Governments in Jizhou and Bingzhou have rarely launched effective recourse actions to recover fugitives.

Once the peasant fled, he was tacitly acknowledged that he was dead, and he didn't care.

As a result, a long time ago, since the Western Han Dynasty, there were a considerable number of people in the Taihang Mountains who did not belong to the household registration of the imperial court.

Some of them fled into the mountains because they could not bear the harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes, and some of them could not bear the military service, so they fled into the mountains, were not subject to the control of the imperial court, and basically did not pay taxes.

In the middle and late Eastern Han Dynasty, such a situation became more and more obvious, and it was conservatively estimated that there were more than 200,000 fugitives living in the Taihang Mountains.

The chaotic situation before the Taiping Dao army in Jizhou caused a considerable number of Taiping Daoists to flee into the mountains with their elders and children, looking for refuge in groups willing to accept them, or simply huddling together to keep warm and occupy the mountains to survive.

The arrival of these people has brought some small Taiping Dao thoughts to the hundreds of thousands of escapes who are struggling to survive in the Taihang Mountains, and also brought them the news that Jizhou and even the world are about to be in chaos.

At the same time, because the Yellow Turban Army was in good shape in the first few months, several counties in Jizhou and Bingzhou were affected.

Some people who had nothing to do with the Taiping Dao but were also dissatisfied with the Han court decided to respond to the Yellow Turban Army and took advantage of the situation to launch a rebellion, attacking and killing officials and bullies.

Among them, the most famous are Zhang Niujiao and Chu Feiyan.

These two teams set off a wave in the Changshan country west of Jizhou, attacking cities and territories everywhere, but the local officials and soldiers could not resist and fled in disarray.

And their timing is also very good, it happened that when Lu Zhi returned to Luoyang to accept the appointment, he began to rebel, and when Lu Zhi took office as the pastor of Jizhou, because of the chaotic situation in Jizhou, they had grown to the scale of more than 100,000 people, and Changshan Country was almost their happy land.

Lu Zhi was also weak and tired of coping with it at the beginning, but fortunately Liu Bei asked Lu Zhi to promote Liu Yong and Liu Sheng, and Lu Zhi and Zhao worked together to rectify the logistics and food affairs, with Liu Yong and Liu Sheng as captains, and led the troops to deal with Zhang Niujiao and Chu Feiyan.

Lu Zhi saw very clearly at that time that the reason why these two people were able to grow in Changshan Country was because the situation in Jizhou was unstable, there was a lack of food, and agricultural production had not recovered.

Therefore, the important thing is not to defeat them, but to have enough food to stabilize people's hearts, so that those who lack food can see the hope of having enough to eat, so that they will not risk their lives to follow the thieves in rebellion.

Liu Bei played an important role at this time, he used the Zhen family as the main helper, and won a large amount of grain aid for Lu Zhi in Jizhou, which made Lu Zhi have the confidence to open a warehouse and release grain and suppress grain prices.

As a result, Lu Zhi began to reverse the situation, and announced many policies that were beneficial to the people's livelihood, stabilizing people's hearts in Jizhou, making Zhang Niujiao and Chu Feiyan's situation in Changshan Country unfavorable.

In the end, he personally led his troops into Changshan Kingdom, and with the help of some local armed forces in Changshan Kingdom, he successfully defeated the coalition forces of Zhang Niujiao and Chu Feiyan.

Zhang Niujiao was shot, Chu Feiyan fled, more than 100,000 stars scattered, and only more than 10,000 remnants of the defeated soldiers fled into the mountains with Chu Feiyan.

At that time, Lu Zhi did not have the spare energy to go into the mountains to pursue the remnants of the enemy, as long as the boundaries of Jizhou were stabilized, he also began to transfer to administrative governance, continue to stabilize the situation, promote the restoration of agricultural production, resettle displaced people, and so on.

But what he never expected at that time was that Chu Feiyan not only did not disappear, but became bigger and stronger.

After Chu Feiyan entered the mountainous area, he changed his name to Zhang Yan, and merged some of the troops who originally belonged to Zhang Niujiao who fled into the mountainous area with him into his own troops, forming a powerful fighting force, and unexpectedly opening up a new situation in the Taihang Mountains.

He couldn't beat Lu Zhi, but he was able to beat many of the others, and through constant fighting, he gained a large piece of territory to survive, and accumulated huge military prestige, and then contacted the fugitive groups in Changshan, Zhao County, Zhongshan, Shangdang, Hanoi and other places.

Sun Qing, Wang Dang and others among the leaders of the fleeing households admired Zhang Yan's military ability, and they all brought their subordinates to Zhang Yan's command, and some relatively small forces in the mountains also obeyed Zhang Yan's orders because of his prestige.

While Lu Zhi pacified Jizhou and did not let the civil uprising break out in Jizhou, Zhang Yan also developed in the Taihang Mountains, and he developed very well.

He gradually developed from a small force in the dozen to one of the largest forces, and through several battles and diplomatic schemes, he successfully annexed several large forces.

In the end, in November of the third year of Zhongping, when Lu Zhi left Jizhou and returned to the Luoyang Imperial Court as a lieutenant, he basically completed the great cause of dominating the Taihang Mountains, and became the No. 1 person in the Taihang Mountains who came from all over the state.

He is not necessarily everyone's direct leader, but he has the strongest force and the greatest prestige, and he is the most capable one, so even if the big guy maintains a semi-independent state, he will obey his orders and not be hostile to him.

The fugitive forces in the entire Taihang Mountain area have a unified person since then, and Lu Zhi never expected that the little character who was beaten by him would have such an ability.

Around October of the third year of Zhongping, Lu Zhi had already learned through some news that there was a thief leader named Zhang Yan in the northern mountains of Changshan Kingdom, who had some prestige, and sent small forces into Zhao County, Changshan Kingdom and Zhongshan Kingdom several times to attack and plunder, resulting in instability in the three places.

He sent Zhao Zhao, Liu Yong and Liu Sheng to lead the Jizhou soldiers to the local crusade many times, and obtained certain results, but the people who came to attack never stopped, and even defeated the official army.

Lu Zhi inquired further and learned that Zhang Yan was Chu Feiyan back then, not only did this guy not die, but he also became a powerful anti-thief leader in the mountainous area, stronger than before.

He was deeply worried, so he made preparations and wanted to lead his troops into the mountains to crusade, so that he would not lose his tail.

He had always known that the huge mountainous area at the junction of Youzhou, Bingzhou, and Jizhou was the weak area of the Han government's ruling power, and that the power of the government had never penetrated deep into the mountainous areas, and that there were large groups of fugitives in the mountainous areas, who would often enter the plains to cause chaos and disturb local security.

He was determined to solve this problem.

But just as he was submitting the performance to Luoyang and preparing to lead the troops to attack, an order from the Luoyang court came.

The court thought that Lu Zhi's work in Jizhou was very good, very good, and it was enough, and he should now return to the central government to take up a higher position, rather than continue to stay in Jizhou to fight, not to mention the possibility of crossing the border into the Bingzhou and Youzhou regions.

That's not his thing.

Lu Zhi went to the table twice, explaining his worries about the situation in the mountainous areas, thinking that letting Zhang Yan go untreated would cause a catastrophe, but Liu Hong had made up his mind and let Lu Zhi not care about these things and go back to Beijing directly.

Lu Zhi had no choice but to return to Luoyang with worries, and was promoted to the rank of the third prince's lieutenant, and recorded the affairs of Shangshu, mastered the vital administrative power, became one of the de facto prime ministers of the Han Dynasty, and realized his life ideal.

But the situation in Jizhou and Merge Prefecture was just as Lu Zhi expected, and after Lu Zhi left, it began to become bad.