Dong Ce stood on the high platform, looked down, and looked at these thousands of soldiers, with strict armor, swords and guns like a forest, standing majestically and majestic like a mountain, and his heart couldn't help but surge with pride for a while.

It's just that he also knows that the current Rock Fort Infantry First Town can reach this scale, which can almost be said to be the limit. The total population of Rock Fort is only 30,000, and men account for a little more than half of them. That is to say, the total number of males in the entire Panshi Fort is about 17,000, and the number of males in this age group is about 13,000 when they are over fifteen years old and under fifty years old - this age group is also the age group suitable for soldiers in the Ming Dynasty at this time.

At this time, among the thirteen,000 or so men, nearly 3,000 had become soldiers in the Rock Fort, and they were still standing troops, spending most of the year in the barracks, and there was hardly much time for farm work.

And they were the strongest, the most physical, and the best of all the men in the whole of Rock Castle. In other words, the most important 3,000 laborers in the Rock Fort were trained in the army, not in the fields.

In fact, this has caused a considerable impact on the agriculture of Panshibao, but because the people of Panshibao have just divided the land, the enthusiasm of the people is very high, and although the heat and light conditions of Panshibao are not very good as other northern China, at least the water source of Panshibao is sufficient, irrigation is able to keep up, and large livestock such as ploughing cattle are also relatively sufficient, which alleviates the problem of lack of strong labor to a certain extent. So the problem of labor shortage is basically covered up and offset.

The grain production of Panshi Fort is still quite high, and there is no very obvious problem of labor shortage, but Dong Ce knows very well that the proportion of soldiers in Panshi Fort to the common people has reached this level, which is already a limit, and it can no longer be recruited from the people of this fort.

At this time, Dong Ce's troops were divided into three parts, Jiading was one part, the first town of the infantry army was another part, and the remaining part was the second town of the infantry.

The family members under his command, those under his hands now, and those who are training in Anxiangdun, add up to six or seven hundred people. The number of people in the first town of the infantry army under his command was nearly 3,000, and the number of people in the second town of the infantry army exceeded 3,000.

In this way, the number of troops under his command is already close to 7,000.

This is a rather appalling number.

At this time, the Ming Dynasty still claims to have millions of soldiers, and the nine-sided town still claims to have hundreds of thousands of troops, take Datong Town as an example, at this time, the strength of Datong Town on the books is still more than 100,000, but how many troops can actually be? It is about 30,000 or 40,000, and the other 70,000 or 80,000 soldiers are all on the books, and in fact, no one can be found at all.

Naturally, their salaries were divided among the generals at all levels and even those officials in the imperial court.

And among these 30,000 or 40,000 people, how many of them are capable of fighting?

To tell the truth, there were absolutely no more than 20,000 soldiers capable of fighting, because about half of these actual soldiers were old, weak, sick and disabled.

In this situation of Datong Town, in fact, you don't need to look at other boundaries, just look at the situation on Beidong Road, and you can generally know what is going on in the entire Datong Town.

These military forts on the North East Road are generally about three or four hundred troops, and the military forts in Datong Town add up to a total of seventy-two, so you can roughly calculate how many available soldiers there are in Datong Town. And randomly select a military fort from Beidong Road, look at the composition of the soldiers inside, and you can roughly see that there are many old, weak, sick and disabled people in it.

This situation is very common throughout the town of Datong.

Dong Ce's nearly 7,000 men can be said to have occupied about one-fifth of Datong Town's troops, and the most important thing is that these soldiers under him, especially his family members and the first town of the Panshi Fort Infantry Army, are very strong in combat effectiveness.

Before he knew it, his power had grown tremendously, and his strength had grown to this extent.

Dong Ce is proud of himself.

He knew that he had become a force that could influence the direction of a certain war in this era, in this East Asian land, in this dynasty, such a force, such a strength, of course, was still far from enough, but it had exceeded Dong Ce's expectations.

He didn't expect that he had been able to get to this point in just a year and a half after coming to this era.

And the future is of course promising.

After reviewing these troops, Dong Ce recruited all the officers and issued an order: tomorrow, attack the remnants of the White Lotus Sect.

After the White Lotus Sect was defeated under the Rock Fort and the south of the Huanshui River, Lord Sun Xiang fled with his men in embarrassment. Since the Rock Fort was all infantry troops, and he had some selfish intentions in his heart at that time, he was not so attentive to the pursuit of victory, and did not deal a devastating blow to these people in the White Lotus Sect who fled.

After Sun Xiangzhu fled all the way south for dozens of miles, he gathered a group of people and horses and occupied a piece of territory, although the momentum was far less than the original one, but it was still a hundred-legged insect that died but did not stiffen, and it was still entrenched there, recruiting troops and horses. Especially recently, there has been a resurgence of power.

And in the past half a year, no one has encircled and suppressed them anymore, whether it is the governor of Datong, Lord Jiao, the general soldier of Datong, Wang Pu, or even other generals, they all turned a blind eye to him as if there was no such person in their own jurisdiction.

They did this to preserve their strength, and because of their actions, the remnants of the White Lotus Sect have survived to this day, and there are signs of recovery recently.

For others, these are extremely numerous, enough to have thousands of remnants of the White Lotus Sect, which is a hard bone to gnaw, but to Dong Ce, it is a piece of fat. As long as you want to gnaw. I gnawed it off in one bite.

He had long wanted to clean up these remnants of the White Lotus Sect, Liu Ruozai was about to take office, and Dong Ce wanted to give him this credit as a big gift.

Tomorrow is the twenty-ninth day of the lunar month, and there will be two more days before the New Year, at this time, no one would have thought that Dong Ce would suddenly attack the White Lotus Sect and send troops to attack the White Lotus Sect.