One hundred and seventy-nine chapters of tragedy

Amid the wanton clamor and insults of the defenders of the city, a group of thieves retreated in despair. On the way back to the camp, Fang Ge instructed his own soldiers: "Get a few of the mothers-in-law we have captured to the cannon." ”

Zhang Hu and the others brought the remaining five cannons to an open place. Not long after, several poorly clothed women were staggered over. Facing the searching gazes of Zhang Hu and Niu Youtian, Fang Ge said proudly: "I heard a rumor in the Sichuan military camp, during the Banzhou Rebellion, that Yang Yinglong used a trick, and the cannons of the Kede Dog Officer Army all became dumb. Our cannon was cursed, and I felt that this trick could make the cannon dumb, and if I couldn't say it, it could also make the spell fail. As he spoke, he pointed with his hand at the ravaged women who were slumped in front of the horses, "Strip them naked!" Each person gave a dustpan, crossed his legs to fan Lao Tzu against the cannon, and broke the spell of the monk*! ”

Amid the exclamations of the women and the lewd laughter of the thieves, Fang Ge's own soldiers tore off the rags covering the bodies of several women, and stuffed several peasant baskets and dustpans into their hands. A broken woman threw the basket to the ground and wept, cursing the thieves who had lost their humanity as she cried. In just one or two breaths, the woman was slashed in a pool of blood—ignorance, cruelty, and curiosity about the anatomy of the woman's body, and like almost all female corpses, the corpse was immediately disemboweled...... The others were completely frightened, and according to Fang Ge's instructions, in the midst of the thieves' laughter, they came to the cannon and put the dustpan under their crotch and fanned the artillery.

Seeing them slap them thirty or fifty times, Fang Ge drank, "That's enough." Give it a try! ”

A smile froze on the faces of the guys in the artillery crew.

However, although it is not known whether the women have broken the spells of the monks, they are all very aware of the consequences of disobedience. Another "talent" has gone to the western sky, and only one of the only ones who has ever touched the cannon is the only one left, and while grinding with the other guys, he is desperately recalling in his mind all the processes of the gunner he saw operating the cannon not long ago.

"What the hell are you going to sing to Lao Tzu? Sharpen your hands and feet! As soon as Niu Youtian's scolding came into his ears, this guy was so beautiful that he almost jumped - "Thirty out of each cannon and eight taels per shot." Niu Youtian's "out" was remembered by him in a hurry! That's right, half a pound of medicine! Oh my God, that guy stuffed a few pounds in the morning, don't blow up your donkey ball!

Charge, seal the mud, tame, load, ram again, open the fire door to pour the primer, ignite the torch......

When the artillery crew was busy, Fang Ge gently pulled the sleeves of Zhang Hu and Niu Youtian, and the two of them understood, and several people quietly retreated a little farther away.

Rumble!

Iron bullets whizzed out. Flying far away under the eyes of everyone, for a long time, a puff of smoke and dust burst out of the inside.

"It's broken, the demon monk's spell is broken!" The thieves erupted in cheers.

Boom, boom, boom.

Several other guns opened fire one after another, and all of them were successfully test-fired.

Zhang Hu, who was overjoyed, shouted: "Kill back!" We're going to split those demon monks alive! ”

"Handsome and slow." Fang Ge stopped him, "We just broke the demon law of the monk." I also know a way, wait until I go back and prepare, and put one on them tomorrow! Fang Ge smiled fiercely, his smile was so vicious. Looking at Fang Ge's hideous face, Zhang Hu's heart tightened, as if there was a small insect on his back, and he jumped up to the back of his head with a "whoosh" from the bottom to the top, a chill rose in his heart, and he laughed dryly: "Good, good!" Listen to Brother Fang. ”

Early the next morning, when I saw the thieves coming from afar, the defenders, who believed that they had the blessings of the gods and Buddhas, easily laughed and straightened up from the wall, waiting for today's victory. As the thieves approached, Zhang Jian rubbed his eyes and opened his mouth wide in surprise. Turning his face to look at the others, they all had the same shocked expression.

At the forefront was a team of thief auxiliaries with shovels and shovels. I saw them come to a stop at the distance of an arrow, and began to dig in a line. This distance is the limit of the shooting of bows and arrows, and there will be no accuracy, and these thief auxiliaries are certainly not worth wasting precious shells and bed crossbows, so the defenders did not fire, and they were all staring at what the thieves were going to do today. After two or three pillars of incense, the thieves dug a small pit half a person deep, and then stopped under the shouting of the team officer, and stood on the edge of the pit with shovels and shovels one by one.

The second group came up with a team of more than 100 thieves' sword and shield soldiers, each of whom brought a woman who had been destroyed to the point of barely being human! The women were naked, and for days they had been turned into walking corpses by far worse than falling into hell – they had struggled, they had begged, they had even tried to die...... However, all their efforts were in vain, and for several days, since they fell into the hands of the thieves, they were subjected to the never-ending ravages of the thieves day after day, until they became more terrible than the demons in the temple of Yama, and could no longer arouse the interest of the demons. At this moment, they no longer have shame, no more resistance, no longer the slightest nostalgia for this world - they walk numbly and obediently, towards the end of life, and the end of suffering.

A ghostly whistle sounded, and the thieves' soldiers slammed their butcher knives into their chests, and then together with the auxiliaries, they poured the corpses into the pit, facing the west wall of Kaifeng*.

The defenders on the wall looked at each other with a wide range of eyes—admittedly, they weren't all decent men, and many of them were exiles who had been confiscated. The generals of the Ming Dynasty have all kinds of superstitions, such as killing chickens in battle for divination, smearing weapons with black dog blood, and even stabbing villains, all kinds of tricks are also varied, including Qi Jiguang is not exempt from vulgarity, for example, Qi Junshen insisted that the musket team belongs to fire, the flag should be red, and the wolf team should be wooden, so you must carry the green flag, if you use it wrong, you will wait to defeat the battle! However, after all, it is an official army, and such a tragic and evil method is unheard of by everyone. Some people began to vomit, Ji Shu, Zhang Jian and other officials shed tears, and they turned their backs and couldn't bear to look at it anymore, Jiang Shide came to Lu Ping, the officer of the artillery team, with fire in his eyes, and pointed with his finger: "Bombard those dog-day beasts for Lao Tzu!" ”

"Handsome ......" Lu Ping wanted to speak and stopped. On the one hand, he is indeed a little reluctant to waste precious shells on a few ordinary thieves: crashes, cars, even if it is a ladder, the target is easy to hit, as long as it is hit, collateral damage will achieve great results, on the other hand, due to the uneven level of manufacturing technology, although the Ming army often adopts the limit test method of "double the medicine and double the bomb" before the new artillery is installed, but passing the acceptance does not mean that there will be no accidents in the future, and the artillery explosion occurs from time to time, so there are the most superstitious things in the artillery team, and there are many taboos- There are several black dogs in the team, just to crack the enemy's aversion to victory. Seeing that the thief used this kind of poisonous plan, he had just killed two, and he didn't know if he could resist it after drenching the cannon body with dog blood, and he was indeed a little afraid of opening the cannon at this moment.

"Bastard! Give Lao Tzu a hit! Jiang Dashuai was so angry that the green tendons on his forehead burst out, and his hand was already on the hilt of the knife.

The handsome man was angry. The humble position immediately opened fire. Lu Ping stammered and gave the order to open fire.

Sure enough, as Lu Ping expected, only two of the six cannons were fired, and none of them hit the thief, and the cannonball swept high above the thief's head and smashed into the clearing, splashing a large canopy of dirt - of course Lu Qian, who was worried, didn't know that a lot of the dog blood that had just been spilled flowed into the cracks of the fire gate, soaking the gunpowder poured in, and the torch was just a burst of sparks at the fire gate.

The thieves outside the wall erupted in an earth-shattering cheer, and Fang Ge was even more proud. Niu Youtian, who was overjoyed, looked at Zhang Hu, but he didn't expect the joy on his brother's face to flash away, and for a moment his face was so gloomy that he grinned. Ushida was a little confused, but his attention was immediately drawn to the strange behavior of the defenders on the wall...... They're firing cannons! This "cannon fight" is not a normal artillery, it is a real fight, beaten with a military stick - like a soldier who has violated military regulations!

With so many cannons failing at the same time, it can only be the thief's evil law that has taken effect! This is not just Lu Ping's own thoughts, but the thoughts of everyone on the wall. Jiang Shide, the chief military officer, was also stunned, but his commanding temperament made Jiang Dashuai make a ridiculous decision to kill himself: "Artillery, fetish." When encountering the enemy's evil law, he will not attack, and he will also be cowardly. Gu Nian is the first offender, come to people, those who don't sound, give Lao Tzu forty military sticks each! ”

Guo Yinqiao's cannon didn't go off either. Of all the artillery crews, this group of people was the most eye-catching, and Jiang Shide came over and stared. The military order is like a mountain, and the marshal says to fight. Jiang Dashuai stared in front of him, Lao Guo remembered the fat beating he received from Zhang Guerrilla, and he was already angry in his heart, so he fought harder, and when he finished counting at 1510, the small crack on the belly of the cannon had been shaken into a crack. "Give Lao Tzu another shot!" Jiang Shide shouted and ordered.

The propellant and projectile were loaded and did not need to move, the fire door was a scorched scum, Lao Guo stabbed a few times at the bottom with a wooden stick, pulled out some damp ignition powder, and poured a lot of it in, the ignition soldier was about to press the torch, Jiang Shide roared again: "Wait, Lao Tzu come and order!" The splitter snatched the torch and pressed it down, and with a loud "boom", the cannon finally blew up as promised, blowing up most of the artillery crew members and the chief officer Jiang Dashuai for a long time.

* In real history, Yang Yinglong did use this trick, and this guy firmly believed that as long as this was the case, the artillery of the Ming army would not be able to fire. Li Hualong, the governor of Liaodong, read the books of sages and sages, and of course he was well versed in the way of "defeating magic with magic", in order to prevent his treacherous plan from succeeding - "my soldiers will splash them with dog blood", and then open fire! And guess what? Yang Thief's spell failed, the cannon of the official army fired, and the whole army that was afraid just now was jubilant! Well, of course, you can say that Yang Thief's trick is useless at all, and the cannon will sound if he splashes dog blood or not...... The problem is that from Master Li to the auxiliaries, no one believes you! If you don't splash dog blood, you are sent by the hostile forces of the Yang thief, and if you don't splash dog blood, you don't love Daming.

*About the Tiger Squat Cannon. Because the military system of the Ming Dynasty is characterized by the generals leading an army by themselves, and how they like to bring it, the military towns not only have different structures, the composition of the troops, and the number of soldiers, but also the types and names of weapons are varied. Taking artillery as an example, many of them were cast by the generals themselves (until the Opium War of the later Manchu Qing Dynasty, Lin Zexu, Qi Shan, and Guan Tianpei all cast artillery of different sizes when preparing for war), and the names of generals and masters are also imaginative. Qi Jiguang's own military book "Actual Record of Military Training" recorded two kinds of artillery with different shapes: one is the modified "bowl mouth cannon", which extends the barrel to more than three feet, and the other is the "tiger poison cannon" originally equipped by the Ming army. There is also a kind of "Saigon gun" in the "Real Record", which is no different from the above-mentioned artillery depending on the size, charge, range, etc. There are many surviving physical objects, and their appearance and size are also different. For the sake of convenience and understanding, the Tiger Squat Cannon here is a portable artillery gun with a barrel of about three feet, a straight barrel-shaped gun body, an inner caliber of 2-3 inches, and a weight of about 50 catties.

* This part is incredibly difficult to write. Ignorance, cruelty, anger...... I deeply feel that these words are far from describing such damned atrocities and the feelings of the heart when I write them. However, in real history, such a tragedy really happened - Zhang Xianzhong did it. It is also the duty of the readers as much as possible to know what kind of ignorance and cruelty has happened in this land. Zhang Motou has a nickname called "Yellow Tiger", which is also the origin of Zhang Hu's name.

* In addition to the artillery manufactured by the Ministry of Industry of the Ming Army, it was common for each military town to cast its own cannons. Since the quality is not certain, the test will be carried out in a extreme way: first a half-charge test firing, then a normal launch, and finally a double charge and a double reload - at this time, a small trachoma on the gun can cause a tragedy.

*I didn't make up this kind of magical scene out of thin air. There is a record in "Pihai Chronicles": "Liu Guoxuan will attack Quanjun, but Long Xi refuses to do it, and he will go by force, and it will not burn; Guo Xuan was angry, and the eighty rods exploded like powder in one shot." Liu Guoxuan wanted to attack Quanzhou, the cannon was very heavy, and he couldn't drag it, he thought that he was cowardly and "unwilling to do it", and if the gunpowder was damp and did not catch fire, he was petty, so he lost his temper and pumped it with a stick, cracked the body tube, and then blew up the chamber.