The Qing court's plan to suppress the Taiping army on the four routes failed, Xiang Rong's army was defeated and killed, Qishan was dismissed, and only Li Weiguo, the minister of the Jiangdong Road, was left as the minister of the Three Routes.

For a time, Li Weiguo's name was in full swing, and he became the backbone of the Qing Dynasty, and the burden of suppressing the Taiping Army fell on Li Weiguo's shoulders.

Li Weiguo was very happy, Xiang Rong died, and the Jiangnan camp was destroyed, and there was only one minister in the entire south of the Yangtze River, Li Weiguo, and only Li Jiajun was left in the Qing army in Jiangdong, and no one could check and balance.

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom will last for more than ten years, Li Weiguo knows this very well. With Li Weiguo's foresight and the well-equipped Li Jiajun, it is entirely possible to suppress the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the early stage of its development.

But Li Weiguo would not do that, he also had to use the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to slowly accumulate his own strength, and constantly consume the national strength and luck of the Qing court, in order to make it easier for him to dominate the world in the future.

Since it was a long-term military struggle, Li Weiguo naturally had to be prepared.

Li Jiajun built fortifications in Longtan Town, Jiuhua Mountain, and Xiaomao Mountain east of Tianjing, and called Jiangdong Daying; Fortifications were built in Maoshan, Wawu Mountain, and Donglu Mountain to the south of Tianjing, and the two camps formed a semi-encirclement posture against Tianjing.

Li Weiguo took Danyang in Zhenjiang Prefecture as his base camp, which was very close to Jiangdong Daying and Jiangnan Daying, and was a key node of the canal, which could control the southern Cao Yun channel, and the strategic location was extremely important.

Only 3,000 defenders were deployed in Danyang County, 3,000 in Jiangnan and 4,000 in Jiangdong, with a total strength of 10,000 troops, and lied to the court that there were 30,000 troops.

Anyway, Li Weiguo and Hong Xiuquan have a secret agreement, Li Jiajun will not attack Tianjing, and the Taiping army will not attack Li Weiguo's defense area, the two sides maintain a tacit understanding, even if they want to act for the imperial court, the two sides will ventilate in advance, and just play the trick realistically and fool the past.

Of course, Li Weiguo can't trust the Taiping Army, so he will only deploy 10,000 soldiers and horses on the front line, and they are all new soldiers, most of them are cold weapons, even if the Taiping Army suddenly attacks, it doesn't matter if the 10,000 soldiers and horses are wiped out, for the Li Army, the main force of the Li Army is placed in the rear, with Shanghai as the center, focusing on the defense of the Susongtai region, even if the Taiping Army raids, the Li Army has enough time to deploy and counterattack.

Similarly, the Taiping army did not dare to fully trust Li Weiguo, and they deployed tens of thousands of old, weak, sick and disabled people near Li Weiguo's defense line as a cover, and deployed heavy troops at Xiaolingwei, Moling Pass and Dasheng Pass to build a second line of defense to protect the safety of Tianjing.

Both sides tacitly agreed to their respective military deployments.

However, the Qing court's new minister of Jiangbei Luqin, Tuo Ming'a, soon arrived in Yangzhou to take over Qishan to supervise the Jiangbei camp and continue the offensive against Tianjing.

After he arrived at the camp in Jiangbei, he immediately sent people across the river to contact Li Weiguo, and agreed to attack the Taiping army from the north and south.

Li Weiguo is naturally just making a show, whether he should send troops or send troops, but today he advanced 30 miles, and tomorrow he will be pushed back 30 miles by the Taiping army, and the two sides are tug-of-war back and forth, with huge momentum and considerable casualties.

Of course, this casualty figure was purely Li Weiguo's deliberate exaggeration and concealment from the imperial court, with the intention of showing it to the imperial court, so that the imperial court would think that Li Weiguo was trying his best to suppress the bandits. At the same time, deliberately exaggerating the casualty figures is also a disguised way to hide Li Weiguo's true strength, and at the same time, he can ask the imperial court for military salaries, this deal is really cost-effective, and Li Weiguo likes it very much.

Naturally, the imperial court did not have the money to pay Li Weiguo military salaries and pensions, so that Li Weiguo could justifiably intercept all kinds of taxes and gold in the Susongtai region, and even intercept the taxes of other provinces, such as Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong, which were all transported to Beijing through the canal, and Li Weiguo could intercept them in Suzhou, Danyang and other places as military expenses for the encirclement and suppression of the Taiping army.

Li Weiguo has long thought about this road to fortune, which is also one of the important reasons why he chose Shanghai as his foundation.

Li Weiguo was busy with how to pit the silver of the imperial court all day long, and there was also a lot of trouble in Tianjing City.

Recently, the top leaders of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom have been arguing, mainly discussing how to lift the siege of Tianjing, and Yang Xiuqing took the opportunity to propose a plan to conquer the Quartet. Among them, the Northern Expedition was used to divert the attention of the Qing army from attacking Tianjing with all its might. The Western Expedition was used to expand the territory of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, while the Southern Expedition and the Eastern Expedition were both temporarily canceled, because of Li Weiguo's existence, Hong Xiuquan was worried about stimulating Li Weiguo, so these two attack directions were canceled.

The last time Hong Xiuquan realized Yang Xiuqing's threat and wanted to get rid of Yang Xiuqing, but Yang Xiuqing realized the danger and curried favor with Hong Xiuquan in time to escape, this time Yang Xiuqing was prepared in the morning, he did not engage in "Heavenly Father Descending to Earth" again, but followed Hong Xiuquan's thoughts.

However, in terms of the selection of candidates for the Northern Expedition, Yang Xiuqing proposed that Lin Fengxiang, Li Kaifang, Hong Xuanjiao, and Su Sanniang lead an army of 20,000 to the Northern Expedition.

As the military advisor of the Taiping Army, Yang Xiuqing knew very well that there were only 20,000 people in this Northern Expedition, which was obviously a lonely army going deep and ending with nine deaths, but Hong Xiuquan had no insight in this area, and he did not find out that this was Yang Xiuqing's conspiracy.

It turned out that Yang Xiuqing had already found out the list of generals summoned by Hong Xiuquan when he was going to clear Yang Xiuqing that day, Lin Fengxiang, Li Kaifang, Hong Xuanjiao and Su Sanniang were all present at the time, so they became a thorn in Yang Xiuqing's side, and this time the four of them were sent to the Northern Expedition battlefield to get rid of them.

By the time the Taiping Army organized the Northern Expedition and the Western Expedition, Li Weiguo had already left Danyang and returned to Shanghai.

The equipment of the arsenal obtained from the British has been installed, the Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau has been officially put into operation, and the Chinese technical workers who understand foreign languages hired from Hong Kong, Macao and Nanyang are responsible for the normal operation of the machinery and equipment, and the first batch of P1842 and P1851 muskets, as well as artillery guns of various calibers, have been sent to the production line to step up production.

The machine tools and equipment purchased from Europe have been carefully protected by Li Weiguo, which is a sharp weapon of the country and cannot be lost.

In the same way, Li Weiguo will not let these machine tools sit idle, and the first thing he will do is to make the first batch of military equipment.

Rifles and bullets, rifles in the true sense of the word instead of muskets, and real one-piece bullets instead of propellants and projectiles are installed separately.

Li Weiguo drew drawings based on his memories of modern rifles and bullets, and then hired skilled workers to cut and make them.

In the beginning, the cut rifle parts were very inaccurate and not easy to fit together. After hundreds of corrections to the parts, the first rotary pull-back rifle was born.

Li Weiguo used his own name to name this rifle, the Patriotic Rifle, which means to protect the family and defend the country.

The Patriotic rifle is 1.25 m long and weighs 4.2 kg without bayonet, the bayonet is 520 mm long and weighs 0.5 kg, it adopts a rotating pull-back loading mode, it is fired by a hammer, two left-hand rotating rifling, with a ruler and a crosshair; With magazine, five rounds.

The overall appearance of this rifle is similar to the historical Mauser 98 rifle, but the bolt parts are more advanced than the Mauser 98 rifle, which is equivalent to the level of the Mauser 98K rifle, but the accuracy and air tightness of the parts are slightly insufficient, which is limited by the technical level of industrial machine tools in this era, and the air tightness is only equivalent to the level of the Mauser 88 rifle.

On the whole, the appearance of the Patriotic Rifle appeared more than forty years earlier than the rifles of the same class in history, which is a huge advantage.

In fact, Li Weiguo really wanted to make the most classic five-six rifle of the People's Liberation Army, but because of the steel material, processing accuracy, cost and other reasons, it was impossible in this era, so Li Weiguo could only temporarily choose to develop a rifle with similar performance to Mauser 98 and capable of mass production.

For Li Weiguo, it is very easy to design and manufacture a patriotic rifle, but it takes some time to process and cut parts, once the prototype gun is designed and manufactured, the next step is to manufacture the mold, and after a series of tests, it can be officially put into service.

However, if compared with the bullets that are used with the Patriotic Rifle, the latter is much more difficult to design and manufacture.

This is because the design and manufacture of bullets requires powerful precision cutting machine tools, and Li Weiguo's existing machine tools, although they are already the most advanced machine tools and equipment in this era, are still incomparable with later generations in terms of accuracy.

Li Weiguo wanted to design a 7.62 mm caliber matching bullet for the Weiguo rifle, but unfortunately the accuracy of the machine tool could not be reached at all, Li Weiguo experimented many times, and finally found that the accuracy could not guarantee the second decimal place, and even the first place was so-so.

In this way, once the accuracy error of the bullet is too large, it is impossible to achieve mass production, and the standard rifle will not be able to equip the troops in batches, after all, when fighting, it is common for the bullet to suddenly jam because of the error of 0.01 mm, even in the 21st century under the precision machine tool cutting, let alone in the backward 19th century.

Li Weiguo finally chose the caliber of the bullet at 9 mm, which is also because this caliber is the easiest to cut out, and also because the use of ** as a propellant, to ensure the effective killing range within 500 meters, the caliber is small and the power cannot be reached, and the caliber is larger or the length of the bullet is increased, the load and production cost will be increased, 9×58 mm, just in the best position.

Bullets are limited by firing gunpowder, and the more advanced the gunpowder fired, the smaller the bullet will be. Similarly, because of the cutting technology of this era, it is impossible to make a steel-core warhead, and only copper or lead can be used to make a warhead. Lead bullets are extremely lethal, easy to cut, and have a lower cost than copper, but Li Weiguo still gave up using lead bullets and switched to copper bullets.

This is because the barrel of the Weiguo rifle is engraved with rifling, and the lead bullet is easy to melt and remain in the chamber after firing, which is not conducive to the maintenance and maintenance of the gun.

It took Li Weiguo only 15 days to develop the rifle, but it took a full four months to develop the matching rifle cartridges, which shows the difficulty of making the bullets.

Fortunately, in the end, the Patriotic rifle was successfully developed, and the next step was various range tests, as well as actual combat tests, which took a lot of time. However, Li Weiguo is not in a hurry, after all, it is still the era of muskets, and Li Jiajun's existing muskets are enough to be competent for all kinds of combat modes.

At the same time, the number of machine tools in Li Weiguo's hands is limited, and it is impossible to use all of them for the production and processing of rifles and bullets, and these machine tools still have more places to use.

However, the machine tool is the machine for the production of machines, and it is only necessary to use the existing machine tools to process and manufacture more machine tools and equipment, so as to meet the needs of a large number of various machines and equipment required for the Patriotic Rifle production line. When all these are ready, I believe that by then the various tests of the Patriotic rifle will be completed.

Although the Patriotic rifle has many deficiencies, but in the 1850s, the Patriotic rifle is the most advanced, it reached the level of the 1890s, forty years ahead of the current world, and this is a huge difference between the rear rifle and the front rifle, it belongs to the generation gap, equivalent to a generation and a half ahead, once equipped with Li Jiajun, the whole world will tremble and go crazy.