There is also a reason why Ye Tianlong wants to be the shopkeeper of this hand, his cultivation has improved very quickly recently, and he feels that he is about to break through to the dark energy cultivation, so he must spare some time to concentrate on cultivation.

In addition to Ye Tianlong, the cultivation of several other team members has also made great progress during this time, according to Li Rufeng's speculation, at most one month, it is estimated that most of the first batch of team members will be able to break through to the dark energy cultivation.

This is not because of how good these people's martial arts talents are, but purely because the pills that are usually used to assist in cultivation are sufficient.

In the real world, because of the extreme lack of raw materials for refining the essence blood pill, most martial artists can usually take some low-grade versions of the essence blood pill at most, and the genuine essence blood pill may not be able to eat one a month, but Ye Tianlong and the others eat these pills as snacks every day, and the cultivation is naturally rising rapidly.

Even Li Rufeng relied on the top-grade essence blood pill refined from the materials obtained in the riding and slashing world to be able to break through to the innate realm so smoothly.

This is why Li Rufeng pinned his hopes for the continuation of martial arts in this virtual world, after all, the resources here are too rich compared to the real world, with such a wealth of martial arts resources to assist, martial arts cultivation is easy to achieve a small success, unlike the current real world, even if Zhang Quanna's martial arts qualifications are good, after practicing for decades, it is just a Ming Jin cultivation. The ratio of pay to benefit is so low that naturally few people can persevere, and most people give up after a few years of practice and feel that they have not achieved anything.

After two days of retreat and cultivation, Ye Tianlong successfully broke through to the realm of dark energy, and began to give birth to strands of internal force in his body, and his attribute value also increased tremendously, his strength value increased to sixty-nine points, his agility value also increased to sixty-six points, and even his spiritual power increased to fifty-three points. The amount of blood suddenly increased to a high of 900 points.

And on the afternoon of the day when Ye Tianlong broke through to the dark energy, Jiang You, who was dusty, also came back with a horse-buying caravan.

When they went, they brought with them a lot of world-valuable glassware and artificial gemstones, and along the way they sold these goods to wealthy merchants and nobles in exchange for money, and then used the money to buy horses and hire powerful mercenaries from all over the world.

In this way, they made it all the way to the Kugit Khanate, where they went into shopaholic mode and began to buy horses on a large scale.

With the guidance of Mama Cha, an insider, Jiang You bought a total of more than 400 war horses this time, and as for inferior horses such as traveling horses and pack horses, he bought more than 800 horses. In addition, there are more than 50 excellent stallions and more than 100 mares that can be used for breeding. You must know that these stallions and mares are as valuable as hens that can lay golden eggs in the hands of those horse dealers, and if it weren't for the help of the professional Mama Cha, Jiang You would never be able to buy these stallions and mares.

After Ye Tianlong personally inspected these horses, he found that many of the mares were pregnant, and it seemed that it would not take long to give birth to ponies.

In addition to these more than 1,400 horses, Jiang You also hired more than 500 mercenaries along the way, many of whom were hired in Kujit, and their riding skills were above level 5, and they were extremely qualified cavalrymen with a little training and armament.

Ye Tianlong was very satisfied with the results of Jiang You's large-scale purchase, with so many horses, even if his troops increased a lot during this time, he was still able to realize the transformation of all men into mules and horses, and with so many war horses, he was already able to form a cavalry force of more than 300 people.

Ye Tianlong's next cavalry preparation is divided into two kinds, one is the heavy archer cavalry unit, this heavy archer cavalry unit will be the most elite cavalry unit under his command, one person will be equipped with three horses, including two war horses and one pack horse. The pack horses will be responsible for transporting weapons and armor. Let the two horses save as much energy as possible in non-war time, and when the battle comes, the rider can rotate the two horses, always maintaining a high speed of maneuver, so that the enemy can never catch up with them, and these archers can always use arrows to shoot the enemy soldiers who pursue them.

Because both riders and horses are heavily armoured, these heavy archers can also be converted into shock cavalry at any time when necessary, and can be replaced with long-pole weapons such as lances and glaives to attack enemy lines.

And this kind of all-round cavalry that can not only ride and shoot, but also close combat is a minority, so its number will definitely not be many at the beginning, and Ye Tianlong only plans to form about a hundred cavalry.

In addition to the most elite heavy archers, Ye Tianlong is also preparing to form a number of more than 200 people in the armored cavalry troops, this kind of troops will be one person and two horses, a war horse and a pack horse, weapons and armor are usually carried by pack horses, compared to the heavy archer cavalry troops, this armored cavalry is actually all men and horses, but the heavy archer troops are generally three layers of armor per capita, and the medium armored cavalry troops will only wear two layers of armor, and the defense is worse than the heavy archers, In addition, weapons are generally only equipped with light one-handed weapons such as sabers, not long-pole weapons such as lances and glaives, and will avoid melee combat as much as possible when fighting, and will generally only use their sabers when chasing down defeated soldiers.

These two cavalry units were also called dragoons and eagle cavalry by Ye Tianlong respectively, of which the dragoon was naturally used to call the heavy archer cavalry, and the eagle cavalry was used to call the medium armored archer.

The reason why Ye Tianlong made his cavalry unit a full-fledged cavalry unit was mainly because he now had a limited number of qualified riders and horses in his hands, and he couldn't waste them as casually as the Swadia Kingdom and the Kugit Khanate. You must know that even the most well-equipped Swadia knights, there will always be some losses after charging, if Ye Tianlong asks his cavalry troops to follow the example of Swadia knights to play what kind of charge, it is estimated that it will take a few battles for the hundreds of cavalry in his hands to lose more than half or even the entire army.

The archers are different, mainly choosing long-range attacks, and in the case of good enough armor and trying to avoid close combat, the battle damage will not be very large.

Anyway, Ye Tianlong's purpose in forming a cavalry unit is only to entangle the enemy army at a critical moment, not to use cavalry to fight a decisive battle with the enemy, only need to drag his own infantry to arrive, and the task of those cavalry will be completed.

Ye Tianlong calculated, after deducting these more than 300 cavalry, he still has more than 1,300 soldiers in his hands, and these will naturally be incorporated into the infantry unit.

After the actual combat test of the last national war between the Nord Kingdom and the Svadia Kingdom, Ye Tianlong also found that his own vehicle formation has a great ability to restrain the enemy's cavalry troops, so he is not ready to continue to expand the melee troops in the future, the melee infantry will still maintain the previous scale of 300 people, and these soldiers will continue to work as artillerymen. The remaining 1,000 infantry will become ranged units such as musketeers or archers.

But to be honest, the number of archers in Ye Tianlong's army is really a bit small now, a total of about eighty people, because Ye Tianlong needs the strong bow skills of these soldiers to be above level seven before he can officially become an archer.

This is mainly due to the fact that if the skill of this strong bow is too low, the lethality of the arrows fired is far less than that of the bullets fired by the flintlock rifle. In this case, it is naturally better to continue to use the flintlock rifle to fight, and after the strong bow skill is upgraded to seven points, although the lethality of the arrows shot is still slightly inferior to the bullets fired by the flintlock rifle, but in terms of rate of fire, it is far better than the flintlock rifle, and it can also cause huge damage to the enemy's heavy armor targets in actual combat, so Ye Tianlong will set such a standard, so that his soldiers can officially transfer to archers when the strong bow skill is upgraded to level seven or above.

And if you want to arm so many new soldiers, it will naturally take a while to produce a sufficient number of weapons and armor.

Different from the last time, this time Ye Tianlong no longer only made one kind of Iron Floating Tu Heavy Armor, but also added several other armors for mass production.

The first is the Mingguang armor, which is intended to be used to equip the most elite dragoon troops and archers, and the other is heavy full-body steel plate armor, which is used to equip the non-commissioned officers who have made more meritorious contributions in the army.

The average thickness of this kind of heavy full-body steel plate armor has reached about three millimeters, and the thickness of the breastplate is as high as six millimeters, and the weight is generally more than fifty catties, but Ye Tianlong is not afraid that those subordinates will not be able to wear this kind of heavy armor.

After all, those who can be equipped with this kind of armor are veterans who have served in his army for a long time and have made a lot of military achievements, and many of them have reached the Ming Jin standard for martial arts cultivation, even if they wear this kind of heavy plate armor, they can run and jump freely.

And the last type of armor is the giant python battle armor made of the giant python with a body length of nearly twenty meters and the scales shed before the second-order python dragon breaks through to the second order and the better green python battle armor, this kind of armor is not only very defensive, but also lighter than the steel plate armor, and will only be used by Ye Tianlong to reward those soldiers or players who have made great contributions, and generally there will be a knighthood along with this armor.

That's right, Ye Tianlong is now an official baron, so he is naturally qualified to canonize his cronies as knights like other nobles.

However, there are no more than ten people under Ye Tianlong who have won the knighthood now, but in terms of military rank, there are more than 100 people who have been promoted to the rank of non-commissioned officer. The current military rank system in Ye Tianlong's army is basically the modern military rank system of the Xinghan Empire.

For example, the soldiers who had just enlisted in the army were the lowest privates, and their outward rank was marked by a red feather on their helmets. Soldiers who have served in the army for more than two years or who have killed more than three enemies on the battlefield will be promoted to private, and the feathers on their helmets will be replaced with orange ones.