Dragon Sea Empire

In the morning, in Penglai County, where the Shandong Chief Secretary's Dengzhou Government Office is located, in the Dengzhou General Town Mansion, Li Xiutang, the chief soldier of Dengzhou, was sleeping soundly in his bedroom, with a beautiful woman sent by one of his subordinates still in his arms.

There were bursts of loud rumbling noises that rattled the roof tiles, and the roof beams trembled slightly.

The woman who had just been raped all night was the first to wake up and screamed. Li Xiutang, a burly figure in her 40s, was very annoyed at having her dream disturbed, and kicked the woman out of bed, cursing, "You bitch." , what is the ghost screaming early in the morning?"

"Boom, boom," another loud noise came like thunder, and Li Xiutang was shocked: "Mother, who fired the cannon there without an order?"

"Hey," the bedroom of Master Li Xiutang, the chief soldier, was suddenly pushed open, and Li Xiaocheng, the governor of the general military department responsible for guarding Penglai Water City, stumbled in, his face covered in dust.

Li Xiaocheng is Li Xiutang's distant nephew and the confidant of Master Li Zongbing. He rushed to the bed and exclaimed: "My lord, uncle, Shuicheng cannot be defended anymore."

Li Xiutang grabbed Li Xiaocheng with his bare upper body, rolled and crawled, pointed at his nose and cursed: "You must have lost your mind and went crazy. How could Shuicheng be attacked? Who is attacking the city?"

"Boom, boom, boom," the sound of a series of cannons drowned out Li Xiaocheng's trembling voice.

"Damn, what are you talking about," Li Xiutang yelled while holding his nephew's skirt tightly.

"The opponent is flying a Chinese flag on a blue background,"

Li Xiutang took a deep breath and let go of his hand: "The pirates of the Zhonghua Company, aren't they making trouble in Fujian and Guangdong? How did they come to us?"

"Boom,"

The half-closed door was knocked open again, and a blood-stained general stumbled in, knelt down and reported: "Master General, Shuicheng has fallen, pirates are attacking Penglai City, and they are about to break through the city." Into the,"

"How...how could it be so fast," Li Xiutang was extremely surprised.

"My lord uncle, the pirates are very familiar with the local sea routes. Last night, they secretly lurked outside the Zhenyang Gate in the south of Shuicheng and beside the Penglai Pavilion on Danya Mountain. They have a light artillery that can be carried up the mountain by human power. There is also a kind of flowering rocket... At dawn, the pirates suddenly attacked and occupied Penglai Pavilion, and fired condescending bombardment at Shuicheng; at the same time, Changshan Island in the north was also occupied by pirates last night, and they also attacked Shuicheng from the sea in the morning. They have a large number of ships, each with more than ten cannons, and hundreds of ships bombarded them repeatedly, and our naval warships couldn't get out of the water gate at all," Li Xiaocheng cried: "The barracks of my nephew's relatives opened a shock wave. Yangmen rushed to Danya Mountain, but was suddenly attacked by pirates who had already ambushed at the gate, causing countless casualties, and they occupied Zhenyangmen, and my nephew was able to escape with the desperate resistance of the guards."

Li Xiaocheng's words were a bit inaccurate, he was the one who opened the south gate of Penglai Water City, but he and his soldiers didn't want to attack Danya Mountain to regain the commanding heights, but to sneak back to Penglai City; in short, Li Xiaocheng wanted to abandon the city and run for his life. As a result, he was intercepted and killed by the Sailor Musketeers who had been ambushing all night.

Penglai Water City, the city wall is made of mixed earth and stone. The plane is slightly rectangular and the circumference is 2200 meters. There are two gates in the north and south. The north is called Water Gate, also known as Tianqiaokou. Stone masonry, as high as four battles, the water gate is about three feet wide and five feet deep. The south gate of the city is called Zhenyang Gate, commonly known as Tumen. It is located in the southeast corner of the city and communicates with the land. One meter wide and four feet deep, Xiaohai is located in the center of the water city. It is slightly narrow and long in plane, 655 meters long from north to south. To park ships and drill sailors.

There are also military facilities such as piers, wave-leveling platforms, anti-wave dams, naval camps, lamp towers, forts, enemy towers, sluices, and moats inside and outside the water city. The water city, which should have been a coastal defense base and a military forbidden area, is different in this era. A scene: there are water pavilions all over the coast of the small sea in the city, the singing and music of singers and dancers, and the laughter and curses of officers and soldiers all night long, an unprecedented grand occasion.

When Chen Zhongji followed Yin Feng to inspect the Daming ruled area, he took the Xinxing and Dingyuan giant ships and sneaked across Bohaikou twice. The Denglai Navy never knew about this.

However, that night, after Chen Zhongji heard the spies report the scene in Penglai Water City, he still sighed very much: "The officers and soldiers are singing and dancing every night. If we attack Dabai Tiantang in an upright manner, it probably won't take too much effort. "

Fan Tao, the commander of the fleet, smiled, looked at the map and said, "Jizai... Director Chen, after taking down Shuicheng, do we still want to take Penglai City? hit it down,"

"Then do it like this, the infantry brothers' transport ship is still behind, it will take a day to reach Long Island, let your sailors go and occupy Penglai,"

The second to sixth teams of the Ryukyu Corps of the Sailor Musketeers have a total of five guard teams, with a total of more than 550 people. They are mainly composed of sailors on the main battleships Feilong and Feibao. The Flying Dragon was nearly five feet wide, so it was useless to attack the Feizi ship in Penglai Shuicheng. Therefore, the second and third sentry teams were assigned the task of landing and lurking. The fifth and sixth sentry teams are responsible for attacking Penglai Pavilion and occupying the top of Danya Mountain.

The officers and soldiers of the Denglai Navy Division of the Ming Army had no sense of the actions of the Chinese Army at all, and they were not vigilant. While they were having fun, the Sailor and Musketeers landed on the low-angle coast east of Penglai, and moved smoothly. A confirmation signal was issued, and the Chinese Army sailors lurking on the sea in front of Shuicheng received the signal.

In the morning, the plan to attack Shuicheng was surprisingly smooth. The light field artillery and thunderbolt rockets carried to Penglai Pavilion by manpower were condescending, and all the bullets hit the inside of Shuicheng. Although Penglai Shuicheng was considered a relatively strong coastal defense base at that time, but Its biggest flaw is the Danya Mountain behind it. The defense on the land side of the Water City is too weak. Once the enemy occupies the commanding height of Danya Mountain, the entire Water City can only sit and wait.

When the fast boats of the Chinese navy with the Chinese flag on the blue background rushed into the water gate of Penglai Water City, most of the Ming navy ships anchored at Xiaohai Wharf had been ignited by thunderbolt rockets, and more than [-] ships had already died. Abandoned on the docks, the sailors of the official navy were scattered and fleeing.

The officers and soldiers in Shuicheng hardly made any decent resistance, and most of them surrendered on the spot. Later, Li Xiutang, the commander-in-chief of Dengzhou, escaped from Penglai City with his own standard battalion. As soon as he left, the Chinese army used 100 Jin black gunpowder blew up the north gate of Penglai City, and the brigade of sailors and musketeers rushed into the city. In addition, at the mouth of the Liushui River in the east, 3000 sailors and musketeers rushed to land on the beach. Blocked by the river.

The Chinese army occupied the base of the Denglai Naval Battalion, occupied Penglai County, and also occupied the Changshan Islands at the mouth of the Bohai Sea, and established a temporary supply warehouse on Changshan Island.

In order to ensure the safety of the Penglai temporary base of the Chinese Navy Navy, the Sailors and Musketeers dispatched detachments to occupy Huangchengji in the southwest of Penglai County and Liushuihekou in the east of Penglai respectively, and established two temporary fortresses each.

At the same time, the Chinese army also landed at Lushunkou in the later generations of the Liaodong Peninsula. With a force of 1000 sailors and musketeers and 500 student troops, they captured the Jinzhou Guard Zhongzuo and Jinzhou Guard in one fell swoop; Some more than 1000 defenders were unprepared and loosely defended. They were successfully landed by the Chinese army at night. During the night attack, the student army rushed to the front under the leadership of the leader Wang Shuowang, and kept throwing grenades forward. , Directly blowing up thousands of households in the center left to death in his own room, the Chinese army's explosive weapons deprived the defenders of their little courage, allowing the Chinese army to capture Jinzhouwei within a day.

The two major defensive fortresses in the north and south of Bohaikou have fallen into the hands of the Chinese army, and the gates of the important places in Beijing and Quzhou have been opened wide.

Chen Zhongji waited until the infantry arrived, re-formed the fleet, and began to march westward, aiming at Tianjin Wei on the west coast of the Bohai Sea.

Since the Chinese army attacked the southeast coast at the beginning of the year, the Ming Dynasty court center was busy raising money and food some time ago, and dispatched troops from the whole country to the southern coastal area. Therefore, the imperial court did not pay attention to the defense of the northern coastal area. Some people will be able to fight directly from the mouth of the Bohai Sea and approach the key points of Beijing and Quzhou.

The most distinctive feature of the establishment of the Ming Dynasty's military is that the leadership system is highly centralized on the basis of a high degree of decentralization. The military power at the bottom is highly dispersed, and the military power at the top is highly concentrated. There are several battalions with a variable number of people under its jurisdiction, unlike the Chinese Army, which has a clear hierarchical structure, a fixed and orderly number of soldiers, and clear responsibilities.

Moreover, this system determines that the Ming army has almost no established and large-scale field mobile troops except for the three major battalions of the capital and the frontier soldiers. In case of a major war, the Beijing army and the frontier soldiers cannot be easily used. Then you have to transfer troops from various guards and barracks all over the country, and they can’t all be transferred away as an organizational system. Hundreds of people are transferred from the guards here, one battalion from the battalion there, and [-] from the chief secretary’s jurisdiction. , Thousands of troops were transferred from the area under the jurisdiction of the general army. In this way, in the first half of the year, a large-scale army was scattered from all over the country. Whether the large group of soldiers who got up can cooperate with each other to carry out field battles, only God knows. Fundamentally changed, so the new-style field troops trained by Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou were gradually assimilated by the old system of guard barracks after Zhang Juzheng.

Now, the whole country's army is mobilizing to the south. No one thought that the Chinese army had appeared in the Bohai Sea overnight.

The letter of emergency to the capital from Dengzhou land, due to the heavy rain for three consecutive days, did not arrive in the capital until about six days later, and at this time, the Chinese army had already landed at Dagukou.