On the eighth day of the first month of the thirty-fourth year of Taiping in the Ming Dynasty, when the Ming Dynasty arrived at noon, the sky in the Taixi Continent had not yet dawned.

But for the Ming Dynasty, the world's strongest empire, and for a hostile empire that makes everyone feel powerless, the Taixi countries did not dare to relax in the slightest.

They all exhausted all kinds of methods, and arranged a large number of meticulous works and informants in the Ming Dynasty and the domain.

The real magnates and elites of the Ming Dynasty, under normal circumstances, no one would be spies for foreigners, and it is impossible for the information of the Imperial Council to be leaked directly.

However, they can buy off a lot of ordinary people, they can try to arrange for some Tatars to obtain residency, and they can send official ambassadors who are very restricted.

In the vast majority of cases, espionage is not as thrilling as in movies and TV dramas, but is hidden in completely inconspicuous daily life.

Information that is very common to ordinary people at home can be very critical to other countries.

For example, the Imperial Court Newspaper, the news and articles in various newspapers, these public information may keep the high-level of the Taixi countries awake at night.

Tessy Continent, Lucian Empire, Moscow Province.

Paul, the fifth emperor of the Lucian Empire, was called by his own maid at dawn.

Several urgent secret reports from foreign intelligence agencies were sent to the emperor.

"The news confirms that the Fengyuan State, a vassal of the Ming Empire, announced a reform announcement, and the Ming Dynasty officially began to withdraw the domain, and the details are as follows......"

Paul, who is now 60 years old this year, looks at the contents and analysis of the detailed report, and his expression becomes more and more ugly.

Having the servant summon his most valued prince Nikolai and the cabinet ministers of the empire to come to a meeting, he fell into a long contemplation.

How the hell did the situation get to this point?

Lucia's first direct contact with the Ming Dynasty was the Battle of Yaksa more than a hundred years ago, which the Ming called the Battle of Longjiang Fort.

Because of the war between the Ming and the Qing Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, which theoretically owned the Outer Heilongjiang River, had no time to look north, which made Lucia's expansion in the northeast even deeper.

However, Zhu Cihong made a plan in advance, and after the Ming reunified the country and completely solved the Jurchens and Mongols, he made a move against Lucia.

Lucia's manpower in the northeast is more "sufficient" than in history, and she has participated in more troops than in the historical Battle of Yaksa, with the total number of troops on the Lucian side reaching thousands of men.

As a result, the more prepared Ming Dynasty was completely annihilated, and most of Lucia's troops were captured, except for a few killed.

Among these captives, only a small number of generals ransomed themselves with their own money, and most of them were castrated and sent to Liaodong mines as coolies, becoming white slaves in the Ming Dynasty.

After the Battle of Longjiang Fort, Zhu Cihong directly began to prepare for a new battle, and took the initiative to contact and integrate the local natives.

The "forest people" of the Outer Northeast, as well as the Mongols known as the "Buri Yakei", including the "savage Jurchen" Saurons, were trained as the Northland jungle hunters of the Ming Dynasty.

The Ming Dynasty provided them with supplies and guns, and sent them to the north and west to investigate and attack.

After that, the two sides of Daming and Lucia fought three battles of a small scale in the East Xianbei and Beihai regions.

In places like Xianbei Wasteland and Mobei Mongolia, before the railway connection, both sides were unable to carry out large-scale military operations, and the Ming Dynasty had a slight advantage relatively speaking.

Lucia suffered all the crushing defeats in the three battles, and had to completely surrender and admit defeat, and asked for a peace treaty with the Ming Dynasty.

In the peace treaty, the Ming Dynasty clarified the ownership of the entire Eastern Xianbei, the area around Beihai, and all lands east and south of Beihai.

In the peace treaty, Lucia pledged never to explore and expand eastward, and never to seek access to the sea in the Pacific.

Lucia had regarded peace as an expedient measure, and was ready to secretly accumulate strength to advance eastward again.

But as the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and the Ming Dynasty built the railway to the shores of Beihai Lake, Lucia completely gave up that unrealistic plan.

In about the same time, the Ming Dynasty also defeated the Dutch, Portuguese, and Spaniards at sea, and became the only absolute controller of the South Seas.

The able-bodied Taixi merchants generally understood that in the east of Malacca, all life follows the will of the Ming Emperor, not the will of God.

The wealth, power, and unreasonable ferocity of the Ming Dynasty greatly shocked Lucia's little Tsar Peter.

As a result, the Westernization reform of Peter in Lucia's history disappeared, and became the "Easternization" or "Minghua" reform of this world.

Peter took Zhu Cihong as an example, first ascended the throne and became emperor, and changed Lucia to the empire.

Efforts were made to strengthen the centralization of power, establish the Lucia royal consortium, cultivate the royal family group in an elite manner, and gradually implement the Oriental-style imperial examination system.

Gradually transformed the serfs into oriental-style tenant farmers, continued to learn from the Ming Dynasty to develop handicrafts, and continued to open mines and build factories.

Lucia was greatly developed, and Peter's own destiny changed.

He did not move the capital to St. Petersburg, because the capital of the Ming Dynasty was not a coastal city, but only built a special railway to the nearest coastline.

So he did not catch the cold in the sea either, and ended up living in Moscow to be in his seventies.

And at the age of sixty, he learned from Zhu Cihong to abdicate early and guide his son to become emperor.

Peter's eldest son, Alexei Petrovich, did not go to Europe when he was young, but was sent all the way to study in the Ming Dynasty.

This changed the crown prince's mindset and further changed his fate.

Alexei ascended the throne while his father was alive, became the second Lucian Emperor under his father's direction, and became even more orientalized than his father.

This smooth intergenerational transition of imperial power laid the foundation for Lucia's subsequent stability.

The successive palace coups in history were eliminated as much as possible by two generations of emperors who had mastered the techniques of the East.

Catherine the Great in history naturally disappeared.

The current emperor of Lucia, Paul, is not Catherine's unlucky son Paul I, but Alexei's direct great-grandson, Peter's great-great-grandson.

Lucia of this world, although she did not get the coastline of the Pacific Ocean and her territory was far inferior, was more powerful than in history.

Lucia, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain were the first Western countries to be directly beaten by the Ming Dynasty, the first to learn the technology of the Ming Dynasty, and then began to industrialize.

Lucia, in particular, has always maintained contact and learning from the Ming Dynasty, and did not lag behind in the second industrial revolution.

By the thirty-fourth year of the Ming Dynasty, the industrialization of the Lucia Empire was very close to the level of the late nineteenth century.

Lucia also gained access to the Baltic and Black Seas, and more coastal lands than she had historically controlled in Europe, completing the partition of Poland ahead of schedule.

However, the more and more in-depth Minghua reforms also made Lucia's centripetal force begin to decay.

Especially in the territory of Lucia's east, most of the Asians living there are oriented to the Ming Dynasty, resulting in Lucia's control of the east has always been unstable.

At the same time, the rising nationalist forces in Lucia also generally believed that only by defeating the Ming Empire could they truly get rid of the shadow of the Ming Dynasty.

In the end, with the contact and mediation of the British, Lucia joined the anti-Ming alliance as the main force of the land war.

As a result, after the war lasted for more than ten years, although some results were achieved on the battlefield, the anti-Ming alliance was about to be unable to hold out.

The war of attrition is the national strength, and the farther away from the mainland, the smaller the advantage, so after the failure of the operation in the North Sea, Lucia will try to go to Anxi.

The Mongolian Plateau battlefield was 2,000 kilometers away from the Daming Jing Division, and Anxi was more than 4,000 kilometers away from the Ming Jing Division, and the starting point was completely reversed when it was changed to Moscow.

The battlefield of Ancy is closer to Lucia proper, but the locals around the battlefield are very interested in the Ming Dynasty, so the battle still looks very difficult to fight.

Obviously, the Ming army, which had been prepared for a long time, quickly prepared the barbed wire trenches and transported those steel monsters by rail.

Neither Napoleon nor Kutuzov saw any hope of a quick victory, and the war of attrition remained.

Now that the news of the Ming Dynasty's withdrawal has been confirmed, Emperor Lucia's heart is even more worried.

Is the withdrawal of the feudal domain to the colony to treat itself as a native of the colony to squeeze out the war potential and completely consume it with the anti-Ming alliance?