The proportion of soldiers and civilians in the city who are sick is basically about the same, at first the Jin soldiers still used isolation measures, but later the spread of the plague has been seriously beyond the scope of control, not only people are sick and die, but even cattle and horses are also widely sick and die, this isolation does not play any role at all!

The dead are too fast to catch up, and the buried corpses will be burned! The city was filled with smoke of burning corpses all day long, and the golden soldiers at this time had completely lost their combat effectiveness! If Yang Qizhong attacked the city at this time, it was likely that he would easily take Taiyuan City, but he did not attack the city but continued to order the siege of the city.

When Yang Qizhong really received Xiao Ming's letter, Taiyuan City had been besieged for two months, and Yang Qizhong realized this time that if this continued, maybe all the people in Taiyuan City would die, but he still delayed it for a few more days and guessed that a letter of persuasion was sent in the city to persuade Jin Bing to surrender.

At this time, Taiyuan City has truly become the hell of Shura! More than half of the 100,000 Jin soldiers died! The people are even more gone! The Jin soldiers who defended the city immediately organized to surrender after receiving Yang Qizhong's letter of persuasion, they didn't dare to fight anymore, in fact, they didn't think about surrendering too early, but Yang Qizhong besieged the city too much.

Anyone who leaves the city or simply shows his face on the city will be shot down by a rifle, which means that no one will be allowed to come out alive! In the face of such a terrifying high pressure, many Jin soldiers were desperate! But in a plague-ridden place like Taiyuan City, there was no way out except to wait for death.

The Jin soldiers also threw the dead bodies in the city from the city to the outside of the city, in order to spread the plague outside the city and force Yang Qizhong to withdraw his army, but they found that the corpses were quickly disposed of, not only buried deep but also sprinkled with lime.

Now that people are willing to accept the surrender of the Jin soldiers, it is what they can't ask for, so Taiyuan City finally fell after being besieged for more than two months! This is undoubtedly the biggest result for the Northern Expedition! But this kind of result has made people a little angry, there are too many dead!

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians in Taiyuan City took the lives of more than 100,000 people at once this plague! More than half of the 100,000 defenders of Jin Bingjin died, and now more than half of the remaining ones have no combat effectiveness, and the people are even more suffering! Affected by the raging plague, countless people died of illness, almost nine out of ten families mourned!

Yang Qizhong did not enter the city, but let all the Jin soldiers drive out of the city and enter a specific area, and then let the military doctors diagnose and treat the sick, and the people in Taiyuan City must also all go out of the city to be quarantined, and then he sent people into the city to clean up the dead bodies! Spraying medicine, the whole Taiyuan City was filled with a pungent smell of medicine and lime, mixed with the rancid smell of dead corpses!

In this battle, the elite soldiers of the Jin soldiers in the entire Hedong Road were lost, except for the more than 40,000 Jin soldiers who surrendered, the rest all died of the plague, and the news reached Kangjing, Xiao Ming sighed! The heart said that Yang Qizhong was really too heavy to kill, and he was so ruthless, I am afraid that it would damage Yang Shou.

But the court of the Great Song Dynasty was extraordinarily happy, what a great good news this is? Since the founding of the Great Song Dynasty, there has never been a result of annihilating more than 100,000 enemy troops in all foreign wars, but the Ningxia Soldiers and Horses Governor cleaned up more than 100,000 Jin soldiers as soon as he made a move, which had a great impact on the entire Northern Expedition for this war!

The news spread to the front line, which also greatly encouraged the Song army and the righteous army who insisted on resisting Jin on the two roads in Hebei, and Yang Qizhong's name spread far and wide to become the first-level general of the Great Song Dynasty after Yue Fei! Yang Qizhong himself didn't know these things, and he finally understood why Xiao Ming wrote to him.

Yang Qizhong's local name in Taiyuan is very ugly, and the people call him King Yang Yan! It's a demon who kills people without blinking! This made Yang Qizhong very distressed! After all, he is a person from Shanxi Dai County, Hedong Road, and he still has a lot of feelings for the fathers and elders of Jindi, and this battle has affected so many innocent people! This made Yang Qi Center also very sad.

So he not only exempted the local people from paying taxes for three years, but also went around seeking medical advice for the local people, trying to eliminate the effects of the plague, and raising food and money to distribute to the local people so that they could resume production, and also sent the military horses of the Jin soldiers he had captured to do farm work.

After a period of hard work, the local area of Taiyuan gradually regained a little vitality, but at this time, how to deal with those captured Jin soldiers has become a problem again! According to the meaning of the Great Song Dynasty, it was to send the captives to the capital to present the prisoners to the royal ancestral hall, and also to carry out a large ceremony to publicize the great achievements of the imperial court to the world.

However, after consulting Xiao Ming's opinion, Yang Qizhong drove all these prisoners to the construction site and began to build the road from Xingqingfu, the capital of Taiyuan Province and Ningxia Autonomous Province.

But after the construction was being built, Yang Qizhong regretted it again! It turned out that the construction of this project was really unimaginable, and more than 40,000 prisoners were simply not enough! The road was progressing well before, and after reaching the mountainous area of Liupan Mountain, there were constantly captives dying and missing! The captives' mood also became unstable.

This section of the road is too difficult to repair, according to the original march path to walk at all, the road to repair the mountain rocks at any time, and the mountain ups and downs are also very large, Yang Qizhong reluctantly made the decision to detour. From Taiyuan to Fenzhou in the south, then to the west, after passing the Great Wall, around the desert to reach Xiazhou!

Another road that has been repaired can only continue to the north, bypassing Liupan Mountain and arriving in Yunnei Prefecture, and at the same time building a road to Xijing Datong Mansion! The hardships of the project can be imagined, and Yang Qizhong only then knows how precious manpower is! I regret that I did kill too hard!

The battle situation on the northern front basically came to an end after the completion of the first phase of the campaign objectives, the Song army was busy transporting logistics materials, consolidating the reoccupied land, and asking the Privy Council of the Great Song Dynasty for the time of the next attack, but the Jin State was not a fool, and it was natural to seize the time to counterattack at this juncture.

Just as the Great Song army was consolidating its defense, the Jin soldiers, under the leadership of Marshal Wanyan Zongbi Jin Wushu, suddenly launched a counterattack against the Great Song army! Their tactics were really like Xiao Ming's analysis at the beginning, through the cavalry to carry out a long-distance raid, began to intersperse a large range of roundabouts, attacking the logistics supply line of the Song army, and attacking from the back of the Song army!

Liu Qi of the Song army met the battle in a hurry, but due to the lack of training of his recruits, he did not dare to shoot in the face of the opponent's cavalry charge, and was defeated, Liu Qi hurriedly contracted the formation to ask for support from Wu Jue's army on his left flank, and when Wu Jue led the army to come, the Jin soldiers had withdrawn and disappeared.

In fact, Song Jun's style of play is not in accordance with the rules at all, how can there be a reason that all battles are completely under the orders of the Privy Council, even if there are flying kites on the battlefield to transmit messages, they are not worried about mistakes! However, it would be a great defeat to have the Privy Council participate in the command of the entire campaign and the direction of the attack, and how could this battle be fought in such a way when the complex situation of the war ahead was not known and the rear was blindly commanded?

Such incidents continue to happen, and the Song army on the frontal battlefield will be isolated to the front by the Jin soldiers, and the Jin soldiers can attack at will in the back, while the tens of thousands of troops of Wu Jue and Liu Qi have become shrinking soldiers, facing the front line of Kaifeng and the Jin soldiers behind them.

In the face of the army of Han Shizhong and Zhao Yanwen in the north, the Jin soldiers adopted the strategy of holding and harassing, so that Han Shizhong's march had to slow down and was hindered in the area east of Dading Mansion, while Yang Qizhong was busy building roads at this time, and the entire strategic deployment of the Song army of the three routes was disrupted!

Xiao Ming, who got the news, was very angry, he ran to the Privy Council and loudly reprimanded Wang Shu and others, and in the face of such a battle situation, Wang Xie, Liu Guangshi and others were also a little scratching their ears and cheeks, and they also knew that the situation was a bit serious! Since there were no second-line troops reserved at all when the troops were dispatched this time, if the Jin soldiers took advantage of the situation to go south at this time, they could immediately seize the strategic location of the first line of Xuzhou.

Even if Jin He wanted them to continue to go south along the canal and attack the area of Yangzhou Zhenjiang, then Kangjing would be in danger! This situation is really very bad, Xiao Ming's anger is not for no reason, the leader of the Jin soldiers is Wanyan Zongbi, this is an old opponent, he won't be unable to think of this way!

What makes Xiao Ming even more angry is that if the news is revealed, then the Northern Expedition bonds will inevitably be affected, and by that time, the price of the bonds will plummet, and he will lose a lot of money by then! This matter involves the direct interests of himself and Emperor Gaozong, he is not worried that the Jin soldiers will really dare to fight, and even if he does, he will have a way to repel the Jin soldiers again, what he is worried about is the overall political and economic interests.

Wang Shu first expressed his willingness to take full responsibility for this matter, and if he wanted to find someone to take responsibility, he was willing to take the blame and resign! After Xiao Ming was angry for a while, he gradually calmed down, he knew that this was also a good opportunity, on the one hand, to teach these people a lesson, and on the other hand, he could take advantage of the situation to take over the command of the Privy Council!

It turned out that he had been reluctant to interfere in the work of the Zhongshu Province and the Privy Council, that was for fear of gossip from others, he knew that now that he was in high power and received the attention of many people, he was not willing to give authority to others so easily, but it did not mean that he would not seize every possible opportunity to seize power!

Xiao Ming directly ordered, on the one hand, to strictly seal the news, on the other hand, let Jushi Gu in Shouzhou lead the second-line guards to move east in the direction of Yangzhou, and at the same time ordered his descendants, the Great Song Dynasty Royal Tiger Guards, to assemble from Hangzhou and Kangjing north to Zhenjiang, and he was ready to personally lead the team!

But for this matter, Wang Shu was loudly opposed, Xiao Ming, as the first and auxiliary minister of the cabinet, many things could not be separated from him at all, he suggested that he personally lead the army forward, and let Xiao Ming sit in the command of the Privy Council!

Xiao Ming said: "How can you know the ever-changing battlefield situation in front of you when you sit in the rear, and if you talk about the troops on paper, you may lose the net worth of Song Erlang in front of me, so you can lead the troops to the north first, and I will arrive after arranging it!" The battle situation cannot be delayed for me, and I hope to fight under Yanjing City before the end of the year and completely solve the problem of Jinguo! ”

Wang Shu was helpless, he knew that Xiao Ming had made up his mind this time, and it was useless to say more, so he immediately prepared to pack up and go north to Zhenjiang, while Xiao Ming stayed in Kangjing to arrange some follow-up things, and he had to rush back to Hangzhou to visit his family and do some things, which were very important to him.

Let's not talk about the situation on the side of the Great Song Dynasty, and let's talk about the Jin Wushu here, the 30,000 cavalry he led this time can be regarded as the elite of the Great Jin Kingdom, just as Xiao Ming guessed, he really thought of the battle plan to go south, and his general Chi Zhanhui took the initiative to ask for his life and asked to attack Xuzhou!

But Jin Wushu made him turn eastward, and rushed to Yingtianfu within a day at a lightning speed, and captured Yingtianfu on horseback, and the Song army was defeated before it reacted, and withdrew in embarrassment, and then the Jin soldiers went south from Yingtianfu into Huainan East Road, surrounded Yangzhou from behind, and the last thing Xiao Ming wanted to see finally happened!