Yuan Shao, the father of Fanghua in the Three Kingdoms

Chapter 1116 Revenge
The reason why Yuan Xi wanted to testify against Yang Feng was that at that time in the Han Dynasty, massacre was not a big problem for most princes, but for Yuan Xi, a modern man, facing the trolley problem, it was still quite difficult to make a decision because of the constraints of modern morality.

Therefore, his explanation to Yang Feng was also a proof of his own behavior. If he could not find sufficient reasons, it meant that he himself had not gained the awareness of the world.

The appearance of Yang Feng interrupted their discussion about Pang De. After Yang Feng left, Lu Lingqi could no longer suppress her curiosity and continued to ask about the key to the capture of Ji County.

So Yuan Xi said a person's name.

Pang De's brother, Pang Rou.

When Lu Lingqi heard Pang De's name, she asked, "Is Pang De the one who killed the people of Jizhou the most?"

"I heard that he led more than a thousand cavalrymen and killed tens of thousands of villagers in the past few months?"

Yuan Xi said, "That's right. Pang De is loyal, but he has a bad character. He has done a lot of shameful things for the Xiliang Army. He is disliked by everyone and has no way out. So he can only cling to Ma Chao and Cao Cao."

"And there is something even more outrageous. If the truth is revealed, I'm afraid that most of the princes in the world will not tolerate him."

Lu Lingqi asked curiously, "What did he do?"

Yuan Xi said aloud: "Kill my sister-in-law."

Lu Lingqi was stunned. "A sister-in-law is like a mother. How dare he do this? What's the reason?"

Yuan Xi said: "According to Pang De himself, it was because his sister-in-law was not virtuous, Pang De got drunk and was so angry that he killed his sister-in-law with a knife."

When Lu Lingqi heard this, her first reaction was to shake her head. "This is too outrageous. Even if the eldest sister-in-law is not virtuous, she should report to the eldest brother for punishment. What qualifications does he have to kill people?"

Yuan Xi smiled and said, "Look, even you can understand this truth, so Pang Rou will certainly understand it, which is why she broke up with Pang De in anger and never saw each other again."

"There are many suspicious points in this matter. It is possible that he was drunk and crazy, but it is also possible that a general in the court killed his mother directly. However, it is definitely extremely rare, because the most important thing for an official is reputation. Even if the elders are not virtuous, they have to accept it."

"So Pound's move is extremely unreasonable."

"Pang Rou naturally thought so, but he had no evidence. He could only keep it to himself because his family's dirty laundry should not be made public."

"This incident happened three years ago. At that time, I was fighting in Bingzhou. Because this incident caused quite a stir in Ji County, when the people from the Procuratorate gave me the information, I took it to heart. I sent a spy from the Procuratorate who was good at autopsies to Ji County secretly. He found Pang Rou and took a lot of effort to persuade him to open the coffin and conduct an autopsy."

"The spy was a direct disciple of Hua Tuo and had a good understanding of the human body. Fortunately, he arrived in time and the body had not yet rotted. After a thorough inspection, he finally discovered the truth."

"The deceased was raped and murdered."

Lu Lingqi finally understood and gritted her teeth, "This shameless beast!"

She then sighed, "My husband is so meticulous. He is so far away and can guess the truth without seeing the scene. He is amazing."

Yuan Xi said: "I just guessed it right. After all, Pang De is a contradictory person and he raised a very disgusting son."

Lu Lingqi asked curiously, "What son?"

Yuan Xi then realized that he had let the cat out of the bag, so he smiled and said, "It's okay, it's all gone."

He thought that after the surrender of Shu Kingdom in later generations, Pang Hui was unethical and killed the entire family of Guan Yu's descendants. It was obvious that Pang De asked for death after being captured by Guan Yu, but Pang Hui took his anger out on Guan Yu's descendants, which showed how poor Pang De's family education was.

Plus, Pang De refused to surrender no matter what. Now it seems that he probably felt that his moral standards were too low, and the Kingdom of Shu might not be able to tolerate him?
In any case, after the truth about Pang De's rape and murder of his brother and sister-in-law was revealed, Pang Rou hated Pang De deeply. In order to take revenge, he defected to Yuan Xi, secretly cultivated his subordinates, and waited for the opportunity to act. Finally, when Ma Chao and Pang De were on an expedition, he seized the opportunity, raided the city gates at night, and let the Qiang people enter the city.

Gao Shun didn't need to do anything about what happened afterwards. The Qiang and Hu tribes, who had a grudge against Ma Chao and Pang De for genocide, launched a crazy revenge, and all the sufferings they had suffered were returned to the families of the Xiliang army.

Pang De was Ma Chao's most capable general and had killed many people on a daily basis. Naturally, he was the focus of revenge. The end of his family could only be described as retribution.

If Yuan Xi knew that Pang De was scolding him for being like a beast, he would probably laugh out loud. When he was slaughtering other people's families, didn't he think that sooner or later, the boomerang would hit him? However, the act of revenge on the Xiliang soldiers' families might completely destroy the morale of the Xiliang soldiers, and it might also make them even crazier. After all, people who crazily slaughtered their own kind were no longer human, but beasts.

Yuan Xi knew that his behavior did not make him a qualified and mature politician. A true politician would be like Cao Cao, who valued talent over morality. All talented people in the world, regardless of whether they had moral flaws or not, could be used by me. Just like an enemy general, even if his hands were stained with the blood of his own soldiers, if he turned against us and came to meet us, how many lords would refuse?
As for the dissatisfied civilians and soldiers, who cares about their thoughts?

But Yuan Xi just couldn't swallow this anger for some reason. When he thought of some unpleasant things he had seen and heard in later generations, he felt extremely depressed. Why should you avoid being held accountable just because you lost the battle and surrendered?
If they were foreigners, it would be fine. Since they are not of our race, their hearts must be different, and there is a natural antagonism between the two sides. But why do people of the same origin slaughter their own compatriots, run away after being defeated, and come back decades later and pretend nothing happened, and still be the superior people?
Aren't you talking about tradition? China believes in blood debts being repaid with blood, father's debts being repaid by son. This blood debt will be passed down from generation to generation, and sooner or later it will come to the point where it has to be repaid, but cannot be repaid, and then a complete settlement will be made.

So no matter what, Yuan Xi would not accept the surrender of people like Ma Chao and Pang De. They couldn't surrender, and they couldn't run away. It would be better for them to die here.

He stood up, went out to call his subordinates, and began to arrange the next action plan. He could guess that Ma Chao's counterattack was about to come.

As expected, two days later, Ma Chao's remaining tens of thousands of Xiliang cavalry rushed into Yuan Xi's territory with an extremely ferocious attitude and began an indiscriminate massacre.

But the situation was beyond the expectations of the leaders Ma Chao and Pang De. The tens of thousands of cavalrymen, whose goal was to destroy all the villages along the way and go straight to Jicheng, were divided into more than a dozen teams. They ran for two days and two nights but did not find any valuable targets.

Originally, the method used by the Xiliang soldiers to find villages and towns was very simple. They would search along the roads and rivers, and within half a day, they would be able to find places where people lived together. This method had been tried and tested, so after they found nothing, they finally realized that something was not right.

Not only did they fail to find the civilians, they were also intercepted by Yuan Xi's soldiers who outnumbered their own troops by several times. This was not a dilemma faced by just one or two teams, but it was the same for all teams!
The Xiliang army was already demoralized due to various rumors, and now they were intercepted and suffered heavy losses. The generals of each team could only retreat temporarily to preserve their strength.

The generals of each team who encountered this kind of crisis would only feel that they were unlucky and happened to encounter Yuan Xi's army with superior forces or that their side had a bad tone. However, what they could not expect was that actually each team was in a similar predicament.

Of course, it is impossible for Yuan Xi to mobilize so many cavalry. The reason why the current situation can be created is that after several months of battlefield training, Yuan Xi’s army has finally established a relatively complete dispatching and command system in Jizhou.

Whenever a Xiliang soldier was discovered, its marching direction and number of people were found out, and the information was sent to the nearest intelligence center. Then the order was issued, and the nearest Yuan Xi army would complete the division and encirclement of the Xiliang army at the fastest speed and by the best route.

If the Xiliang army entered the attack range, several ambush teams would immediately launch a fierce ambush on them. After defeating them, these teams would not pursue them any further, but would rush to the next place where the enemy was most likely to appear, to prepare for the next ambush.

At the same time, the alarm information will be transmitted in advance to the village that may be attacked. After receiving the message, the villagers will immediately take refuge in a hidden place under the guidance of the dispatched officials.

This two-pronged approach not only made it impossible for the Xiliang army to find a target for revenge, but also put them in a dilemma of being attacked at all times.

From the moment the entire Xiliang army entered Yuan Xi's territory, it was as if they were stuck in a huge quagmire, and it was difficult to get out.

Ma Chao, who led an army on his own, did not fail to realize that the massacre in Ji County was done by Yuan Xi to provoke him, but Ma Chao was confident that no one could catch his whereabouts, because the Western Liang Army had been invincible for so many years relying on the tactics of rapid advance, so how could it be so easy to defend against?

He also underestimated Yuan Xi's determination to eliminate him, so he knew nothing about the fate of other teams. Now Ma Chao did not focus on a few villages, but started from Qinghe County and went straight to the Zhouji Pass between Anping County and Zhongshan County, heading straight north.

His target was not Jizhou, but Youzhou Zhuo County, north of Anping County!

Since the Jizhou village decoration can't satisfy his appetite, he will go a little further north and cause complete chaos in Yuan Xi's rear area!
Ma Chao was lucky. For some intentional or unintentional reasons, the thousands of soldiers he led were not stopped and reached the north of Anping. Along the way, they also massacred a small village of more than a hundred people.

This obviously could not satisfy his appetite. After all, in Ma Chao's view, the settlement of hundreds of thousands of people on the border of You and Ji was his real target.

Then according to the map, he should have arrived near Yijing, the largest city on the border of Youbing.

After the fall of Gongsun Zan and the capture of Yijing by Yuan Shao, this big city was renovated many times, turning it into a military town for the transit and deployment of troops.

Although there has been no war on the You-Ji border in recent years, Yijing has undergone several transformations. Although Ma Chao was unaware of the arrangements, he was aware of this and had no plans to let his troops approach Yijing, but instead planned to take a detour.

However, things certainly did not go so smoothly. He soon received news that Pang De's army in front had encountered Yuan Xi's army in Yi Jing, and was surrounded and divided by them, and was fighting hard.

When Ma Chao heard the news, he felt a little unhappy. "It's bad enough that you run faster than me, but now you have attracted the enemy and haven't been of any help. Now I have to clean up Pang De's mess!"
But Pang De was Ma Chao's most capable general, so Ma Chao would naturally not sit idly by and watch Pang De die. So Ma Chao had to order the entire army to rush to the battlefield to rescue Pang De.

Ma Chao rushed all the way and was about to reach the edge of the battlefield. When he was still more than ten miles away from the battle site, he was shocked by the tragic scenes along the way.

On both sides of the road, the bodies of the fallen soldiers were lying in disorder. Most of them were dressed as Xiliang soldiers, but their bodies had extremely strange death conditions.

(End of this chapter)