After seeing through the reality of the Zhou State, Lu Yuan's jealousy of this great Northern Emperor country was greatly reduced.

After all, the situation is already clear.

Zhou Guo, who did not have the full support of Jade Toad Dao. Now its own potential has been tapped to the limit.

Ten people in the first place, 1.3 million standing soldiers, these are all the strength of the Zhou State.

Even if you dig later, you won't be able to dig out much power.

What's worse is that Zhou Guo's current family foundation is still being consumed rapidly.

On the western front of the Zhou Kingdom, on the two counties of Helong, every spring and autumn, a major war with hundreds of thousands of people broke out with the Fan.

Although relying on their own strength, the Zhou people have repeatedly been able to break the Tibetan people and achieve victory.

But even if there are victories again and again, how can there be no dead in war?

At the end of each battle, the Zhou side would lose tens of thousands, or even more than 100,000 soldiers and horses.

These losses add up, and after nearly six years of fighting with the Tibetan people, the scale of the soldiers lost by the Zhou State on the boundary of Helong has exceeded 300,000.

The above figure is just a simple death toll.

More than the death toll is the disability figure of as many as half a million.

Even though most of these casualties were temporarily conscripted villagers, there were as many as two or three hundred thousand elite soldiers.

The loss of 200,000 or 300,000 elite soldiers, more than 500,000 young and strong villagers, and more than 800,000 casualties at once, even for the Zhou State, was an unbearable loss.

You must know that after the Zhou State lost Hanzhong County, the total population of the country today is only about 17 million.

800,000 people is already equivalent to one-twentieth of the other party's population, and it is still the most elite young and strong in the population.

has lost so many elite populations one after another, not to mention the Zhao State, which is about equal to the Battle of Changping, and the State of Qin, which has finished the Battle of Changping.

At the beginning, during the Northern Expedition of the Yue Kingdom, Lu Yuan and other allied forces annihilated more than 200,000 soldiers and horses of the Zhou State in a battle, which made them emboldened and did not dare to look south.

In the end, it took more than ten years of cultivation to recover.

Now the Zhou State has lost more than 300,000 elite soldiers, and the rest of the men are more than 500,000, and the casualties have far exceeded the Northern Expedition that year.

Such a huge loss, although it will not lose the national fortune in World War I, but it is almost a big loss of vitality, and without more than ten or twenty years of cultivation, it will definitely not be able to slow down.

But is there still time for Zhou Guo to recuperate?

At this time, the Tibetan people had the help of the Chu State, and the scale of the invasion of the two counties of Helong this spring was far larger than in previous years, and the number of troops dispatched had exceeded 700,000.

In the rear of the Zhou people, there were also Chu troops who went straight to the heart and carried out sabotage.

Conservative estimates.

Even if the Zhou State can win this battle and defeat the Fan and Chu States, its own losses are finally estimated to exceed 100,000, which is another bloodletting.

Every attack on the two counties of Helong is a loss of vitality and a weakness for the Zhou State.

Faced with such a dilemma, Zhou Guo could not give up the second county of Helong.

Because if these two counties are lost, there will be no barrier in Guannei County, where the national capital is located, and the most elite core territory in the country will face a direct threat from the Tibetan people.

At that time, the Tibetan people will get the land of Helong, and their strength will be more and more enhanced, and the Zhou people will have more difficulty coping.

This is a dead end of step retreat, step by step, and finally no retreat.

Therefore, no matter how difficult the battle situation in Helong is, the other party can't take a step back, because if he retreats, Zhou Guo will almost step into the coffin in half a step.

But just holding on to it, although Zhou Guo maintained the situation, he was constantly bleeding and losing his vitality.

Originally, relying on the great business of Zhou Guo's family, even if he continued to let blood, he was confident that he would be able to consume those Tibetan people.

But at this time, Chu State suddenly intervened and got into this mess, so the general trend, which had gradually become clear, suddenly became unpredictable again.

Zhou's inevitable victory has become unpredictable, adding countless variables.

Even more disadvantageous.

In addition to the Helong war, in the past two years, the northern Wei State seems to have sharply intensified the border conflict with the Zhou State in Shuofang County because of the cold wave.

Although there was friction between the two countries in Shuofang County, the conflict was only maintained at a scale of 10,000 people, and there was basically no tendency to expand.

Since the year before last, the number of soldiers and horses that Wei invaded Shuofang County has increased a lot.

The two countries often see wars between tens of thousands of people here, and even last autumn, a war of 100,000 people broke out.

100,000 soldiers and horses, which is equivalent to a national war for the hegemon.

Other words.

The Wei State was in Shuofang County, and officially broke out a national war-level war with the Zhou State.

Although this national war did not last long, it ended in just one or two months, and it did not break out again.

But the impact of this war is far-reaching.

Because this means that after several years of adjustment, Wei has officially prepared to gather the strength of the whole country and start the journey south.

Last year's national war was just a small snack before the meal, and some temptations were made.

When the reality of the Zhou State is clear, the other party will brazenly go south and set off a huge southward migration journey.

This is not alarmist.

The geographical location of Wei determines that the other party will make this inevitable choice.

The large state occupied by Wei is Yanzhou, one of the nine states, and it is officially destined to be one of the three states and three regions covered by Arctic ice and snow.

The Antarctic poisonous fire that Yangzhou where Lu Yuan is located may have to wait for the Arctic cold wave to completely descend and the north-south imbalance before it breaks out, with a buffer of hundreds of years in between.

But the Arctic cold wave that Yanzhou is facing is now erupting.

The three northernmost outer regions are now estimated to have been classified as Eternal Ice Domains, and they have completely become Immortal Domain.

For Lu Yuan, disaster is future.

But for the creatures of the three states and three regions in the north, the disaster is now and happening.

Especially the three outlanders, a cold wave has already fallen on the land where they live, and these people have either died in the snow or have already begun to migrate south.

On the Wei side, although Lu Yuan couldn't stretch out his hand so far for the time being, he didn't know much about the situation in the country.

According to the available information, he could still estimate that the other party should have begun to meet the first wave of disaster victims from the outer regions, just like Zhou Guo.

It is estimated that the border counties in the north of the Wei State have begun to face waves of cold wave battles, just like the two counties of Helong in the Zhou State.

The outer regions bordering the Wei State are the grasslands of the Northern Regions.

Most of the human races living in this foreign land are mainly nomadic tribes.

Although the population of those nomadic tribes is not large, it is estimated that there are tens of millions of people in the hundreds of thousands of miles of grassland.

Tens of millions of herdsmen migrated south, and the shepherd cavalry alone could reach millions of people.

The mighty iron cavalry went south, even though most of them were herdsmen with average combat power, but the sum of this force could also make Wei State eat a good pot.

Although with the strength of the Wei State, it will definitely be able to stop this wave of herdsmen migration in the end, and exterminate or absorb all these southbound people.

But Yanzhou, where Wei is located, is also in the limit area of the release of cold waves.

Now it is the herders on the grasslands who have suffered, driven by the cold wave and have to move south.

After the entire grassland turned into snow, the next one to suffer was the Wei State.

The fast is twenty or thirty years, and the slow is fifty or sixty years, and the cold wave will approach the Yanzhou region.

Once the cold wave descends on Yanzhou, within the same twenty or thirty years, the entire Yanzhou will also follow in the footsteps of the grassland and gradually turn into a country of ice.

In other words, there is not much time left for Wei now.

Maybe twenty or thirty years, maybe fifty or sixty years, and the cold wave is coming.

And within these times, Wei must make a change, lead the people of the whole country, break through to the south, and take a place to live.

This time is tight.

Wei didn't have much time to hesitate to prepare, and had to make a choice immediately.

Now it seems.

The other party's choice is already obvious, and that is to continue south. Defeat his old rival Zhou and seize the opponent's territory as a habitat for Wei to escape the cold wave.

The national war that broke out last year was a harbinger of Wei's breakthrough migration to the south.

As a hegemon that also dominates a state, a national war of 100,000 people is just an appetizer.

Wait for the snack to finish before the meal, and soon the big meal will be served.

At that time, tens of millions of Wei soldiers, and even those grassland people, will turn into the northern torrent, rushing towards the Zhou State wave after wave, until the other party is completely defeated and occupies the other party's land, and then it will stop.

But by that time, the state of Zhou had fallen.

These remnants of the cold wave in the north, the next target may be changed to the Chu State.

If that day really comes, maybe the Chu State will have to fight with them a few times before it can hold its territory.

Therefore, Lu Yuan was not completely malicious towards Zhou Guo.

In the future, if there is a need, maybe they can also support the other party and use the Zhou State as the northern barrier of the Chu State, to block the threat of those cold wave immigrants in the north.

The relationship between countries, likes and dislikes, has never been fixed.

Only interests and circumstances are the guide to making choices.

Lu Yuan has been a king for many years, and he has a deep understanding of this, and he is familiar with it.

Of course, all of the above is just speculation.

There has not yet been a major war between the Zhou State and the Wei State, at most there are some small state wars.

Whether this will really be the case in the end remains to be seen.

But even so, the Shuofang front, where the war had reached the scale of a small national war, the Zhou people would lose tens of thousands of soldiers and horses every year.

The two counties of Heyang in the east are better, and the Zhou and Liang states are not large-scale wars, and there are even very few frictions and conflicts.

Although the two countries have stationed heavy troops on the border, they are very restrained from each other, and they have no intention of expanding the war, which still guarantees a certain rationality.

It's just that even so, in the two battlefields of the Western Front and the Northern Front, the number of soldiers killed and disabled in the Zhou State every year is more than 200,000, and the scale is gradually expanding.

According to this trend, the two-front battlefield will last for ten years, and the number of casualties on the battlefield alone will exceed two or three million.

Such a number is basically equivalent to all the men in the Zhou Kingdom, who died on the battlefield once.

It can be seen from this that the Zhou State, which was facing two waves of migration from the north and the west at the same time, was in such a bad situation.

In this way, it is no wonder that Yu Chandao is obviously in the territory of Zhou State, but he is not optimistic about the other party at all, and he is unwilling to invest heavily.

Just because the international situation faced by Zhou is really the worst in the world.

There are Wei and grassland herdsmen in the north, Xiliang and Snow Plains in the west, Liang in the east, and the newly rising Chu in the south.

The above four enemies are all capable of dispatching an army of millions, and any of them are not inferior compared to the Zhou State.

At this time, Zhou Guo faced four opponents with one enemy, and faced four opponents of the same level with the strength of one country, no matter how you look at it, the future is dark and the future is worrying.

Jade Toad Dao has the slightest sense and the slightest expectation for the future, it is impossible to pin the rise and fall of his own Dao system on Zhou Guo.

Now that he can support a protector of the Zhou Kingdom, it is already for the friendship of his fellow villagers, and he is benevolent and righteous.

In the eyes of people of insight in the world, in the future Zhongzhou hegemony, Zhou Guo has been out of the game ahead of schedule.

Even the time of the defeat of this hegemon may be within one or two decades.

At this time, it seems that the martial arts are promising, but everything is just a return to the light, and when the last trace of vitality is exhausted, it is the time when the Yongzhou overlord falls.

This is the mandate of heaven, and it cannot be reversed by man.

Lu Yuan saw through this trace of destiny, so after piercing the reality of the Zhou State, he sent a message to Huang Xuan, asking the other party not to go too deep in the land of Longxi, and after a little capture of the population, he could withdraw to Hanzhong.

The state of Zhou was already doomed.

In the face of the situation of siege by all sides, even if the other party is unwilling, it will be difficult to reverse the decline.

But for the state of Chu, the early defeat of the state of Zhou is not a good thing.

If the Zhou State is destroyed, the greatest possibility is that one country is divided into six points.

That is, the Fan people and the Western Liang State captured the two counties of Helong, the Wei State captured the Shuofang and Guannei two counties of the Zhou State, the Zhao State captured the first county of Henan, the Liang State captured the first county of Henan County, the first county of Nanyang, and the Chu State seized the three prefectures of Xiangyang County controlled by the Zhou State.

The above territorial divisions are all based on the speculation of the distance between the Zhou Kingdom and the various countries, where the mountains and rivers are connected.

From this speculation, it can be seen that the Zhou State was destroyed, and among the six forces, the Chu State was able to reap the least benefits.

The land of the three prefectures, for the current Chu State, is better than nothing, and it doesn't make much sense.

On the contrary, after seizing the territory of the Zhou State, their strength has been expanded, and the threat to the Chu State is far greater than that of a Zhou State.

The Liang State seized the two counties of Zhongzhou occupied by the Zhou State, which will further improve the puzzle of Zhongzhou's territory, and its strength will be strengthened, and it will be more difficult for the Chu State to want to go north to fight for Zhongzhou in the future.

The Wei State seized the core of the Zhou State, which will directly threaten the two counties of Hanzhong and Xiangyang of the Chu State, and directly pose a huge threat to the defense pressure of the northern frontier of the Chu State.

Maybe in the future, there will be no day of peace in the whole north.

The Tibetan people seized the two counties of Helong, and they temporarily had the land to live in, and their dependence on the needs of the Chu State would be greatly alleviated.

In the future, Chu Guo wants to take control of the other party, but it is not as easy as now.

Even after these Tibetan people gain a firm foothold in the land of Helong, they may still have Longwangshu, thinking of entering Hanzhong County and Xichuan County, and taking these territories to expand their own living space.

The only one that does not pose a threat to the Chu State is the Zhao State in Jizhou.

But Zhao and Chu are too far apart, it takes months and a half to contact each other once, and there are countries in the middle, even if Chu wants to join forces with each other, the efficiency is too low.

Therefore, to sum it up carefully, for the Chu State, the destruction of the Zhou State is better than maintaining the existence of this Yongzhou overlord, which is more advantageous.

At least.

Before Lu Yuan unified Yangzhou, integrated the land south of the Yangtze River, and had the strength to go on the Northern Expedition, the Zhou State could not be destroyed.

So now, it is okay to bleed the Zhou State, so that this Yongzhou overlord will slowly weaken, and the Chu State will lie on its wound to absorb nutrients and strengthen itself step by step.

When he finally grows up, he has enough strength to divide this weak giant with all the fierce beasts around him, and grab the most delicious pieces of fat on the giant's body.

Before this goal is achieved, the Zhou State cannot be destroyed, and even if necessary, the Chu State can still help the other party and make this northern barrier last longer.

So adhering to this line of thought, Lu Yuan also appropriately adjusted his strategy against Zhou Guo.

Think it as a barrier, weakness is the main, and you can support one or two if necessary.

This is the strategy for the Zhou State in the future.

……

May 13 of the 10th year of Shenwu.

The elite of the northern frontier of the Zhou State arrived in the hinterland of Longxi County, and the vanguard engaged the Chu army that had invaded the place.

The two armies fought a big battle, the Zhou State had many soldiers, and the Chu army was defeated, and it was difficult to resist the crowd, and they couldn't help but retreat.

Then Huang Xuan adhered to Lu Yuan's strategy, took advantage of this defeat, and withdrew his troops for hundreds of miles, losing most of the many prefectures and counties in Longxi that he had occupied before.

Later, he sent an envoy to the place of the Fan people to inform the Zhou people of the arrival of reinforcements, and that the Chu state was ready to withdraw its troops.

Then, without waiting for the Fan people to respond, after giving up many occupied territories, Huang Xuan led his troops to fight another battle with the Zhou reinforcements, repelling them and curbing the arrogance of the Zhou people.

In the end, Chu Jun took the last group of Zhou people who were coerced and withdrew to Hanzhong County along the Yangguan Trail.

At this point, the battle of the Chu army out of Longxi finally ended with the Chu State carrying 300,000 people from Longxi back to Hanzhong, and it came to a complete end.

Not long after the Chu army retreated, the Tibetan people were still unwilling and reluctant to give up the good results they had won so far.

In the end, after He Batsheng joined the reinforcements, he seized the opportunity and sprinkled the flame of revenge on these Tibetan people.

In a series of major battles, more than 200,000 soldiers and horses of the Tibetan people were annihilated one after another, and these thieves who entered the army were severely damaged.

However, although the losses were heavy, in this spring raid, the Fan people also seized millions of stone grain from the Zhou people.

After the food was transported back to the tribes, minus the number of people killed in the war, it was enough for many tribes on the snow field to breathe a sigh of relief, and the famine was greatly alleviated.

This summer, there will be fewer deaths.

It was also at this time.

With the complete end of the Helong War, when the Chu army returned to Hanzhong with the people of Zhou, Lu Yuan also took advantage of the situation to issue an edict to move these 300,000 Zhou people to Xichuan to enrich the local population.

At the same time, the three Northern Expedition forbidden armies that had been stationed in Hanzhong for half a year were also commanded by Qingyunzi and officially returned to Beijing.

Now that the war in the north is over, Hanzhong is stable, and the threat of Zhou has been lifted.

As for the Ning State in the east, Lu Yuan also personally led the troops and horses to defend it, with ten forbidden armies of Dongting County, 50,000 water divisions, and soldiers from local prefectures and counties, nearly 300,000 standing soldiers, which was enough to be safe.

Now wait for Qingyunzi to return with the 60,000 troops of the Northern Expedition, and the 100,000 princes and horses led by Li Xiong to arrive in Dongting, and based on these 160,000 troops, you can take advantage of the situation to form the Southern Expedition army.

At most, in the autumn, the state of Chu will be able to launch a southern expedition and unify Lingnan.