Zhu Youzhen used fraud to deceive Liu Fangliang and really surrendered himself, the Ming Emperor.

This move did not come to the minds of the officials.

Even Zhu Youzhen himself didn't think of it before this.

Originally, Zhu Youzhen just wanted to try it, because he himself was not sure whether he, the emperor, still had a deterrent effect on these homeless thieves.

He was not sure if the idea of imperial power that had been entrenched for thousands of years had taken root among the common people.

However, the facts told him that even if he, the emperor, had never been out of the Forbidden City, his influence could have caused tens of thousands of people to fall to their knees.

Of course, this also requires that you have a strong enough army on your side.

Otherwise, he simply waited directly in Beijing for Li Zicheng's army to attack, and then surrendered Li Zicheng.

This is obviously impossible.

Liu Fangliang was forced to do so, and he didn't mind whether his king was Li Zicheng or Zhu Youzhen, so he easily chose to surrender in the face of danger.

According to Zhu Youzhen's instructions, Liu Fangliang went to the city gate, and sent Zhu Youzhen's edict to order the 80,000 troops outside the city to also throw away their weapons and surrender.

Most of the 80,000 troops outside the city were auxiliaries or Ming Dynasty soldiers and exiles who were coerced, so their combat effectiveness was already weak.

In this way, Zhu Youzhen easily collected 100,000 troops, plus 80,000 guards in the city, the number of Zhu Youzhen's army surged to 180,000!

He, the king, was trapped in the city of Beijing at the beginning, without a single soldier or a tael of silver, and now he has an army of 180,000.

This has to be said to be a qualitative leap.

However, Zhu Youzhen did not plan to really leave all the 100,000 intruders, after all, these 100,000 intruders are not a real army.

Most of them were homeless people and guards who had been defeated from all over the Ming Dynasty.

These people are not good at war, but they are more powerful than one to their people.

But Zhu Youzhen also knows that he urgently needs to have a strong enough new force to increase his weight in the next war competition.

And the 100,000 troops in front of him are undoubtedly an excellent opportunity to increase the scale of their new force.

After all, although most of the 100,000 soldiers in the army are bandits with loose military discipline and no different from bandits, there are also many old thieves who have followed Liu Fangliang and others from Chongzhen ten years ago to the present, and they can be said to have rich experience in actual combat, and even fought with Lu Xiangsheng's Tianxiong Army and Cao Wenzhao's army, which can be regarded as rare elite soldiers in this era, at least they know how to rush and kill, how to survive on the battlefield.

Of course, most of these 100,000 soldiers who surrendered must have committed sins, and the Ming officers and soldiers who surrendered to the army before themselves committed the crime of betrayal.

But for their crimes, Zhu Youzhen did not pursue them, and said that they would never be held accountable for their previous crimes, but if they commit them again in the future, they will be severely punished!

It's not that Zhu Youzhen, the emperor, is really benevolent, but to fight for the world, sometimes you need to be ruthless, such as Li Jiantai, who surrenders knowing that his emperor is there, must be severely punished, and these officers and soldiers who have betrayed the Ming Dynasty or committed sins before should be tolerant, and considering that more soldiers and soldiers will definitely be surrendered in the future, and they can't blindly kill.

After all, after more than ten years of war, the population has declined sharply, although these people were once their enemies of the Ming Dynasty, but they are all Han people, if the killing is too much, it will also lead to his day when Jiannu goes south, it is difficult to unify, in vain for the benefit of Jiannu.

Now, after the Ming Emperor opened the precedent of not pursuing the previous crimes when he surrendered the army, he would prompt more troops to choose to surrender in the future, and reduce the consumption of each other due to the civil war.

Considering that he wanted to show his benevolence as an emperor, he also wanted to use this opportunity to expand the scale of his control over the army.

Zhu Youzhen decided to immediately begin a screening of the 100,000 troops who had surrendered.

It is not for nothing that Zhu Youzhen withdrew the entire central organ of the Ming Dynasty to the south with a piece.

Although these civil officials were of little use on the road except for running and consuming food, they have played an important role so far.

After all, politics is inseparable from words.

Immediately, Zhu Youzhen asked Li Banghua, the secretary of the Ministry of War, to fully preside over the screening of the 100,000 surrendered troops, with the assistance of Sun Shilun, the right attendant of the Ministry of War.

And the entire civil officials who followed Hu to the south, whether they were from the Metropolitan Procuratorate or the Hanlin Academy, or the other six departments, or the Guozijian Guanglu Temple, Taifu Temple, Honglu Temple, and Dali Temple, all had to accept Li Banghua's temporary dispatch to complete the screening of 100,000 troops in the shortest possible time.

According to Zhu Youzhen's requirements, those over the age of 45 and under the age of 16 must be eliminated. In addition, those who voluntarily returned home and did not want to continue to serve in the army were also eliminated.

Within three days, hundreds of civilian officials who accompanied him had to screen 100,000 people, and finally left 70,000 fresh troops, and 30,000 chose to leave.

For those who left, Zhu Youzhen ordered that each person be given two taels of silver as travel expenses, and at the same time let them gather together to listen to the lecture of Zhu Youzhen, the emperor of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Youzhen's remarks are naturally not lofty content, but nothing more than to win the hearts and minds of the people.

Since Li Zicheng played the slogan that King Chuang came and did not pay for food, as the emperor of the Ming Dynasty, if he wanted to win the support of the people of the world, he naturally had to have his own political opinions, and his political ideas were very simple, that is, let the people of the whole world have land and plant, and let the people of the whole world have enough to eat.

Even Zhu Youzhen knelt down directly in front of these people for this reason and swore to the sky.

The 30,000 soldiers of the original army who were about to return to the peasants did not expect that the Ming Emperor would give him two taels of silver, so he was moved, and secretly sighed that the emperor was actually a good emperor, and his heart of rebellion and rebellion was also weakened.

After returning to his hometown, he will naturally bring the words of Emperor Zhu Youzhen of the Ming Dynasty back to the countryside at the bottom, and then serve as a propaganda team for Zhu Youzhen for free.

Zhu Youzhen is not sure whether these people will continue to become bandits after leaving, but he believes that there will always be a few who will go home with peace of mind to marry their daughters-in-law and hold their children.

In this way, at least the destroyed social base can restore a trace of productivity.

After all, the country is still a society dominated by a small-scale peasant economy, and the more farmers go back to farming, the more stability there will be.

Of course, the task of the emperor is to let them have land to plant, and they can farm safely, and the ultimate task is to let them have enough to eat.

The army of 100,000 surrendered was left with 70,000 men.

In other words, the number of troops actually controlled by Zhu Youzhen, the Ming Emperor, has still surged to as much as 150,000!