readx;? The moat was several zhang wide, the water in the river was nearly a foot deep, the horses could not jump over, the infantry could not wade in vain, the besieging enemy threw down thousands of corpses of men and horses, and when they rushed to the river, they found that the defenders were still out of range of bows and arrows, and the crossbows at the head of the city continued to fire, and the thick crossbow bolts pierced the armor of the riders in the front row, and ruthlessly flipped the spurs of the war horses behind them to the ground. Pen ~ fun ~ pavilion www.biquge.info

The horn was blown, the gong was sounded, the mercenaries retreated, the witch soldiers retreated, and the tentative attack ended in the rolling sound of the repeating crossbow.

War is not only a flesh-and-blood collision of front-line soldiers, but also a contest of economic strength of various countries, and various new technologies are always prioritized for the development of armaments. Generally speaking, the most intuitive way to measure the strength of an empire's comprehensive strength is to look at the equipment of its army.

The Qinghui Empire is located in the east of the center of the Luofeng Continent, the land is fertile and abundant, the plague thousands of years ago caused the population of the three countries to plummet, in order to restore the national strength of each change, and the Qinghui royal family took the opportunity to abolish slavery, the land that lost its master, free of charge to the slaves who were free, so that the empire's agriculture can be restored as soon as possible.

There was enough grain stored in the warehouse, food and clothing were no longer a problem of survival, and handicrafts and commerce came into being, and eventually evolved into an independent industry, and out of the instinct of merchants to chase profits, they invested heavily in order to obtain high returns with new products, which in turn promoted the progress of agriculture, and the accumulation of thousands of years made the economic strength of the Qinghui Empire close to the sum of Sunset and Cuihua.

When people have money, they are afraid of being robbed and afraid of losing their lives because of their wealth, so bodyguards came into being. With gold and silver in the treasury, the royal family is even more afraid of losing its dominance, and who doesn't want to sit on the high dragon chair? The army's equipment is constantly improving, and even the taxes of a few years later will be spent in advance.

Dugu Wushuang, the king of Qinghui a thousand years ago, abolished slavery, making the country rich and the people strong, abolished the prince's fiefdom, so that the imperial succession had competition but never rebelled, and transferred the child camp from the military department to the civil department, so that there has never been a powerful minister killing the king for thousands of years...... It's a pity that the sky does not increase his longevity, and he failed to realize the strategy of cutting the domain, and left his last words on his deathbed: The descendants of the future generations will focus on keeping the success, and if they want to go in, they will first cut the strong domain.

A generation of British lords passed away for a thousand years, and never imagined that after a thousand years, his descendants, Mei Ying, inherited the shadow of his ancestors, but went against his last words and set troops on the grassland when the king of the county was not removed.

"Machine crossbow!" Duan Na drank a bowl of wine and broke a wine bowl, stepped on the fragments under his feet and scolded angrily in the tent: "Hidden in the Qinghui Emperor and the royal family's internal response, damn it! ”

"Prince, please be careful. ”

The two Wu Zong drank a lot of wine and didn't say a word, Kantar heard Duanna's wine words, and hurriedly stood up and reminded: "Prince, if you can get into contact with the crossbow machine diagram, your identity is not trivial, don't get into trouble after drinking, so as not to anger the king." ”

"I know the benefits and disadvantages, don't talk about it, Captain Wan, the siege and siege of the city will be handed over to you, don't let the forest and the ghosts in the forest get it first, I'll drink another bowl, and I'll sleep." ”

The beautiful slave girl knelt down and held the wine, and before she could bring the wine bowl to her chest, her body was crooked and drunk and fell into the chair, and the slave girl was busy cleaning up the messy wine table.

"You three watch carefully, and do not leave until the prince wakes up. Kantar spoke gently, but the murderous intent in his eyes could not escape Wu Zong, and the older guard aimed at the chest of the slave girl with malicious intentions, and snorted at the partner beside him: "The prince is drunk, don't snub the beauty, come, let's continue to drink, and stay in the tent tonight to protect." ”

"Womanizer, embarrassed and useful!" Kantal was disgusted in his heart, but a smile appeared on his face: "Then there are two adults, and they dare not be greedy for a cup and make mistakes when they are busy with military affairs, so I will retire first." ”

Returning to the tent, Kantar revealed that he was murderous: "Send three more patrols to monitor outside the prince's tent, if anyone tries to leave the camp, don't ask questions, shoot me with arrows!" The chief of the guard was a little at a loss after hearing this: "Lord Wuzong?" Kantar hesitated for a moment and made a ruthless decision: "Let the patrol team hide the crossbow, except for the prince, no matter who tries to leave the camp, kill it!"

Overhearing the secret of the empire, the fate of the slave girl was doomed, and she would be destroyed by the lustful guards temporarily, Kantar couldn't help but think of the quarrel at the top of the empire before the departure, how should the slave be treated? The royal family and hereditary nobles wanted to maintain the status quo and suppress the rebellion one after another by force, and a large number of small and medium-sized nobles, especially the military magnates who exchanged their military merits for their titles, and the commoner nouveau riche who spent money to buy titles because of their business wealth, were more inclined to the changes of Qinghui thousands of years ago, advocating that slaves should be given personal freedom and allowed to move freely within the empire's borders. The royal family and the great nobles have vast lands and countless slaves, and it is said that they should control the most wealth of the empire, but from nowhere, the gold and silver gradually transferred to the pockets of the small and medium-sized nobles, and the gold and silver were full of arguing for power, so that the slaves' armed resistance to the exhausted royal family became more and more difficult to suppress the quarrels in the court.

Kantar and his shrewd generals gradually understood that the Sunset Empire was no longer an invincible cavalry kingdom to which the king's horsewhip scrambled to the death. They want to revive their former glory, but they are often constrained by equipment constraints, lack of financial resources, and can barely afford to raise a huge army, let alone distribute equipment as good as the Qinghui Empire.

"Alas, it is still necessary to use the force to compensate for the difference in equipment. ”

Kantar is known as a Confucian general in the Sunset Empire, advocating that the strength of the commander lies in his strategy, and the high and low side is based on his bravery, and he commands the three armies to plan for the brave, but now he is turning around and can't think of a surprise winning plan, and the casualties will inevitably be several times that of the defenders.

The barrier of the moat made the cavalry archers useless, so they abandoned their horses to become infantry, and pushed the heavy wooden fence to the moat outside the city wall to cover their comrades who carried dirt bags behind them.

"Hard, fast!"

The centurions shouted hoarsely, their whips mercilessly whipped the soldiers, and the wheels under the wooden fences cut deep ruts in the grass. The simple wooden fence is crudely constructed, and the logs that are nearly a foot long and the mouth of the bowl are crisscrossed and tied into wooden rows with leather ropes, and after hitting the wooden wheels that the craftsmen hastily made, they are erected to become a wooden wall to resist the crossbow arrows.

The crossbow bolt was shot, and the strong impact force made the soldiers pushing the fence look bitter, and there were always unlucky eggs who became corpses on the ground, but the fence also weakened the penetration of the crossbow arrows, and it was difficult for a crossbow bolt to wear several people into a gourd string. The wooden fence in the front row, unable to withstand the crossbow bolts repeatedly hit and penetrate, scattered and fell, the soldiers did not have time to escape and let the crossbow shoot to kill, the stumps flew blood and flesh splashed, the centurion and a few soldiers who were lucky enough to escape, the gratitude to God in their hearts was not finished, and the order of the commander came from behind him, let him run to replenish the strength of the fence next to him, the centurion turned around and seemed to want to argue, but before he could say anything, a feathered arrow flew head-on, covering his bleeding throat to chase after his dead subordinates.

"Retreat from battle, kill!"

There are defenders' crossbow arrows in front, and ruthless military methods in the back, and there is still a way to survive bravely forward. When they go to the battlefield to attack, the junior officers and soldiers actually have no choice, and the warriors who survive are not so much skilled as they are blessed by God and lucky.

"Order the trebuchet, let go of the fence in front of you, and smash the rear team for Lao Tzu!"

The west gate is the focus of the sunset attack, Hu Li's shouts have become hoarse, the mercenaries have been attacking the city day and night for six consecutive days, relying on the advantage of strength to get close to the moat many times, countless dirt bags are thrown in, the moat is getting narrower and narrower, and the river has long been dyed blood red.

"Order, push the corpses in front of the fence into the river!"

Beside the trebuchet, Kantar shouted a command, and the captain beside him covered his face with his hands and besieged the city for six days. The corpses of the mercenaries who died in battle, when the shifts of the 10,000 teams were changed, they were poured with oil and set on fire to keep the souls of the dead out of the cruel battlefield. The Captain knew that Qatar had given the right order, but he still had difficulty accepting the reality and made excuses to leave the trebuchet, unwilling to see the brutal scene with his own eyes.

"Don't pay attention to the repeater, just smash it at the crossbow on the wall bed, and keep it continuous, so that the students don't have time to transfer. ”

The mercenary's trebuchet, following Cantar's orders, ignored the casualties caused by the crossbow to the soldiers behind the fence and threw boulders at the bed crossbow at the head of the earthen wall. Long-range attack, the accuracy of the trebuchet is very poor, it is difficult to smash the bed crossbow on the city wall, but the ridicule of the cadets did not last a few days, the bed crossbow one after another let the stones smash, and the mercenaries made up for the shortcomings of poor accuracy with numbers.

The threat of the bed crossbow weakened, the wooden fence advanced faster, and in several places along the moat, the mercenaries put several rows of wooden fences close together, and one by one the earth bags were placed on both sides of the fence, and the solid wooden walls gradually took shape, and the crossbow bolts fired by the machine crossbow could not easily break the defense.

"Change the rockets and burn them to death!"

The city wall on each side of the earth city is about two or three miles long, widened every three hundred steps, and the arrow tower is built to set up a machine crossbow, and the trebuchet can only be erected at the root of the inner wall, and the enemy outside can not be seen, fortunately, there is no need to aim, a bag of stones thrown at will can smash over an enemy, and after the bed crossbow is damaged one after another, it becomes the main equipment to intercept the mercenary wooden fence.

The front of the long crossbow bolt was wrapped in thick leather, poured with fire oil, ignited and let the crossbow shoot out, and burned on the wooden fence by the moat, and the mercenaries hiding behind the wall hurriedly untied the dirt bag, trying to extinguish the flames and save the wooden wall that countless lives had been exchanged.

The fire bag thrown by the trebuchet was scattered behind the fence, not as heavy as a stone, and it did not bring much harm to the advancing fence, and the sharp-eyed mercenary found that a rope on the fire bag was sparkling and hissing, and just pointed it out to the centurion who led the team, the deafening explosions sounded one after another, and the grass by the moat was blazing, the wooden fence was torn apart, and the mercenary fled back with a cry of pain in the fire.

"Gunpowder!" Kantar bit his lip with hatred, seeing that today he would be able to connect the wooden walls and fill the moat, who knew that the soldiers would store so much gunpowder that the tens of thousands of mercenaries who had died by the river in six days would be in vain. In order to prevent unnecessary losses from the other two besieging troops, Kantar shouted from his throat: "Order, stop the siege." ”

The invention of gunpowder is tantamount to a joke.

Among the cultivators who pursue immortality, there is never a shortage of people who can't endure hardships and loneliness, and always want to take shortcuts opportunistically, hoping to refine the elixir and soar day by day. Over the years, there has been no elixir, and the legend has evolved into a miracle. The temptation of immortality is eternal, and the alchemists who are tireless in this elixir can't hear the immortal song from heaven if they can't refine the elixir, but they have found a good medicine for mortals to cure diseases, prolonging the lives of countless people, and behind the aura of the ancient divine doctor are hidden the helplessness and bitter smile of the cultivators.

I don't know when and where, an alchemist who has made countless failures dizzy, looking at the realgar that he has worked so hard to save, Saltpeter and exotic flowers and plants, and they are going to be turned into waste in the Dan furnace, so they flew up and kicked the charcoal in front of the furnace into it, humming and sitting next to them and chanting words, I don't know whether they are praying or cursing the thousands of gods and demons outside the clouds, who knows that the ancestor who has been awake for thousands of years wakes up at this time, so the alchemy furnace exploded with a bang, burning the alchemist beyond recognition, but fortunately, the ancestor yawned and fell asleep, and finally picked up a life.

Countless years and countless people have failed in alchemy, maybe someone has already discovered the formula and died on the spot if their fate is not good, maybe someone is not in the mood to record a failed formula, maybe there are countless explanations, but the result is that gunpowder has appeared in front of the world since then, and it has been born for a long time, leaving people with the impression that they are all festive fireworks, which will make men, women, young and old, rich and poor laugh out loud.

In the history books of the later generations of the Luofeng Continent, each of them records the grassland war: Duguying, the lord of Qinghui County, used gunpowder on a large scale for the first time in the war to conquer the grassland, bringing unimaginable fear to the enemy, thus winning the final victory. Only in the canons of the Qinghui royal family can one find an inconspicuous name: Yeluqi, the man who made gunpowder practical on the battlefield. As for the name of the real director Gao Yuan, the history books of Luofeng Continent have all deliberately chosen to ignore it, whether it is merit or fault, and future generations are not qualified and dare not comment on it. (To be continued.) )