The Rise of History’s Most Powerful Empire

Zhong Yu's army came out in full force, and the Emperor of Ming Dynasty was anxiously searching for money and food, and wanted to form a new army to suppress the rebellion again.

It's a pity that although he took out part of his small treasury and ordered the officials and landlords to donate money and food, the income was not much after all.

And because the emperor lost most of the people's hearts, too few people were willing to join the army. Although the formation of the army was enough, the quality of the soldiers was far inferior to the previous batches.

In the end, after such a toss, the Emperor Ming only recruited a handful of 200,000 new troops, barely enough to guard the surrounding area of ​​the imperial capital, and it was a complete joke to use it to crusade against rebels.

After the recruiting of the new army was completed, only such a small number of soldiers and horses were obtained. The emperor's plan undoubtedly became a joke.

In desperation, the current old emperor of the Ming Dynasty could only order 200,000 new troops to defend the imperial capital and send out some troops to suppress the central provinces around the imperial capital. As for the safety and ownership of the other southern provinces, the old emperor could only express his helplessness.

In the mind of the old emperor, the six southern provinces didn't contribute much money to him after they took it back, and instead asked him, the court, to contribute a lot of money to the disaster relief.

Over the past few years, the imperial court has invested an unknown amount of food and salaries in the south, but in the end what they got was not enough.

In the hearts of the princes who are high in the court today, the six southern provinces have changed from a rich land to a barren land, and they have become like chicken ribs. Keeping them is tantamount to keeping a burden.

It might be a good choice to take advantage of this opportunity to get rid of this burden.

Today's officials of the Ming Dynasty have long since lost their aggressive mentality in the early days of the founding of the country. They have long been corrupted by the luxurious life. In their eyes, the territory where they can make money is the most important thing. If you can't get money, no matter how much you get, it's still trash.

Therefore, under the policy of passive resistance implemented by the imperial court, the 400,000 defenders in the six southern provinces, under the long-term lack of military pay, could not stop the imperial army's high morale to crusade against the slightest bit.

Under Zhong Yu's personal leadership, the army of millions was like a tiger out of the cage, declaring its majesty and strength to everyone with incomparable wantonness.

The army quickly invaded the six southern provinces, once again announcing the arrival of the last master to the people here.

This time, the people in the six southern provinces actually welcomed the arrival of the imperial army.

Because they discovered that although the power of the Yu Kingdom was expelled last time, the Ming Dynasty government that followed did not bring them any good life. The gap between heaven and earth.

In addition, the local garrison harassed the people everywhere, looting property was considered minor, harming local women, and wanton killing of innocent people was even more common. People everywhere have nowhere to appeal for grievances, and they have long been looking forward to the return of the imperial army.

Zhong Yu didn't feel too happy about these welcomes, because he knew that the reason why these common people welcomed him was just to miss his previous benefits. As long as there is someone who can give these common people better treatment, they will immediately abandon themselves, just like abandoning the Ming Dynasty now.

Besides, the betrayal of millions of troops in the six southern provinces taught Zhong Yu a good lesson, and he thoroughly recognized the untrustworthy facts of these people.

This time, the six southern provinces were recovered. Because of previous experience, it did not take too long. The entire regime change was completed in about three months.

After taking down the six southern provinces, Zhong Yu did not go further to crusade on other territories, but sent more troops to the six provinces to clean up the local bandits and wipe out the remnants of the Ming Dynasty.

These are not important, the important thing is that Zhong Yu intends to start liquidating those who dared to betray him before.

Therefore, in order to avoid unnecessary turmoil, it is necessary to increase the local garrison.

This time the cleanup lasted for two months, and the main targets were the local big landlords and nobles, as well as some remnants of the Ming Dynasty army, many of whom had betrayed Zhong Yu before.

After the cleaning was completed, Zhong Yu began to target the Ming Dynasty again.

Excluding the garrisons used to guard the 12 provinces, Zhong Yu mobilized an army of about 800,000 to attack the west that had not been touched by Zhong Yuran before the Ming Dynasty.

There are five provinces in the west of Ming Dynasty, which are mainly used to defend the Ba Kingdom, Shu Kingdom and Qi Kingdom in the west.

Because the three countries formed a strategic alliance, although each country was not very powerful, and was a little weaker than Ming Dynasty, they combined to become a colossus, and no one wanted to provoke it.

Daming is one of them who doesn't want to be provoked.

But others don't want to recruit, these three countries want to provoke others, especially Qi, which has the most borders with Daming, sends some small troops to attack Daming almost every year, within ten years there will be a massacre of more than 100,000 people war.

In addition to the frequent wars that led to the small population of the five provinces and poor living and economic poverty, they also trained a frontier army capable of conscripting and fighting.

The number of this frontier army is not large, only a few 300,000, because the Ming Dynasty did not have so much money and food to support them. It is also a defensive measure to limit the expansion of the frontier army.

Especially in recent years, due to the continuous emergence of internal and external troubles in the Ming Dynasty, the food and salaries of the frontier troops in the five western provinces are often in short supply, and they are often paid for one month and then stopped for five or six months, causing many people in the frontier army to be unable to eat Not to mention morale.

In the past, people in the western region were angry at the discrimination against people from other regions of the Ming Dynasty, and hated the titles of barbarian, bandit and bandit that those people imposed on them.

Now that they have cut off their own food and pay, the dissatisfaction in the hearts of these frontier soldiers has finally reached its peak.

So when Zhong Yu's army came to the west, a total of 300,000 frontier troops killed the imperial supervising army sent to monitor him, and surrendered to Yuguo.

Zhong Yu was overjoyed when he received the news, and quickly ordered the mobilization of food and salaries to distribute to the 300,000 frontier troops who had been short of military funds for a long time, intending to use money and food to buy these troops.

The Qi State in the east is also a great border threat to Zhong Yu who has taken over the west. These 300,000 frontier soldiers who have dealt with Qi State for a long time are just good guards.

With these troops, Zhong Yu left another 200,000 to strengthen the defense of the western region, and at the same time as a surveillance, it was enough to ensure that the five western provinces were firmly in Zhong Yu's hands.

After winning the western part, Zhong Yu finally completed his strategic plan for the Ming Dynasty.

After Zhong Yu's continuous weakening of Ming's strength, there were only four provinces in the middle and two provinces in the north. The strength was far from being called an empire.

Next, Zhong Yu set his sights on other countries, intending to plunder enough land from other empires to call himself emperor, so as to break through the eighth-level boundary.