Chapter Ninety-Eight, Wear (Version of Emperor Chongzhen's Decision (I)

Since he woke up, Emperor Chongzhen, who had changed the core, continued to recuperate in bed - no way, unconscious and hanging on ginseng for so many days, his body and bones are too weak, he can be described as weak and can't help the wind, and he has a low-grade fever from time to time; While trying to sort out the memories left in the mind of the original owner of this body, he also ordered the great eunuch Wang Chengen to bring up the recent recitals and the palace newspaper so as to understand the current situation of the Ming Empire.

Then, this poor time-traveling version of Emperor Chongzhen was deeply shocked by the unrecognizable and lively world today.

“…… Yellowstone, who assassinated Nurhachi alone? Chen Xin, who plotted against Dengzhou? Who are these people? How does it not match the history books at all? The Battle of Daling River was lost as in history, but what happened to the second Wenxiangjiao uprising in Shandong? In the history books, there is only the one launched by the former sect leader Xu Hongru during the Apocalypse...... What the?!! King Chuang fought outside Beijing in the summer of the fifth year of Chongzhen, and now he is camped on Shijing Mountain in the west of the city?!!! Belch...... The current King Chuang is not Li Zicheng, but Gao Yingxiang? What is this? ”

(In the official history, there was indeed a Shaanxi Liukou who wandered to the outskirts of Beijing in the fifth and sixth years of Chongzhen, but was soon driven back by the official army.) ）

All in all, the new version of Emperor Chongzhen felt that his mind was very confused, but unfortunately the current situation no longer allowed him to think slowly. In the short ten days after he woke up, the battle situation around Gyeonggi was still deteriorating further - after annihilating the last Qinwang army from other provinces in Tianjin, Huang Taiji, who was steady with his troops, did not rush to attack the Beijing Division, but swept the surrounding prefectures and counties of Beizhili and cut off the outer wings of the Beijing Division one by one.

On the ninth day of November, the Jin army broke through Cangzhou, on November 11, the Jin army broke through Renqiu, on November 12, the Jin army broke through Wuqing County, and on the 13th, the Jin army broke through Xianghe County. On November 15, the Jin army entered Hejian Province, and because of the Guanning rebel general Wu Xiang sent to lure him to surrender, the defenders of Hejian Province made a noise and mutinied, attacked the government office, and coerced the prefect to open the city gate and return to Shun. When the remnants of Hejian Province heard the news, they immediately looked at the wind and descended one after another.

On 16 November, the Shaanxi Liukou Gao Yingxiang Department entrenched themselves at the Lugou Bridge, showing off their might, and the imperial court dispatched the officers and soldiers of the Beijing battalion out of the city to meet the attack, but they did not expect that the 5,000 Beijing battalion would collapse without a fight. He also transferred the Tianxiong army of Lu Xiangsheng's headquarters from Tongzhou, and fought fiercely at Lugou Bridge for a day before recapturing this key road to the south of the Beijing Division.

On November 17, the Jin army besieged Gaoyang City, and the county order hung a seal and fled. The original military department Shangshu, Dongge University scholar, emperor Sun Chengzong, with seventy years of age rate of the whole clan to fight to defend the city, finally because the city is small and helpless, in three days later, the emperor Sun Chengzong committed suicide in defeat, and the descendants of 19 people were martyred in battle.

On November 20, the Jin army entered Baoding Mansion, because the city of Baoding Mansion was tall and strong, and the Jin army traveled a long distance, tired from a long battle, and did not overcome it for a while. On the same day, the Guanning rebels pretended to be a defeated army of the imperial court, deceived and opened the gate of Zhuozhou, and immediately joined forces with the outside to take Zhuozhou lightly, cutting off the connection between the Beijing division and the south.

At this point, the Beijing division has been basically isolated from the outside world, relying on Lu Xiangsheng to lead the remnants of the Tianxiong army, as well as the rout soldiers who fled from everywhere, barely gathered more than 10,000 people, rushed left and right in the area from Tongzhou to Lugou Bridge, barely held out a little strategic space, and did not let Beijing City be encircled.

However, with the fall of the counties of Gyeonggi one after another, and there were no soldiers and horses of King Qin in the south, the situation in Beijing was still worse day by day, day by day, day by day, with the Liaodong Jiannu ravaging Gyeonggi, attacking the state and breaking the county, half of the villagers and gentry of Beizhili were fleeing to Beijing. Beijing was originally a supermetropolis with a population of more than one million, but now a large number of war refugees have poured in, and the population in every square inch has skyrocketed to more than 1.8 million: such a population is obviously a burden that Beijing cannot afford at this time, and the entire Beijing division has become a chaotic refugee camp.

What's even worse is the problem of food supply - from the Abatai raiding and plundering Beizhili in January, to the Wenxiangjiao uprising in Shandong in the summer, and then to the defection of the Guanning army in the autumn, Jiannu entered the customs in a big way...... During the entire five years of Chongzhen, except for a very short gap between May and June, the Grand Canal was in a state of blockade. Even that extremely short period of navigation was not used by the imperial transportation system, so that the grain producing areas in the south of the Yangtze River were barely able to bring a grain of rice into Beijing this year. In addition, there are nearly a million more refugees with their families to eat, so that the price of grain in Beijing has skyrocketed to 80 taels of silver per stone and rice in October, and in November it has continued to rise to an unprecedented price of 100 taels of silver per stone and rice!

Even a bureaucratic institution as tight as the Soviet Union was afraid to be blind in the face of such a situation. As for the already inefficient Ming court, let alone mention. What's even worse is that now Emperor Chongzhen is sick and can't serve as a director, and the Donglin civil officials who control the six ministries are singing against the first assistant Wen Tiren, so that this "wartime court" is almost in a state of strike, not to mention stabilizing food prices, giving relief to refugees, and even maintaining law and order is a mess!

As a result, in and around Beijing in the autumn, social order collapsed unprecedentedly for a while. The streets are full of dying homeless people, shops are closed, and the whole city is so silent that there is no life. Hundreds of lootings, killings, riots and the like happen every day.

And the frequent outbreak of grain rush riots all the time has made only a few grain stores in the city with deep backgrounds that can afford to afford to stand guard by wealthy families dare to open, and there are often piles of human heads and corpses in front of the stores, like the palace of Hades, to deter those hungry people with bad intentions.

In the face of the sharp increase in crime, the arrest of the Shuntian Mansion Yamen and the patrol of the Five Cities Soldiers and Horses Division ran all day long, but they still couldn't suppress the bullets - the city was full of hungry people who died for a bite of food, even if they killed people softly, they couldn't stop these hungry guys. There were even many officers and soldiers who secretly guarded and stole themselves, participating in the robbery and killing of the grain shops in Beijing by the homeless people, just to get some grain, rice, salt and sauce, so that their families could barely make ends meet—with the deterioration of the situation and the skyrocketing price of grain, the silver issued by the imperial court became more and more insufficient. Not to mention that ordinary soldiers and arresters are fast, even the last Xiaoliu officials and the Beijing officials of the Qingshui Yamen can't stand it, and there are constantly cases of families starving to illness and even starving to death.

Moreover, the sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from all over the country soon made it difficult to find a house in Beijing, and even the homes of the gentry, if they could not find relatives and friends, often could not rent an apartment, and had to live on the streets. And the ordinary people who don't have much soft around them, let alone the ordinary people, who can only shop everywhere along the street. However, the imperial court, which was in a state of paralysis, did not come up with any resettlement measures, and as a result, the displaced people were led to sleeping in the open and defecating.

As a result, the epidemic soon bred in the city of Beijing, thousands of corpses were dragged out of the city every day, thrown to moats or mass graves, and the common anti-epidemic drugs in major pharmacies in Beijing were sold out, but the epidemic was still not curbed in the slightest, but there was a trend of intensification, making Beijing like a ghost domain for a while, even if the official eunuchs were also dressed in linen, the doors were filial piety, and even the palace also died in the plague. Wen Tiren Shoufu, who was in a hurry to go to the hospital, had to summon Taoist monks and monks to open a dojo in the palace, overtake the dead, and pray for disasters, but unfortunately it didn't seem to be effective.

To add insult to injury, in September and October, those out-of-town homeless people sleeping on the streets may be tolerable, but after entering November, with a gust of north wind, the city of Beijing during the Xiaoice River period instantly became cold and cold, dripping into ice. However, Beijing has been trapped for a long time, not only lack of food, but also lack of firewood, so not only those street people huddled under the eaves have become zombies, but even the poor families in Beijing have to freeze to death every day...... But it is also thanks to this severe cold that the epidemic in Beijing has begun to ease slightly, but it still can't be broken......

In the middle of the night of 20 November, a group of rebels and routs who had infiltrated the city of Beijing somehow actually got into the gunpowder magazine of the Beijing camp...... The huge explosion shook the palace with chickens and dogs, and also made the Chongzhen Emperor fully understand the urgency of the situation - there is no time to rest!

So, in the early morning of the next day, although his body was still not very good, he still walked up to the head of the Forbidden City, overlooking the capital with his own eyes.

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At this time, Beijing has just had a snowfall, and inside and outside the Beijing Division, there is a pure white scenery covered in silver. For those literati and scholars, in such weather, it is natural to enjoy the snow around the fireplace, watch plum blossoms, write poems and lyrics, and be extremely elegant. For the wealthy, eating shabu-shabu, drinking soju, and watching children build snowmen and have snowball fights outside the door on this snowy day is also a joy in life - although Jiannu and Liukou are ravaging Gyeonggi, in the mansions of wealthy relatives in Beijing, there is still a scene of drunkenness and drunkenness...... But for those poor families who can't afford a stove, or those who have no size of land to stand on and no grass hut to shelter from the cold, such a snowy day is enough to die!

Before the snow, I don't know how many people froze to death inside and outside the city, and after the heavy snowfall, there are countless "road downs". Looking down from the noon gate of the Forbidden City, you can see that the servants of the Shuntian Mansion urged the Lijia people to go to the streets, pulling the cart to clean up the corpses along the way, not even a broken mat, just throwing it on the car, filling a cart and pulling it out of the city, and throwing things away everywhere - even if it is a chemical field, it is impossible to burn the corpses because of the lack of firewood.

At this time in previous years, the various ministries of the imperial court, the Shuntian Mansion and the wealthy families in the city may set up porridge factories to help the homeless people. This year's situation, I don't know if I can keep it tomorrow, and the price of grain is rushing to the sky, and it has reached one hundred taels of silver and one stone of rice, who is willing to break the fortune like this?

“…… Beijing has become an isolated city, King Qin's soldiers and horses have also been defeated, hundreds of officials in the DPRK and China are still fighting in the party, and on the opposite side is a generation of outstanding people like Huang Taiji...... Well, there are also Li Zicheng and Gao Yingxiang who are also on Xishan (Shijingshan) outside the city, this place is really impossible to stay! Not to mention that there are also a group of pig teammates around him......" Looking at this bleak scene of corpses on the street, Emperor Chongzhen's majesty couldn't help but sigh like this.

Relying on a little historical knowledge obtained by later generations in Internet forums, as well as the memory of the original owner of this body, His Majesty the Emperor found very sadly: Don't look at the starvation on the streets of Beijing at the moment, it is not that there is no food in this city - the grain and rice hoarded by those wealthy families are at least enough for the people of the city to eat for half a year, but they will not take out a grain of grain to give soup porridge, but will only think about continuing to speculate on high grain prices to make huge profits; Don't look at the current air defense of Beijing, it all depends on Lu Xiangsheng's more than 10,000 remnants of soldiers in the suburbs, in fact, there are not no elite soldiers in this city - the homes of those noble and high-ranking officials are many elite and combative soldiers, adding up to tens of thousands of people, but unfortunately not a single soldier is willing to listen to him, the emperor.

As for the silver, not to mention - the 70 million taels of silver that Li Zicheng obtained by torture after breaking Beijing in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen should have been placed in the cellars of various wealthy families in Beijing at this time, but the imperial treasury was empty enough to run mice, the emperor.

In short, compared with Constantinople on the eve of the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 AD, there was no shortage of money, food, ordnance, elite soldiers, and strong men in Beijing at this time - plus the refugees from the prefectures and counties of Beizhili, the population of Beijing was about to increase to 2 million, and it seemed that there was still a war, but in fact, these money, food, soldiers and horses were not under the control of the emperor, and not a penny was needed for war. What is even worse is that the morale and morale of the military at the top and bottom of the Manchu Dynasty have collapsed, the bureaucracy has also been paralyzed, and the loyalty of the civil and military officials is even more problematic, just like on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Manchu Qing Dynasty.

“…… I can't use any money or food in this city, and I can't mobilize all the elite soldiers who can fight, and I have to prevent them from rebelling...... The whole world is a combat area, and even the palace is not a safe zone, so how can you fight such a game copy of hellish difficulty? ”

In the howling cold wind, the Chongzhen Emperor of the crossing version was surrounded by several eunuchs and palace maids, went down to the city tower full of worries, sat on a soft sedan chair, and moved slowly to the palace - as an unlucky guy who is always robbed of treasures and monsters and equipment in games, and the lottery has never been a consolation prize, he has been accustomed to thinking about the worst of everything, and now this atmosphere of mourning everything is not for him not to think about the worst.

“…… Before the Eight Banners soldiers reached the city, there was already this kind of apocalyptic scene in the capital. When Huang Taiji set up a big tent outside the city, didn't he have to disperse in a hurry? Alas, according to Wang Chengen, the rebel generals of the Guan Ning Army have been sending people to the capital for a while, and many officials have been missing...... However, strictly speaking, these guys who abandoned their officials and fled are good, and those officials who stayed behind may be even worse - I'm afraid that they are not thinking about being loyal to the country, but thinking about using my head to ask Huang Taiji for credit......"

He muttered worriedly, thinking about the chaotic situation at the moment, and couldn't help but feel that the cold wind was even colder, even bitterly cold.

——Under the flickering of the Donglin Party, Emperor Chongzhen, who was still a high school student, once abolished Dongchang in the early years of his reign, and Jinyiwei was also weakened to the point that only an empty shelf remained, in order to show his trust in the world's "righteous men and gentlemen", and the domestic intelligence system completely collapsed. After realizing that the situation was wrong, although Emperor Chongzhen had restored the secret service of Jinyiwei, he had just started when he encountered the current drastic changes.

Therefore, at present, the intelligence ability of Beijing Jinyiwei is just to change clothes and go to the teahouse to listen to the rumors in the market, and the amateur can no longer be amateur. Now that this time-traveling version of Emperor Chongzhen took over the mess of his predecessor, he was very shocked to find that as the supreme head of a great empire, he could obtain as much folk information as Xiao Er of the Beijing Teahouse Shop......

As a result, the lack of strict intelligence information made this time-traveling version of Emperor Chongzhen, who was a pessimist, even more worried - how many loyal ministers are left in the Beijing court today? Could it be that the civil and military forces of the Manchu Dynasty have already colluded, just waiting for the Eight Banners to surrender as soon as they arrive?

And the historical knowledge in his mind also made him think about it in a bad way: I remember that before he crossed, he also read an overhead novel about crossing the Southern Ming Dynasty, and there was a paragraph at the beginning that said that when Li Zicheng arrived at the city of Beijing, Emperor Chongzhen saw that the general trend had gone, in fact, he did not sit in the palace and wait for death at first, but took Wang Chengen and hundreds of internal Cao Jingjun (armed eunuchs) out of the palace, and wanted to escape from Zhengyangmen, but the city refused to open the door. Later, Chongzhen and Wang Chengen went to Andingmen, where they saw soldiers and horses coming from a distance, so they immediately knocked on the Bangzi and released the arrows, and drove Chongzhen and the Neicao Jingjun away from afar. When things reached the point where everyone betrayed their relatives and left, Emperor Chongzhen was completely discouraged and desperate, disbanded the remaining Neicao Jingjun on Chang'an Street, returned to the inner court with Wang Chengen, went straight to the coal mountain, scattered his hair and wrote a blood letter, and then found a crooked neck tree to hang himself.

——When Li Zicheng waved his army to besiege Beijing, including the first assistant, the honorable nobles, the military department Shangshu and even the emperor's relatives, all the Manchu civil and military forces in the entire Beijing city had already negotiated with Li Zicheng on the terms, and were ready to take out Emperor Chongzhen as a vote, and then he could become the father of the new dynasty. The main task of the defenders on the city wall was no longer to defend against the Shaanxi peasant army, but to prevent Emperor Chongzhen from escaping: by the time the army arrived, the city of Beijing was no longer a fortress against foreign enemies, but had become a prison for Emperor Chongzhen, a high-ranking death row prisoner! It was only because they were afraid of being infamous for killing the monarch that these surrendering officials did not attack the Forbidden City themselves, but waited for Li Zicheng to cut off Emperor Chongzhen's head.

Otherwise, with the strength of the city of Beijing, the Qing army had not fallen after many sieges, so how could Li Zicheng be able to occupy the whole city in two days? The answer is that the entire imperial court abandoned Emperor Chongzhen, and the hundred officials and nobles did not resist at all, so they "opened the door to meet the king". It's just that Li Zicheng had no intention of keeping the contract at all, so he built 5,000 pairs of clamping sticks in advance, and as soon as he entered Beijing, he immediately broke the contract and changed his hexagram, arrested those officials who surrendered and tortured them for interrogation, killed many people in public, and tortured 70 million taels of silver in one go, which made the court regret the death experts.

To get back to the point, in this time and space where subversive upheaval has taken place because of the influence of many traversers, today's Shaanxi peasant army is not yet a climate, although Li Zicheng and Gao Yingxiang are now on the west mountain outside the city, but the force is still very weak, and the combat effectiveness is also very suspicious, it is said that even more than 10,000 remnants of the defeated generals under Lu Xiangsheng can not be defeated, and it is estimated that there should be few noble eunuchs in Beijing who are willing to mix with these mud legs.

But if it is replaced by the Jurchen Eight Banners who are in the limelight...... At present, there are not only Wu Xiang and Zu Dashou, these well-connected Liaoxi rebel generals, but now the co-owner of the Eight Banners is the best at recruiting and accepting rebels...... How many of the civil and military officials in the capital have secretly defected to the past? The more I think about it, the more scary it becomes!

But...... Although the original Emperor Chongzhen left a mess for him, a traverser, he also left a little legacy.

Compared with the scene of Chongzhen's seventeenth year in history, the Ming Dynasty at this time was finally slightly stronger - first of all, there were some inner treasures in the palace as coffins; Secondly, there were also some loyal troops inside and outside the city, such as Wang Chengen's Neicao Jing Army and Lu Xiangsheng's Tianxiong Army......

Thinking of this, he couldn't help but look back at Wang Chengen, who was waiting with a lantern - in the official history, when Emperor Chongzhen hanged the coal mountain, only this old eunuch was left to accompany the king to death...... I think there should be no one in the whole world who is more faithful than him, right? p>

“…… It was decided that a court meeting would be held tomorrow to see what the ministers were thinking, and then it would be time to pack their bags and get ready to go on the road. He said so in his heart," he said, "...... Since it seems that this copy of the Beijing Defense War cannot be fought, then simply change to another copy! ”

Then, as soon as he went to court the next morning, His Majesty the Chongzhen Emperor received a large number of resignations......

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ps: With the information that Emperor Chongzhen can get in the Forbidden City, he can't detect that the modern government has intervened at all, at most he can only see that there are some guys who don't exist in history, and they look very much like traversers, so this traverser emperor can't think of "handing over the Ming Dynasty to the party" at all......