In the early morning, the air is very fresh.

Wang Wu, who was sleeping soundly, was awakened by the sound of roosters.

He was in a trance for a while.

Because for the first time since coming to this era, he has heard the rooster announce.

After getting dressed and pushing the door out, there is a paradise in front of you.

In the distance, a farmer was working in the field, and in the distance, a woman with her child was washing clothes by the stream.

The smoke rising from the village made Wang Wu even have an illusion.

He is not struggling for clothes in a desperate situation, but with a yearning for poetry and songs, he sings to himself without illness in this beautiful scenery.

is different from what I thought before, the Maolu Mountain base run by the tiger handsome Li Laiheng is actually self-sufficient in grain!

According to Ying Jiong, the chief soldier of the Li Division, during the more than 10 years of operating here with Hu Shuai, he constantly ordered people to recruit exiles, and asked the soldiers to burn the wasteland to reclaim all the arable land in Maolu Mountain, and strictly forbade the soldiers to infringe on the people in the mountainous areas.

With all these efforts, the Ming army was able to be self-sufficient in food, so that they did not have to compete with the people in the mountains for food.

Li Laiheng also encouraged soldiers to intermarry with the common people, not only marrying the daughters of the common people, but also the women of the Ming army marrying the common people.

The result is a military-civilian integration.

If you go out, you will be diligent and the king will be destroyed, and if you enter, you will train the peasants!

Ying Bing said that in the past few years, they could even trade with those bold traders on the periphery, so as to obtain various materials that the Ming army urgently needed.

Only in the past two years, due to the heavy encirclement and suppression of the Qing army, and the construction of a pile defense line of several arrays, the traders could not approach Maolu Mountain at all, and the people in the nearby 100 miles were forcibly relocated by the Qing army, which cut off the contact between the Ming army and the outside world.

It also made the Ming army unable to obtain other material supplements except food.

Especially after the salt-producing areas originally occupied by the Ming army were occupied by the Qing army one after another, the problem of salt shortage became serious.

The lack of salt made the Ming army generally weak, and the development of children was even worse.

This further led to a decline in the combat effectiveness of the Ming army.

This reminded Wang Wu of the Qing court's "forbidden sea and relocation" law against the Zheng family.

That is, the coastal Han people are limited to move within three days, and those who do not leave within three days will be killed for the crime of collaborating with the enemy.

In three days, people who are far away will not have time to know the news, and even if people who are close to know the news, they will not be able to move their families within three days.

As a result, as soon as the three days were up, the Qing army immediately slaughtered all men, women, and children as long as they remained at home.

Even children are no exception.

From Jiangsu and Zhejiang to Guangdong and Fujian, thousands of miles of fertile soil along the coast have all turned into wilderness basil!

It's all no man's land!

Millions of people have died!

"On the same day, he took his wife and children on the road, put him in his house, set fire to it, and left no stone behind. More than half of the people died, and the pillow was painted. That is, those who can go to the mainland have no food for the stones, and starvation is already at present. ”

Now it seems that the Qing court's relocation of the sea ban in the coastal zone is very likely to be a copy of the blockade of Maolu Mountain.

And this method is indeed vicious.

Taiwan's Ming army can still rely on Taiwan to stand on its own, and how can Maolu Mountain, which is less than 200 miles in radius, hold on.

When Wang Wu went to visit the injured old commander yesterday, he told him that Hu Shuai's soldiers and civilians were at most 30,000, and there were only about 7,000 or 8,000 capable soldiers.

Including the soldiers who rushed from the Western Front, the total number of Ming troops was only about 10,000.

Therefore, although Maolu Mountain can breathe for the time being, and it can hold on for a period of time, it is still necessary to highlight it to break the predicament.

Hao Shuai's opinion is undoubtedly the same as Wang Wuxiang's.

In the past, the reason why the Ming army of Kuidong failed to break through in time was because each family swept the snow in front of the door, each had its own system, and it was difficult to get together, so that it lost the opportunity to break through and was besieged by the Qing army.

Now although the strength of the Ming army has been greatly damaged, only the last base of Maolu Mountain and about 10,000 soldiers and horses remain.

But whether it is cohesion or command, it is unprecedentedly strong.

One could even say that there has never been a sense of unity.

Then, the matter of breaking through was naturally put on the agenda by Hao Shuai.

With the experience of breaking the defense line of two piles, Hao Shuai believes that as long as the upper and lower levels are united, they will definitely be able to stand out.

Highlighting where to go after going, the standard-bearer of Li Zicheng also gave his opinion.

It is to sweep the lower reaches of the Yangtze River along the east of the Yangtze River to Nanjing!

This road Wang Wu is familiar with.

He knew that an army did just that, and he almost buried the Qing court.

No matter from which point of view, this road is also the best way out for the current Ming army.

The surrounding provinces of Kuidong were all heavily armed with Qing troops, and it was impossible for the Ming army to continue to operate under the nose of the Qing army.

Therefore, a long march is the best.

If it succeeds in occupying the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the Loyal Battalion will be able to get in touch with Zhang Huangyan's maritime rebels, who are still persisting in resisting the Qing Dynasty, as well as another heavy Ming army group in Taiwan.

This road alone is not an easy one.

I am afraid that in the end, there will not be one out of ten tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians.

But he still agreed with Hao Shuai's opinion, and only waited for Hao Shuai to discuss and decide with Yuan Shuai and Hu Shuai.

Hu Shuai received the news and had rushed from Laozhai.

After breakfast, Wang Wu went with the mute man to visit the wounded blind man.

On the way, I saw Xu Lin, and they were leading someone to pull a cannon up the mountain.

Mu Shenghui's troops lined up more than 60 large and small cannons on the defensive line, and Li Fuguo, together with Yuan and Hao, two old marshals, were anxious to bring the military and civilians into the base area, so they did not care about these heavy and difficult to carry cannons.

Wang Wu was a little reluctant to see it, thinking that there should be a lot of captured Qing army medicine, so he asked Xu Lin to find a way to pull more than 30 lighter cannons towards the base area.

But no matter how light it is, there are hundreds of catties per door.

In order to pull the cannon to the stele pavilion village, Xu Lin and the others can be said to be tired.

Now, according to the terrain of Beiting Village, the artillery brought is deployed in place one by one, so that if the Qing army launches an active attack on the Ming army, these cannons can make them drink a pot of life.

Because the ground was too steep, Xu Lin and dozens of them couldn't pull the cannon up on it, so Wang Wu hurriedly stepped forward with the dumb man to help.

Everyone used their strength to pull up one cannon alive, and after a short rest, they hurriedly hoisted the second cannon.

After Wang Wu confessed a few words to Xu Lin, he was about to visit the injured blind man, but before he left, Hu Yinxuan, the chief soldier under Hao Shuai, came over.

"Brother Yaowu, Hu Shuai is here, Hao Shuai, please go to the council hall quickly!"

Hu Yinxuan's residence is two miles away from Wang Wu's place of residence, and it looks not far away, but one is on the mountain and the other is under the mountain, so Hu Yinxuan's two legs are also very sore all the way.

There is no way, Maolu Mountain is a dangerous mountain, the highest point is almost two thousand meters, and the Ming army must set up a garrison in a dangerous place if they want to stick to this place, which makes the Ming soldiers either climb the mountain or go down the mountain every day.

It's not as comfortable as flat ground.

As soon as he heard that Hu Shuai was coming, Wang Wu hurriedly followed Hu Yinxuan to the meeting hall in Zhongzhai.

Everyone walked along the steep mountain path for half an hour before they saw a tall stone monument in front of them.

It is the monument of the Holy Emperor's Palace built by the Yongli Imperial Court for Li Laiheng!

In front of the monument is a small school field, probably a place where the defenders practiced.

The council chamber is located in a building that resembles a small temple behind the palace monument.

Ying Zhi, the chief soldier guarding at the gate, saw Wang Wu who came with Hu Yinxuan, and hurriedly stepped forward and said with a smile: "Brother Yaowu, hurry up, Hu Shuai has asked you a few times if you have arrived." ”

"When did Tiger Shuai arrive?"

Wang Wu asked Ying Ji as he walked.

Ying Bing said that Hu Shuai brought people to come an hour ago, that is, before dawn, because he wanted everyone to sleep for a while, so he didn't rush to call people.

He came before dawn, indicating that Li Laiheng was rushing to the stele pavilion in the dark at night, and Wang Wu couldn't help but admire it in his heart.

As he spoke, he had come to the council chamber.

But seeing that there was a crowd inside, King Han, King Anton and Yuan Zongdi were all inside.

The laughter and laughter are also constant, thinking that the old handsomes have just reunited again for the rest of their lives, and the mood is rarely relaxed.

In sight, a middle-aged man in his forties was talking to the injured Hao Shuai.

Unable to sit because of an injury to his buttocks, Hao Shaoqi was carried over on a stretcher.

The middle-aged man who squatted there and talked to Hao Shaoqi was the tiger handsome Li Laiheng, who was known as the "Little Chuang King", and Chinese mainland insisted on resisting the Qing Dynasty to the end, and would rather set his family on fire than surrender to the Qing!