The troops sent by Zhang Xianzhong to counterattack outside the city were all wiped out, which would naturally bring about a series of chain reactions.

On the other side, the morale of the officers and troops who were besieging the city was getting higher and higher, while the morale of the remaining thief defenders in the city was low to the bottom.

Under the cover of the Hongyi cannon, the officers and soldiers continued to rush and kill, everyone was like a rainbow, and shouted while rushing to kill: "Bai Wenxuan, Feng Shuangli, Li Dingguo has surrendered!" Those who follow Zhang Xianzhong will die! Those who descend will not die! ”

The people in the thief army were panicked, and even the soldiers who were on the front line were confused by this shocking news. And those who have not reached the front line for the time being, they can still have the brains to think about whether Bai Dudu, Feng Dudu and the second general really surrendered to the government, and they have no intention of fighting at all.

Finally, in the evening of the same day, the official army blew up a corner of the city wall of Chengdu, and when tens of thousands of officers and soldiers swarmed in, the defenders completely collapsed, and even if there were still 100,000 people in the city, they were also looking at the wind.

Zhang Xianzhong was in a hurry, so he had to let Di Sanpin and Qi Sansheng tie up Li Dingguo, take thousands of cavalry and all the old infantry to break through to the west of the city, and take advantage of the darker and darker in the evening to kill Xinjindu to try to seize the boat and break through.

The treasures he had left in Xiangxi, as well as all the things he had grabbed after entering Sichuan, all the light gold, silver, jewelry, silk and brocade, were also loaded with carts, and he broke through with horses pulling wild gallops, only to throw the boat away immediately when he reached the dock, and went down the river with full sails, sailing oars and galloping.

And the reason why he tied up Li Dingguo and did not execute him immediately is because after all, there is still the last trace of humanity that has not been extinguished, but there are not many.

After all, he hadn't figured it out yet: Was all this really the betrayal of Li Dingguo and Feng Shuangli, or was it caused by Zhu Shuren's offensive tactics?

If Li Dingguo is chopped up at this juncture, it will undoubtedly appear that he is very intolerant, and it is easy to be calculated by the enemy's divisive tactics.

The only people left around him, Di Sanpin, Qi Sansheng, may not follow him to the dark, maybe everyone will be in danger, thinking that "when the eight kings are really at the end of the road, will they be suspicious and crazy, no one trusts them, and they will kill whoever they catch."

This chain of suspicion is really not groundless or a battle of wits and courage with the air, after Zhang Xianzhong's rule in Sichuan could not be maintained in history, the last stage of the crazy massacre, in fact, one of the most important reasons is that when people rebel and leave, they will be suspicious and sick, and everyone looks like a traitor.

This kind of suspicion is combined with a slightly cruel and ferocious character, and it is easy to kill innocents indiscriminately.

Li Dingguo looked at all this with lamentation, but his heart was like ashes, he had nothing to say at all, and he was tied up like a walking corpse.

He can't defend himself, because two months ago, he asked Zhang Xianzhong to release Bai Wenxuan's family and stop detaining the families of the martyred generals.

The only thing that can be defended is that "he, Li Dingguo, was also deceived by the rhetoric of Bai Wenxuan's henchmen sent by Zhu Shuren, and he didn't know that Bai Wenxuan actually voted for it even if he didn't die", but at this juncture, Li Dingguo knew that it was useless to defend himself.

Incompetence, misjudgment and disloyalty, both are sins.

Does it make sense to wash away infidelity as being deceived? At this time, there is no point anymore, and if you want to justify, you have to get out of danger and then argue.

The last cavalry of the old battalion of Zhang Xianzhong's department, adding up to more than 10,000 people, and tens of thousands of old battalion foot soldiers, more than 20,000 soldiers and horses became Zhang Xianzhong's capital to flee desperately in the end.

Not to mention, although Zhang Xianzhong has no ability to fight the decisive battle with the official army in a dignified manner, he seems to have a good chance if he wants to escape.

After all, until this moment, he still has more than twice the number of officers and soldiers,

Although his hundreds of thousands of Sichuan peasant strongmen surrendered in groups, more than 100,000 people still lost their command system on the occasion of chaotic battles, and the officers and soldiers had to hold on for half a day, which was enough to contain most of Zhu Shuren's troops.

The 100,000 soldiers who surrendered in formation could be surrendered in an instant. But 100,000 soldiers who have lost their formations and are fighting separately are as difficult to catch as 100,000 pigs scattered in a hurry, and anyone who has fought with common sense knows this.

What I am most afraid of when surrendering is that the enemy has no command system, and no one can say anything.

On the other hand, Zhu Shuren is also a commander who is well versed in the art of war, and of course he will divide his troops to maintain encirclement and containment outside Chengdu at the same time as he attacks the city, and block Zhang Xianzhong's route at any time.

But Zhang Xianzhong asked for money this time, or he felt that even if he chose to die, the probability of surviving might not be much higher than choosing money, so he simply gambled a lot and broke through to Xinjindu, still wanting to retreat south of Minjiang.

This is something that Zhu Shuren never expected, he always felt that Zhang Xianzhong wanted to have a higher probability of survival, so he should retreat to Mianzhu and Jiangyou, and hide in Jianmen Pass, so as to ensure that he could live for half a few more months before he died after eating the military rations.

The blockade force set up by the Zhu Shuren in the direction of Xinjindu was only a few thousand people, and they were rushed by Zhang Xianzhong regardless of casualties.

And Zhang Xianzhong's troops just smashed into a hole with their lives, and ran frantically into the corridors and gaps, and continued to run wildly without looking back after cutting through the blocking army formation.

In such a desperate situation, after all, the officers, soldiers, and non-commissioned officers are also afraid of death, so if they can flank and injure the enemy, why do they have to block the front and increase casualties?

The front-line generals naturally chose to continue to shoot and fire arrows at the enemy who rushed to the side, harvesting human lives, chasing the tail to cover up the killing, and using the rout of Zhang Xianzhong's army to fight the free vanguard, trampling on each other to expand the results.

So on the twenty-mile road from Chengdu West Gate to Xinjindu, there were at least a dozen miles, and the corpses of Zhang Xianzhong's army were all over the way, and more soldiers were surrounded and intercepted and failed to rush out, and surrendered directly on their knees.

Zhang Xianzhong rushed to Xinjindu, grabbed 100 small and medium-sized boats, and there were no professional warships, so he set sail directly one after another, almost running one by one, and it was too late to wait for his comrades.

In the chaos, some old thieves wanted to get on the overloaded boat, so naturally they staged another "middle finger of the boat", and they were lined up with brushes to chop off the fingers of the boat in the boat.

The wailing sound by the Min River shook for ten miles, and the floating corpses in the river floated out of the river - but these people still have to follow Zhang Xianzhong at this point, which can be regarded as a relatively deep thief, and they are not so innocent.

In April of the sixteenth year of Chongzhen in history, they should have slaughtered innocents in Wuchang.

At this moment in another time and space, Wuchang Mansion was killed to the point that "floating corpses covered the river, blocked the parrot island, and the people were more than an inch thick, and the rest of the month was scattered".

It is the parrot island of "Qingchuan Calendar Hanyang Tree, Fangcao Wife and Wife Parrot Island", where people's corpses are washed by the river and piled up, so that the sandbar in the river can be directly connected to the land by the river, turning it into a peninsula, and the oil in the middle can be more than an inch thick.

(Note: The Wuchang section of the Yangtze River is two kilometers wide, and the modern Parrot Island has been connected with the land, and there is a map in the Song Dynasty, and the Parrot Island is "about 100 zhang" from the narrow place on the south bank.) Information from the end of the Ming Dynasty cannot be found, and it is estimated that it is at least half narrower than that of the Song Dynasty, even if it is a small island less than 100 meters offshore in the narrowest place.

In addition, it cannot be ruled out that the massacre of the city and the dumping of corpses have changed the geological structure around Parrot Island, accelerating the process of connecting the sandbar with the land. If there was no Zhang Xianzhong, perhaps the modern Parrot Island would not have been completely integrated with the main land of Wuhan so quickly. ）

After Zhang Xianzhong seized the boat, he went down the river, thinking that he had escaped for a while. But he obviously underestimated the technical content of the naval army -

Even if the officers and soldiers were negligent for a moment and did not judge the direction of his escape, the ships pursued by the officers and soldiers were obviously more capable of sailing, and the sailors were much more skilled in handling the ships.

Before midnight, the official and military fleets had already arrived, and the torches illuminated the Minjiang River, where there was nowhere to hide, and there were hundreds of warships.

What made him even more desperate was that there were also warships searching upstream in the lower reaches of the south, apparently the officers and soldiers left behind at the wharves along the river in Meishan, Leshan and other places.

Those officers and soldiers seemed to have received the news from the fast horses on land, because the galloping horses were faster than the ships, so they got the news in advance to intercept them, and there were even officers and generals who had brains to arrest some of the officers of Sun Kewang's department who had previously captured and surrendered in Leshan County, Emei County, Leshan County and other places, and put them on the bow of the ship to order them to declare their identities and shout.

You must know that in Zhang Xianzhong's descendants, the news that "Sun Kewang has given up Emei and fled eastward and completely betrayed his father-in-law" has not been confirmed.

There are quite a few die-hard loyalists, and they still think that this is a discordant plan of the officials and soldiers, and that General Sun is still receiving them in Emei County.

This is also where Zhang Xianzhong's last diehard loyalists dare to break through in the south, if they really knew that Sun Kewang had completely escaped in vain, their determination would at least be discouraged.

And the combination of siege and flanking attack by the official army, along with the attack, can be regarded as completely breaking down Zhang Xianzhong's last lineage.

The target of the large fleet of thieves was directly collided, scattered and annihilated on the river.

At first, the big ship of the official army wanted to use the Franc machine to bomb or directly sink it, but in the end, it was the naval army who was responsible for leading the team to practice more knowledgeable, and hurriedly ordered his subordinates not to knock over, not to use heavy artillery, and at most to use turtledoves.

Before he set off, he was taken care of by his own young master, and asked him to pay attention to whether Zhang Xianzhong's escape fleet was loaded with gold, silver and jewelry, because with Zhang Xianzhong's temperament, he liked to escape with the most valuable soft belongings.

Fortunately, the combat power was already crushed, and the ships robbed by Zhang Xianzhong's troops did not have cabin armor, and the turtledove was already able to sweep, and after some strafing, the officers and soldiers jumped to help pull the boat away, and sure enough, they found that many ships had gold and silver, and they fell into the robbery for a while.

Shen Lian hurriedly reiterated the military order again, and the seized property must be returned to the public and the rewards should be redistributed. For this reason, he even had to march to cut down seven or eight officers and soldiers who were so red that they lost their humanity.

Zhang Xianzhong saw that it was difficult to escape, his eyes were bloodshot, and he roared unwillingly and pulled out his knife to slash on the side of the ship, and turned around and cut the thick hemp rope tied to Li Dingguo's body.

"Father-in-law! At this point, are you still going to kill me? I didn't collaborate with the enemy! Even if you collaborate with the enemy, does it make sense to care about these now! Why! Li Dingguo was also stimulated to be ferocious, and he took a back leap after getting rid of the restraints, and drew a knife from Qi Sansheng in his hand, but he was also unwilling to sit still.

Zhang Xianzhong saw that he also took the blade, but he smiled miserably: "If I want to kill you, I won't cut the hemp rope together!" Chop your head directly with a knife horizontally! This is to let you go, there is no seriousness in the attack, do you want to hold a grudge and kill your father! ”

Li Dingguo listened to his explanation, but it also made some sense, and he held the knife and stood still for a while, as if he was thinking.

Zhang Xianzhong didn't bother to cover it up, and finally gave an order: "For the sake of father and son, who was right and who was wrong in the past, whether it was a plan or a betrayal, you and I are both clear, and the past is not to blame, how about it?"

If you don't want to bear the name of betraying your father, help me do the last thing, and I will take these boats of cavalry to the west coast to secretly dock and go north to join Xiu'er. If you are caught dead on the road, it is also fate.

As long as you take these fleets and continue south, pretend to be me, and lead away the officers and soldiers, all the treasures on this fleet will be left to you! However, for my father's advice, when you are caught up by the officers and soldiers, it is better to scuttle and sink all the ships! What we can't get, we can't let anyone in the world get it! ”

Zhang Xianzhong said, ordered the boat to dock to the west, gathered a small group of cavalry in the dark, climbed Qingcheng Mountain, wanted to detour north from Qingcheng Mountain, and all the way along the edge of the mountain to Jiangyou, and joined Liu Wenxiu.

He had given up his treasure completely, and only wanted to gamble one last time to see if he could save his life.

And his order to Li Dingguo to lead away the enemy and finally sink the river with property is indeed very in line with his temperament - Zhang Xianzhong has always been a person who "as long as I temporarily control something, and in the end I can't keep possession, it is better to destroy it".

Historically, the "Jiangkou Shenyin" he engaged in in Sichuan is almost the same as now, and he wants to give up the territory, so he wantonly slaughters the city, which is also this mentality.

Li Dingguo's hand holding the knife tightened, thinking that after all, he worshipped the other party as his father-in-law, and it was really not good to do a big rebellious thing.

After about a stick of incense, the battle on the Minjiang River was completely over, and the chaos gradually subsided.

Li Dingguo made a decision to let all the twenty or so small boats he could control, carrying the most valuable gold, silver and jewelry, go to the Qingcheng Mountain on the west bank to rush and run aground, and then abandon the ship and go ashore to prepare to surrender.

"Second general, don't we scuttle the shipwreck and sink the gold and silver into the river according to the king's order?" Qi Sansheng didn't have any brains, and finally asked.

"You just want to die so much? Leave these gold and silver to Zhu Shuren, and Zhu Shuren may still leave us a way to live for the sake of us having the opportunity to sink silver and not sink. At this point, we have repaid the favor enough, and the grace has been cut off. If you can't live like this, it's fate. We will kill no fewer people than Tartars. ”

Soon, Shen Lian also noticed that the last of the largest group of thieves who had given up their resistance had abandoned the ship and rushed to the beach, and it seemed that at least they could not run away, so he did not open fire indiscriminately, and ordered several rounds to let the musketeers cease firing, and then docked and lined up to search for the prisoners.

"I'm Li Dingguo! Don't fire! The stranded ship is full of gold and silver! If it blows up, it will rush into the river! Li Dingguo took the lead in shouting, and also let all the living soldiers shout.

As soon as Shen Lian heard that this was the case, this group of prisoners were all standing in a pile of gold and silver, and he hurriedly became more civilized, lest these small broken ships fall apart, and they will rush tens of thousands of taels and hundreds of thousands of taels to the Minjiang River.

"Put down all your weapons! Those who descend will not be killed! Officers and soldiers shouted slogans and carefully registered the prisoners of the boats full of goods.

Shen Lian asked people to tie Li Dingguo up, and then he took out his saber and put it on the other party's neck: "You are Li Dingguo?" Where is Zhang Xianzhong? ”

Li Dingguo sighed, and Qi Sansheng next to him hurriedly helped and said, "Eight kings...... Ah, Zhang Xianzhong asked the second general to lead the fleet away from you, he just took a few boats and 100 horsemen, and secretly rushed ashore in the place where the water and grass and reeds were dense in the north, and got into the Qingcheng Mountain. ”

Li Dingguo saw that the other party's whereabouts had been exposed, and added: "Don't search randomly, he will definitely go to Jiangyou in the end and defect to the third brother Liu Wenxiu." ”

If it is an ordinary official and military search that will inevitably disturb the people and point out the direction, then it is good to search in one direction.

Shen Lian didn't think much of the other party's hypocrisy, and said proudly: "At this time, do you still want to kill the people to pretend to be a good person?" Our Shen family army is no better than other soldiers and horses, and never disturbs the people! Even if you search the mountains and inspect the sea, you will freeze to death without demolishing the house, and starve to death without plundering!

If you really have a good conscience, you should have arrested Zhang Xianzhong to receive the reward just now! Now what is false benevolence and false righteousness! My lord, the governor of our family, likes to reuse the people who killed his father-in-law in the thieves the most! ”

……

After Li Dingguo was captured, Zhang Xianzhong's last main force was completely wiped out, and early the next morning, Li Dingguo was escorted back to Chengdu, along with the remaining unspent slaughter of Xiangxi by Zhang Xianzhong, and the treasures obtained from the slaughter of Sichuan in the past few months.

In history, Zhang Xianzhong's "Jiangkou Sinking Silver" is a grand spectacle, and in the 21st century, several sinking silver ships have been excavated by archaeology, and there is a "Jiangkou Sinking Silver Museum" in the northern suburbs of Meishan City and the southern suburbs of Xinjin District of Chengdu.

But it is clear that this will not happen again, at least more than ninety percent of the gold and silver stolen money has been recovered, and only less than one percent has been scattered, and it has sunk into the Min River with the ship.

However, the Shen family army now knows the location of last night's battle, and can slowly send soldiers with good water properties to dive and salvage in the future. It is completely different from Zhang Xianzhong's secret sinking silver in history, and outsiders do not know the specific location.

Zhu Shuren was also a little depressed when he learned that Zhang Xianzhong had not been caught for the time being, and asked for the prisoner's confession, and after thinking about it, he made some deployments to let the troops go to the possible direction to intercept.

Then, he personally interrogated Li Dingguo, and also brought Fang Kongzhi, Zhang Huangyan and other civil officials to testify together, and the tripartite trial.

As for why the other party didn't cut off Zhang Xianzhong's head to dedicate it, Zhu Shuren also asked repeatedly to understand. He has nothing to say about this kind of face-saving person who can't kill his father to vote.

It's true that he likes to reuse the person who kills his father-in-law, but this kind of thing is hard to come by.

But if Li Dingguo is sent to Beijing in accordance with the laws of the Ming Dynasty, it is estimated that he will not escape death.

He thought about it for a while and discussed with Fang Kongzhi and Zhang Huangyan: "Fang Shibo, cousin, I thought that this Li Dingguo was the highest-ranking general in the Zhang Rebellion Army that had surrendered and captured at present. In the end, it is said that he did not listen to Zhang Xianzhong's Shen Yin order, and handed over all the stolen gold and silver.

If we send him to the capital, I am afraid that these tens of thousands of captives will be panicked, and it will not be convenient for us to reform. It's better to set up a private court here for us, give a final opinion, and don't send it to the capital, so as to calm people's hearts as soon as possible. ”

Fang Kongzhi didn't understand why Zhu Shuren did this, and thought that it was really just out of the need to quickly stabilize the situation, so he said that he took on this responsibility as the governor of Sichuan.

The governor of Sichuan, of course, is responsible for the civil affairs work in Sichuan, and now after the official recovery of Chengdu, the first eucalyptus was sentenced in Chengdu, and Fang Kongzhi was in charge, and there was nothing wrong with it in legal theory.

On the contrary, it is the identity of Zhu Shuren, just a governor of another province who crossed the border to pursue the thief army, and he should only sign this matter in the end.

I believe that after the eucalyptus is finalized, and then report the news to Beijing, Chongzhen should be already anxious and have no time to care about these things.

Zhu Shuren unified everyone's thoughts, and then gave Li Dingguo a step down: "Li Dingguo!" When Chongqing broke the city, did you suggest that Zhang Xianzhong slaughter the city! When Chengdu broke the city, did you suggest that Zhang Xianzhong slaughter the city! ”

Li Dingguo: "No, my eldest brother and I both dissuaded my father...... dissuaded Zhang Xianzhong from slaughtering the city, saying that this law would not last long. ”

Zhu Shuren: "Do you have a witness?" ”

Li Dingguo: "Feng Shuangli and Bai Wenxuan can be witnessed. ”

Zhu Shuren: "That's your own people, of course you help get rid of the crime, what about the three massacres in Changde, Changsha, and Hengzhou?" ”

……

Zhu Shuren asked for a long time, and finally asked for a while, and Li Dingguo was able to get a clear relationship with those slaughtered cities.

His final surrender can only absolve him of the basic crime of being a thief, hand over gold and silver, and avoid some other war crimes.

But in the end, there is another item, which is really difficult to deal with: two years ago, he attacked Xiangyang, plundered and killed countless people, and also killed King Xiang and King Gui.

That is the sin of killing two vassal kings.

If this happened a year later, and Chongzhen died, then there is no need to say that the Southern Ming Dynasty is willing to forgive any crime, as long as you are willing to fight for the court.

But now it's only a year away, Chongzhen is still alive, and Ai Nengqi, who committed the same crime with Li Dingguo, was sent to Beijing two years ago. If Li Dingguo didn't have anything to do, he really couldn't convince the public, and when the news spread, Zhu Shuren, the governor, would not have to be the governor.

So in the end, it was only to take the initiative to surrender and hand over the silver, exempt him from the capital crime, sentence him to 100 rods, and serve for the crime, which can be regarded as redeeming the fact that he led the team to attack and kill the two vassal kings.

At the time of the execution, Zhu Shuren personally took the thorn and whipped it thirty times as an example before handing it over to the officials.

Li Dingguo was severely beaten, but he didn't say anything, and he was carried down after the beating.

That night, Zhu Shucai went to the prison to continue interrogation: "Think about it, you Shaanxi people can't survive, what kind of hatred and resentment do you have against Sichuan people and Huguang people!" These innocent and poor people have provoked Zhang Xianzhong!

Your Majesty added three salaries, and that was also to fight against the Tartars! What makes the people of the world miserable is the Tartar invasion! If you are a man, in the future, you will help the official to transform those Zhang Rebel soldiers, and kill the Tartars together, and you will have a chance to wash away the shame in this life!

Otherwise, the court will fight against the Tartars in front for the people of the world, but you only dare to drag your feet behind your back, and you will only leave a name in the history in the future, and you will only leave the infamy of traitors! Whether you want to wash away the traitors or not, it's just a thought! As long as you kill the Tartars together, all the sins of the past will have a chance to be written off! ”