"We're in a bad situation. In August 1846, Li Xian exclaimed in his office in the northern part of Dayuan Island.

At this time, the Guangxi Demon Sect successfully occupied Guilin, and Sanyuanguan took almost all the prefectures and counties in Guangdong, and even the army of the Mixed Yuan Sect also took the north and south of Dayuan Island, and the revolutionary situation should be very good.

However, all Li Xian felt in his heart was anxiety and worry.

There is no other reason, on the surface it is prosperous, but in fact all kinds of problems and contradictions are erupting in a concentrated manner, and if they are not handled well, the rebels will fall into the abyss.

Among them, the most critical and important problem is that the rebels have no money.

This seems strange, at the beginning, the Mixed Yuan Sect and the Sanyuan Sect occupied Guangzhou, a prosperous city that can also be ranked on the whole earth, and obtained a huge amount of funds and materials, and they have been operating well over the years, and under normal circumstances, there should be no shortage of money.

What's more, the Guangxi Demon Sect recently took Wuzhou and successfully occupied Guilin, and also obtained a lot of food and money, which should be enough for the rebels to last for a long time under normal circumstances.

It is a pity that the rebels have a strong ability to grab money, and their ability to make money is not weak, but their ability to spend money accordingly is even better.

In the case of the Mixed Yuan Sect, with 30,000 regular troops, calculated based on the monthly salary of ordinary soldiers as four to five oceans, the annual salary of a soldier is about 50 oceans a year, which means that to maintain these 30,000 regular troops, it will cost 1.5 million silver dollars every year.

In addition, the training of soldiers needs to consume a lot of materials, but also to spend money to equip weapons--- although the mixed Yuan Sect has its own military factory, but also to spend the cost of production--- once the war, the consumption of various military and civilian materials is even more sky-high.

In the battle of Xianrendu, a brigade led by Li Xian consumed about 500,000 yuan worth of shells and bullets in one day, not counting the post-war pension.

In short, counting the soldiers' monthly salaries, weapons and training costs, and various war expenses, the annual war expenses of the Mixed Yuan Sect must reach at least three million silver dollars.

In addition, there are thousands of monks in Li Xian's army, including officers in the army and special combat teams and other special arms, as well as engineer-type monks who carry out production and research and development in the blessed land, considering that the resources required for the monks' cultivation are more than ten times more than that of ordinary soldiers, this is also an extremely large expense.

In addition, Li Xian also had a large number of administrative staff and education system personnel under his command, and it also cost a lot of money to conduct research on ironmaking and steelmaking.

All in all, the Mixed Yuan Sect's annual expenditure is at least between five million and eight million yuan, and the scale of this expenditure has been increasing for several years, not the other way around.

The structure of income and expenditure of the Sanyuan Concept is similar to that of the Mixed Yuan Sect, so the annual net expenditure is only larger than that of the Mixed Yuan Sect, not smaller.

Therefore, the net expenditure of the Huaxia Army jointly established by the two sides is at least about 10 million to 15 million yuan a year.

Compared with such a huge expenditure, the tens of millions of taels of silver seized during the occupation of Guangzhou do not seem to be very conspicuous.

Since the establishment of the Huaxia Army, the strength of the army has only been maintained at about 60,000, not because they do not want to expand the army, nor because they can't find enough young soldiers, but because they really don't have so much money to invest in the military.

As for the three forces on Hainan Island and Yang Tianming's troops in Qinzhou, they were very wise to control the number of regular firearms troops at about 5,000, and any more would affect other expenditures.

As for the Demon Cult, it made 20,000 troops at once, relying on the fact that Guangxi has always been relatively poor, and the soldiers' requirements for salaries are much lower, and the Demon Cult army uses cheap front-loading smoothbore guns, so the cost of maintaining the army is much lower than that of the Huaxia Army.

However, even so, Li Xian and Xuan Zheng watched the people in the Demon Sect expand their army in full swing and do a lot of work in Guangxi, and they didn't have the intention of watching jokes.

Guangxi itself is poor, and the benefits that the Demon Sect has obtained from Guilin and Wuzhou cannot be compared with Guangzhou, and sooner or later, the Demon Sect will encounter serious economic problems, and then it can only go out of Guangxi to the territory of the Qing court to rob and rob, and at the same time, it will also give the Huaxia Army the opportunity to use the economy and weapons to indirectly control the Demon Sect.

This is also the fundamental reason why the Demon Sect actually announced the founding of the country this time, and also named Lao Shizi of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and deliberately removed himself from the system of the Huaxia Army, but the Mixed Yuan Sect and the Three Yuan Sect did not raise objections to this, and they had a superficial attitude of supporting the development of their brothers.

The total strength of the rebels was close to 100,000 firearms troops, but the cost of maintaining such a large firearms force was also enormous.

In contrast, the Qing court still occupies more than ninety percent of China's land, and the annual financial income of the entire imperial court is only about 40 million taels, that is, 60 million silver dollars, which is used to maintain more than one million green battalion soldiers, as well as a huge bureaucratic system, and it is necessary to support the cultivation of the monks of the Inhuman Palace, which can be regarded as a model of careful budgeting.

Anyone with a little economic consciousness will understand that the rebels must find a way to open up financial resources and obtain a large amount of long-term effective income, otherwise they will not need to be attacked by the Qing court, and the huge financial pressure will be enough to cause the rebels' army to collapse on its own.

Therefore, Li Xian's use of troops during this period was extremely cautious.

Guangxi and Guangdong were both fighting in a big way, and it was very lively, but Li Xian left that place of right and wrong, ran to Fujian to open up a new battlefield, and also looted the two rich cities of Putian and Fuzhou, and seized more than 10 million taels worth of materials and money.

When fighting Fujian, the Sanyuanguan troops happened to dig traps in Guangdong and wait for the Qing court to enter the army, so it was impossible and unwilling to go north to Fujian, so the spoils obtained in Fujian were owned by the Mixed Yuan Sect independently, and there was no need to share the profits to the Sanyuan Temple, which made many officers of the Mixed Yuan Sect excited.

Although the relationship between the two families has always been very good and they have always worked together, the differences between the two sides have become more and more obvious over the years, and the question of who is the main and who is the auxiliary has not been resolved.

It's just that Li Xian is looking for someone in the administrative department to calculate, and the next step is to promote the administrative system on Dayuan Island, invest in coal mines and sulfur mines, etc., and build more schools, 10 million taels looks like a lot, but it can only support about a year, far from the point of wealth.

"The next step is to find a way to make more money. Li Xian reviewed the current situation and couldn't help but say with emotion.

After struggling in this world for so many years, I didn't expect to return to the most primitive problem in the end, that is, to find a way to make money to support my family.

Over the years, the Mixed Yuan Sect has also cultivated a relatively complete administrative system, drawing on a lot of Western administrative experience, and has a set of effective methods and appropriate personnel to do both urban and rural governance.

Although Li Xian attached great importance to administrative work, he was not interested in it, so he simply summoned Zhang Sicheng from Guangzhou to Dayuan Island and let him take charge.

As for how Zhang Sicheng set up a bureaucratic system, set up a management organization at the level of a village committee in the countryside, set up schools, and arranged industrial production, that was Zhang Sicheng's own business.