Just when the hinterland of the Central Plains was about to be full of people, Jingzhou Mu Liu Biao, who was originally far away from the land of right and wrong, suddenly fell ill, and he couldn't afford to be sick, and no one could get close.

Liu Biao is very sick this time!

If you want to talk about Liu Biao, he has been able to operate in Jingzhou for many years, and his small days are becoming more and more prosperous, so he naturally has some vision and strategy, and he is definitely not as cowardly as Lao Luo described in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms".

Liu Biao's foundation is very solid now, and there is no shortage of resourceful people under him, and he monopolizes Jingzhou's tender and delicious big fat meat, it is impossible to say that it does not arouse people's "envy, jealousy, and hatred".

Liu Biao himself also knew in his heart that he was easy to attract envy, so he had always been a low-key man in Xiangyang all these years, neither disobeying the orders of the imperial court, saying that he would send troops if he wanted to send troops (as for whether he had contributed or not, then another matter), and said that he would make offerings (anyway, Jingzhou's money would not be spent); at the same time, he tried his best to maintain relations with the Sima family in Yizhou and Sun Jian in Wuzhou, and did not take the initiative to cause trouble; even Zhao Xing, who was far away in the north, Liu Biao also managed to keep people in secret contact and vigorously promote business and trade between the north and the south, not wanting to provoke Zhao Xing to have opinions about himself.

Liu Biao is so obscure, he looks very weak and incompetent on the surface, but he is really "making a fortune in a muffled voice", growing his strength step by step, and now it has reached the point where Liu Bei and Cao Cao are blushing.

As the saying goes, "the husband is innocent and guilty", although Liu Biao hides and does not want to expose his family background, and strives to maintain good relations with all parties, how can he hide from Liu Bei's calculations. Don't forget, Zhuge Kongming, the first strategist under Liu Bei, went out from Nanyang, Jingzhou, and Zhuge Liang's wife Huang Shuo is the daughter of a family in Xiangyang.

As for how to squeeze out Liu Biao and take Jingzhou, Liu Bei and Cao Cao also used a lot of brains, and thought of many ways before and after, but they still felt that it was very difficult to operate. At the beginning, they planned to give up Zhang Wen's vacant position to Liu Biao and "invite" Liu Biao from Jingzhou to Luoyang, but after thinking about it carefully, they felt that Liu Biao would definitely find a reason to prevaricate and not accept it, so in the end they did not implement this plan, so as not to alarm Liu Biao, but it was not beautiful.

Without waiting for Liu Bei and Cao Cao to come up with a suitable strategy, Liu Biao found the smell of danger approaching, and actually played the trick of "pretending to be sick"!

As a local wealthy family in Xiangyang, Cai Mao and Kuai Yue have always been deeply trusted and relied on by Liu Biao. Cai Mao and Kuai Yue saw that Liu Yan and Yuan Shu were successively dismantled by the imperial court and reclaimed their territory, and the uneasiness in their hearts became increasingly serious.

If the imperial court took Liu Biao from Jingzhou and sent powerful characters to subdue Jingzhou, then the local wealthy families in Jingzhou such as the Cai family and the Kuai family would become an unavoidable stumbling block. If it is the kind of person who comes to Jingzhou, maybe Cai Kuai and other families can turn smoothly, but if it is a fierce man who wants to kill people and make an example of monkeys, then the first to bear the brunt are Cai and Kuai.

Such an unpredictable ending was naturally not what Cai Mao and Kuai Yue wanted to see, so they tried their best to advocate some words such as strengthening precautions in Liu Biao's ears, so as to arouse Liu Biao's nervousness and vigilance.

In fact, even if Cai Mao, Kuai Yue and others don't blow the wind in their ears, Liu Biao himself also saw the huge crisis of the great changes in Luoyang, he has been operating in Jingzhou for many years, why should Liu Bei and Cao Cao and others pick peaches?

The imperial court did not say hello to Liu Biao in advance, so it did not say a word and assigned Nanyang County to the name of Yuan Shu, the "King of Ruyang", which made Liu Biao very annoyed. But because Yuan Shu served as the Taishou in Nanyang County at the beginning, and the foundation of Yuan Shu's family was originally in Nanyang, and Nanyang County is now connected to Cao Cao and Liu Bei's territory, so Liu Biao was silent and admitted the fait accompli of dividing Nanyang County from the northernmost part of Jingzhou.

Although Liu Biao did not have a grit with the imperial court on Yuan Shu's return to Nanyang, it did not mean that he accepted it happily in his heart. Since he had expected that Cao Cao and Liu Bei would want to attack him next, Liu Biao came to a preemptive strike, directly pretending to be sick and lying down without seeing anyone, and playing the "procrastination trick".

Aren't you trying to come and take my military power and occupy my territory? I'm sorry, I'm sick, and it's the kind of disease that is contagious and inconvenient to see visitors, so you can't let me be an infectious disease person tossing around anymore, right?

I'm sorry, I'm very sick, and none of my brothers around me have any serious subordinates, and if the 200,000 troops in Jingzhou accidentally clean up someone, it's not my sin, I don't know anything!

Liu Biao's illness really made Liu Bei and Cao Cao a little painful. They couldn't think of a way to crack it for a while, so they seized the time to stabilize the territory they had already obtained and put Jingzhou Liu Biao aside for the time being.

In order to resist the pervasive infiltration of Zhao Xing's forces into the hinterland of the Central Plains, Liu Bei carried out drastic reforms to some existing systems at the beginning of his tenure, hoping to integrate the Sili region, southern Jizhou, Yanzhou, Yuzhou, and Yangzhou in the shortest possible time to form a unified pace and rhythm.

First of all, Liu Bei unified the tax standards for the controlled areas, and although Yanzhou was Cao Cao's lair, Liu Bei still achieved this goal through the hands of Cao Cao's subordinate Xun Yu. A large number of local taxes in various places were all abolished and eliminated by Liu Bei, so that the burden on the common people was reduced a lot, and Liu Bei also won a certain prestige.

In view of the great influence of the Jin State Agricultural, Soldier, Merchant and Gold Bank on the economy of the Central Plains, Liu Bei appointed Su Shuang and Zhang Shiping to follow the practice of the Agricultural, Soldier, Merchant and Gold Firm, and set up a money village dominated by the central court in the control area, and handed over the military expenses sent to various places to be handled by the money bank, and required the taxes paid to the imperial court to be traded through the bank. In this way, Liu Bei's reforms in the economic field have strong financial support, and many goals that were originally difficult to achieve have become less unattainable.

While Liu Bei was reforming the internal affairs in the area under his control, Cao Cao was not idle. He and Liu Bei had already agreed that Liu Bei would be led in internal affairs, and even the Yanzhou region would have to act in unison, and in turn, the military adjustment would be dominated by Cao Cao, and even the Central Army and Liu Bei's Han Rong and Zhang Fei and other troops would also be under Cao Cao's management.

Lao Cao did have a set of military affairs, and he saw that the biggest problem between the Central Army, the Yanzhou Army, and Liu Bei's Army was that the command was not smooth and it was difficult to coordinate, so he deliberately gathered the senior generals of the three armies, and everyone worked out a set of rules of action.

Although Liu Bei and Cao Cao's approach was not thorough and comprehensive, they started active experiments in their respective areas of responsibility, and once these small changes accumulated to a certain number, they would cause qualitative changes.