"Load your artillery and prepare for shelling!"

Outside Shengjing City, on the artillery position of the Xia Army, the unarmored Xia Army artillery were busy like ants, they loaded the shells into the muzzle of the black hole, and then compacted the shells and gunpowder with a pounding pipe, and then stood aside, focusing on the Rongguo Gong Su Dingyuan and the Ling Qi.

Because it was still a cold spring, the artillerymen could not take off their shirts as readily as in summer and autumn, revealing their smoky muscles, while in the far south, in the perennially hot Southeast Asia, their artillery colleagues were always wearing only single pants.

Su Fu and Zheng Zhilong's father and son came at just the right time, the artillerymen just finished loading, carried out the final debugging, and reported to the main general who came to the scene one by one, Zheng Zhilong saw the many artillery, and immediately understood the intention of the Xia army, his face suddenly turned pale, he could already imagine what kind of catastrophic scene Shengjing City would become in this volley of artillery.

After making sure that there was no problem, Su Dingyuan slowly pulled out his saber, he raised the saber high, and slashed down into the void in front of him, almost at the same time, the officer holding the command flag beside him also waved the order flag vigorously, and roared loudly: "Fire!"

"Fire!"

"Light the fuse and fire!"

Zizizi——

As the fuse was ignited by the torch, there was a slight sizzling sound, and a few seconds later, the people inside and outside the artillery position only heard a deafening huge roar, accompanied by the ground under their feet trembling violently, the muzzles of hundreds of various guns deployed on the position suddenly burst into dazzling fire, and the cannon body was pushed back a few steps back by the recoil, and the dark cannonball flew out of the muzzle and smashed into Shengjing City.

All the cannons rang out in unison, even Zheng Zhilong, who was dominating the sea, couldn't help but turn pale, not to mention his sons, who had been imprisoned with him for several years, his sons were all dead, their legs were weak, and even they fell directly to the ground, their mouths opened wide, and they looked frightened.

After the infantry cannon and howitzer were fired, the rocket artillery dragged a long tail flame, and let out a scream like a bird's cry roared from the ground, crossing a shocking trajectory in mid-air, allowing the fire of death to descend on Shengjing City!

The rhetoric of "artillery roars, erodes for miles" may be an obvious exaggeration when applied to the rest of the artillery, but it is well deserved when applied to rocket artillery.

Almost at the moment when the cannon sounded, the soldiers and civilians in Shengjing City reflexively hugged their heads and fled, scattering and fleeing, and the Qing troops on the city wall looked at the cannonballs flying at high speed from the artillery position in horror, and before they had time to ring the warning gong, hundreds of shells passed through a distance of hundreds of meters and smashed heavily on the wall of Shengjing City, making the entire city wall tremble violently.

Some of the shells flew over the city walls and into the city, destroying several houses, and several of them hit the towering stupa in the city, which was cut off at the waist and slowly tilted and collapsed, and the monks and people below panicked and tried to escape, but they still failed to escape and were buried under the rubble.

Shengjing City was heavily bombarded by the Xia army at the beginning of the siege a year ago, and the shelling caused cracks in many sections of the city wall, faintly showing signs of collapse, and then was repaired and strengthened by the Qing army in time, but in this shelling, there were more huge cracks in the city wall, and several sections of the city wall were even more crumbling, and the defenders above evacuated in a panic.

After the solid cannonballs ravaged the city, the rockets dragged the long black tail flame in the sky before they finally appeared, and under the terrified and desperate eyes of the soldiers and civilians in the city, the rockets fell into the city like a meteorite that had fallen on the world in the apocalypse, bringing terrible disasters.

The rockets shrouded most of the Shengjing City like scattered flowers, scattered in all directions, and everywhere they were hit by the rockets, there were terrible explosions, the explosions pushed the flames around, the flames instantly ignited a large number of houses in the city, the fire spread, and the soldiers and civilians in the city screamed in panic, or avoided the terrible flames, or went to find a water source to extinguish the fire, or looked for their lost relatives.

In the palace of Shengjing, the young Emperor Shunzhi watched in horror at the fire spreading in the city, and when he received the news that the Xia army had launched an artillery bombardment, he immediately rushed out of the palace and happened to see the rockets falling

A terrible scene.

"Why do the Han people have such terrible weapons? Why?! Is the heavens no longer favoring me?"

He clutched his smooth scalp in pain and muttered to himself with a languid expression, the eunuchs and chamberlains around him were worried, and wanted to come forward to persuade the emperor to leave here and take refuge in a safe place, but the emperor pushed him away, and his whole person seemed to have fallen into a madness, so that others could not get close.

This terrible shelling lasted intermittently for more than half an hour before finally ending, and the barrels in the back were overheated and hot due to the continuous shelling, and the artillerymen could only pour cold water on the barrels to physically cool down, and the efficiency of the shelling was greatly slowed down.

In the end, Zheng Zhilong, father and son and others were already numb to watch, they were shocked by the powerful firepower of the Xia army's artillery, and their hearts were also full of joy - fortunately, they escaped in advance, if the Xia army launched such a terrible shelling while they were still in the city, then they might be buried in the fire caused by the rockets.

Zheng Zhilong also subconsciously submerged all this into the powerful Zheng fleet that he once crisscrossed the ocean, and he quickly came to a conclusion that if the target of the shelling was replaced by the former Zheng fleet, then they could hold out for less than half an hour, and they had already declared defeat in the first few shellings.

Especially the rockets that could start a fire, and it didn't even take so many infantry guns and howitzers to destroy his fleet and kill all the ships.

Thinking of this, Zheng Zhilong couldn't help but shudder again, he secretly made up his mind in his heart, after returning to Jiangning, he must write a letter to advise his eldest son Da Mu, so that he should be loyal to the Xia Dynasty and not have other thoughts, otherwise, what if he Zheng clan crosses the ocean? It's not that it will be easily crushed by Xia Jun.

He looked at the burning Shengjing City again, most of the buildings in Shengjing City were wooden buildings, even if it was still wet in early spring, it still could not resist the spread of the flames, and most of the city was caught in flames, no matter how desperately the soldiers and civilians in the city tried to save it, they could not extinguish the fire that spread rapidly.

The fire was so fierce that the moat around the entire city was also boiling hot, and the fish living in the moat turned their white bellies and floated on the surface of the river because of the gradually rising temperature, and then they were beaten by the panicked military and civilian buckets, poured into the fire, and turned into white smoke under the engulfment of the fire.

"This is a catastrophic human catastrophe."

This is how John Tang, a Western missionary who personally experienced the shelling in Shengjing Palace, commented on the bombardment in his personal biography.