Liu Qing's death certainly made the people of Xia sad, but when more than a month later, the people of Xia were once again attracted by a happy event, that is, after the birth of the eldest prince Wang Dong, Zhu Qingqing gave birth to the second prince Wang Bo for His Majesty the King, so that Xia Kingdom has two princes, and the country is solid.

With a good heir, then as long as there are no accidents, the Xia Kingdom will continue to exist, and the lives of the people of the Xia Kingdom will continue to be like this, and for a while, people from all over the Xia Kingdom have held banquets to celebrate the birth of the second prince.

Of course, Wang Bo's birth as the second prince was far less attractive to others than the birth of his eldest brother Wang Dong, but Wang Ze still held a full moon wine for him after his full moon, and Wang Bo's birth also made the three brothers Wang Yong, Cheng Chong, and Zhu Rui, who were far away in Sanqi, very happy.

However, when the three ambitious old men were overjoyed, they couldn't help but feel full of regret in their hearts, they were originally going to Zhenhai to visit their children and grandchildren who had not seen them for a long time, but at this time, because the situation in the Central Plains was becoming more and more chaotic, they could not leave.

At the end of October of the twentieth year of the Xia calendar, after Wang Ze's second son Wang Bo was born, the atmosphere between the countries of the Central Plains became more and more tense.

Occupying the vast majority of the states and counties of the Northern Qi Dynasty, the Northern Zhou Dynasty, which was becoming stronger and stronger, began to dispatch troops, and was ready to launch a strong offensive against Wang Yong and Nanchen at any time, so that Wang Ze, who had been concentrating on development, had to set his sights on the Central Plains again.

At the beginning of last year, after the Northern Zhou Dynasty defeated the Northern Qi Dynasty, nearly two years have passed now, and if you count the time when Emperor Wu of the Zhou Dynasty Yuwen Yong sent troops from Chang'an, at least two years have passed.

At first, in order to quickly stabilize the land they had just occupied, the Northern Zhou stopped attacking after occupying most of the most important Northern Qi prefectures, and instead formed a delicate balance with Wang Yong and Nan Chen in the north and south of the Great River, and then all three parties began to bury their heads in consolidating their own occupied territories.

After all, the Northern Zhou was the first country to attack the Northern Qi, and his offensive was extremely rapid after taking the lead, and the combat effectiveness of the Zhou army was indeed strong, and the remnants of the Northern Qi surrendered to the Northern Zhou with the largest number, so the Northern Zhou occupied almost all the land north of the Great River of the Northern Qi after the fall of the Northern Qi.

North of the Great River, Northern Zhou and Wang Yong were bounded by Pingyuan County and Qinghe, and Wang Yong only occupied the three counties of Cangzhou and the five counties of Qinghe County and Pingyuan County north of the Great River.

To the south of the river, the Northern Zhou and Wang Yong were bounded by a large area of land between West Yanzhou (Heze Cao County) and Liangzhou (Kaifeng), but because there was Pengcheng County (Xuzhou) occupied by Nan Chen in the southeast, it was also regarded as a tripartite junction.

The junction of the three parties is definitely the place where super wars are most likely to occur, so Wang Yong has already relocated all the people here, a small part of them moved to Sanqi, and most of them were sent by Wang Yong to Wang Ze in the East China Sea.

In terms of the Northern Zhou and Southern Chen, although the Southern Chen occupied a large area of land and dozens of cities on the line of Runan, Chenliu, Nanqiao County, and Pengcheng north of the Huai River, the Northern Zhou also occupied Luoyang and its surrounding areas, and controlled this most critical strategic point for the Central Plains.

Carefully calculated, between the three, Wang Yong's overall strength is still the weakest, although Wang Yong's current number of troops is second only to the Northern Zhou, and more than the army of Southern Chen.

But this is because of Wang Ze's strong support behind him, so he can support more than 300,000 troops with a small number of people, in fact, compared to Nan Chen's comprehensive strength, especially in terms of national population, the number of people under Wang Yong's rule is only less than half of that of Nan Chen.

Of course, there are also reasons for Wang Yong to move a large number of people to the Xia Kingdom, but the strategic depth of the Sanqi land occupied by Wang Yong is narrow, and the inability to settle more people is also one of the very important factors, which is also where he is not as good as Nan Chen.

Compared with Wang Yong, although the Southern Chen side is still much weaker than the Northern Zhou Dynasty today, the climate in the south where he is located is humid and hot, and the northern army cannot adapt to it, which can easily cause serious non-combat attrition.

Moreover, after the fall of the Northern Qi Dynasty, the Southern Chen army went on a northern expedition and successively occupied the first line of Runan County, Chenliu County, Qian County, and Pengcheng County in Huaibei, and the strategic depth was further increased.

In the face of several moats, the Northern Zhou could no longer easily defeat Nan Chen in one go, and it was easy to fall into a stalemate, which was a very dangerous state in the Central Plains of the Three Kingdoms.

After Nan Chen occupied this line, facing the Northern Zhou Dynasty, which had doubled its national strength, they vigorously reorganized their armaments and fought at any time on the one hand, and on the other hand, they were counting on the Northern Zhou Dynasty to attack Wang Yong, who was the weakest, first, so that they could avoid the edge and pick up a little cheap by the way.

Even if Nan Chen and Wang Yong are still allies, because of Chen Ji's short-sighted behavior back then, it is impossible to restore the close relationship between Wang Ze and Chen Baxian and Chen Qian when they were alive, so there are many intrigues between the two now.

Compared with Nan Chen and Wang Yong, the Northern Zhou will get more benefits! Let's read the book

Not only because the Northern Zhou occupied the most land and population of the Northern Qi Dynasty, but also because the Northern Zhou Dynasty occupied all the horse breeding land along the Great Wall of the Northern Qi Dynasty, so that the west of the Northern Zhou Dynasty cut off the opportunity for Nan Chen to get war horses from Tuyuhun, and the north cut off Wang Yong's opportunity to get war horses from Youzhou.

If it weren't for the rapid rise of Wang Ze's sudden rise in the East China Sea, so that Wang Yong had enough war horses to use, otherwise the two sides would have further widened the gap with the Northern Zhou in cavalry from now on because the Northern Zhou occupied the vast majority of horse breeding land in the north.

Of course, Wang Yong and Nan Chen can both get a large number of war horses through Wang Ze, especially Wang Yong can meet as many as he wants, anyway, now that the pastures of the Xia Kingdom are expanding day by day, Wang Ze has limited the amount of cultivated land, and the pastures of the Xia Kingdom are several times more than the cultivated land.

Of course, it is impossible for the Northern Zhou to not know the details of the Xia Kingdom over the years, so they also know that their occupation of these horse breeding lands can only increase the way for Wang Yong and Nan Chen to obtain war horses, and they cannot expect to limit the number of cavalry on both sides through this point, and the purpose of the Northern Zhou is to increase the number of their own cavalry as much as possible, so as to maintain the superiority of the Northern Zhou in cavalry.

After the Northern Zhou Dynasty occupied most of the prefectures and counties north of the Yellow River in the Northern Qi Dynasty, it can be said that the big moves continued, especially the various reforms carried out by Yuwen Yong in the land occupied by the Northern Qi in recent years were amazing.

Yu Wenyong not only further extended the economic and military systems of the Northern Zhou Dynasty, such as the Juntian system and the government military system, to the territory of the Northern Qi Dynasty, but even extended his own political reforms in the Northern Zhou Dynasty, especially the Buddha Extermination Movement, to the former Northern Qi Prefecture!

When Emperor Wu of Zhou carried out political reforms and carried out a comprehensive campaign to exterminate Buddhism in the Northern Zhou Dynasty, the country's strength increased dramatically, and finally he had the strength to defeat the Northern Qi Dynasty, so the ambitious Emperor Wu of Zhou was determined to carry out his reforms thoroughly.

Because the Northern Zhou Dynasty occupied the most Northern Qi Prefectures, and most of the places that Wang Yong and Wang Ze had not reached when they attacked the Northern Qi Dynasty, the Northern Qi monks here were also the places with the largest number of people and the most populous places.

At the beginning, when the population of the Northern Qi Dynasty was the largest in Gaoyang, it was claimed to be more than 20 million people with households, and even if a large number of people were lost one after another, there were still 15 million people on the eve of the fall of the Northern Qi Dynasty.

After the Northern Zhou Dynasty eliminated the Northern Qi Dynasty, the number of Qi people was 1.6 million, and the population was more than 10 million, which is only the number of people in the statistics of the original Northern Qi government, according to the estimation of Emperor Wu of Zhou, there were at least more than 2 million monks in the temples of the Northern Qi Dynasty alone, and there were at least one million hidden households in other Kwantung families.

So Emperor Wu of Zhou decided that he could not continue to indulge the original Northern Qizhou County to continue like this, and that he must insist on implementing his own policy of exterminating Buddhism if he wanted to realize his ambition of dominating the world.

Bingzhou is the beginning of the Futu religion in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, originally in the Han Dynasty did not become the mainstream of the society, in the Southern and Northern Dynasties of the Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms melee period, because the Hu regime in order to better rule the Han people, so it vigorously promoted the Futu Religion.

This practice is the same as the barbarians who destroyed Western Rome and vigorously promoted Catholicism to rule the Romans, but fortunately the Han people had Ran Min, although he was defeated, but it made the Hu people see the blood in the bones of the Han people, and finally assimilated into the Han people.

The promotion of religion was originally the reason why the ruler wanted to better rule the people, and there was never any question of the advanced nature, and the so-called philosophy certainly had a certain truth, but it was more for the purpose of safeguarding his own vital interests.

During the Northern Qi Dynasty, because of the importance of annexing the state, the Futu sect here was also the most popular place, and when these monks learned that Yuwen Yong was going to continue to implement the policy of exterminating Buddhism here, a large number of famous monks continued to petition Yu Wenyong, asking him to retract his orders.

There are high monks in the Northern Qi Dynasty who threaten Yuwen Yong with falling into the hell of Ah Bi after death, but Yu Wenyong, who has made up his mind, was not moved at all, he ordered the monks to return to the laity, ordered the demolition of a large number of temples in the Northern Qi Dynasty, and melted down the Buddha statues to make coins, so that the country's strength further rose.

Of course, Yuwen Yong's destruction of Buddha could not be smooth sailing, while he promoted the destruction of Buddha, he also implemented the Juntian system in the Northern Qi Dynasty, so some of the scholars whose interests in the Northern Qi were damaged united with some large temples to try to cause trouble, and they imagined that they could even be like Wang Yong, the king of the Three Qi Dynasty, to divide the place.

Obviously, these people were too hasty in the uprising, and they were quickly suppressed by Yuwen Yong, so Yu Wenyong exterminated the scholars who participated in the uprising, and harvested a large number of dependent people.

After more than a year of exterminating Buddhism and suppressing rebellions, the population of the Northern Zhou Dynasty rapidly increased from 10 million to more than 23 million, more than twice the current population of the Xia Kingdom, nearly 10 times the population under Wang Yongsanqi, and more than three times the population of Southern Chen.

At this time, after the drastic reform of the Northern Zhou Dynasty, especially through the Juntian system, it won the support of the people of the former Northern Qi Dynasty, and the promotion of the government military system increased the military mobilization capacity of the Northern Zhou Dynasty by one and a half times in one fell swoop, and the army of the Northern Zhou Dynasty was at least more than 600,000 according to detailed calculations.

At the same time as the overall national strength of the Northern Zhou Dynasty increased, he was in fact able to crush the strength of Wang Yong and Nan Chen, and at this time, although the combined armies of Wang Yong and Nan Chen had a scale of more than 500,000 people, it was obviously impossible for the armies of the two sides to really unite.

So in the autumn of this year, after the autumn harvest in October was completed, Emperor Wu of Zhou Yuwen Yong ordered to levy an army of 500,000, and this news immediately made the entire world turn their attention to the Northern Zhou.