Chapter 88

After two straight days of rain, the weather finally cleared. For the crops in the fields, the rain had come just in time, but for the Taiping Camp, it could not have come at a worse moment.

Under the direction of Zhou Shixiang and Song Xianggong, the strategy for advancing on Xiangshan had already been settled and passed down to the squad-leader level, yet the rear camp had received no word of it at all.

Not only had no one told these old, weak, women, and children that they would be going to Xiangshan a thousand li away, no one had even told them that the Taiping Camp would soon be leaving Luoding.

To preserve secrecy, Zhou Shixiang issued a strict order: whoever leaked the news, regardless of who it was, would be executed without pardon.

Keeping the majority in the dark was not, in fact, Zhou Shixiang's usual way of doing things.

He very much wanted every man, woman, and child in the Taiping Camp to know what they were about to do, because only by knowing what they were doing could they follow with peace of mind, instead of deserting in large numbers on the road, or resisting, and thereby driving the whole camp's morale to rock bottom.

An army without morale could never accomplish the goal of a thousand-li redeployment; the most likely outcome was that it would scatter halfway there.

Yet even knowing that concealment did more harm than good, Zhou Shixiang still chose to conceal and seal off the news, because this was not a shift of a hundred li, but of a thousand — a complete abandonment of their homeland for an unfamiliar place.

And against that, his greatest enemy was not the Qing army, but the deep-rooted attachment to one's native soil peculiar to the Han people.

Luoding or Deqing, the distance between them was never very great. In the people's minds, both places were western Guangdong, both were their homeland, so going from Luoding to Deqing and from Deqing to Luoding made no difference.

They might never in their lives have been to the provincial capital, but visiting relatives in a neighboring county was common, so a distance of a hundred li meant nothing to them.

But if they were made to know they were going a thousand li away, and that they might never return home in this lifetime, most likely to die as lonely wandering ghosts in a foreign land, then most of them would surely panic.

Even with a butcher's blade at their necks forcing them to go, they would not go willingly, and desertion would naturally become their choice — and desertion was precisely what Zhou Shixiang could not tolerate, because he could not let the Taiping Camp lose its morale through the people's flight.

The people may be made to follow; they may not be made to understand.

Zhou Shixiang dared not take the risk. The composition of the Taiping Camp was far too complex.

If these common folk refused to go, it would be very hard for him to force them by arms, because his soldiers and the common people were one and the same.

So he could only keep them in the dark — conceal at every step, and keep concealing until the day the people, even if they learned the truth, could no longer turn back.

The ideological work on the officers was also done in batches. Zhou Shixiang first personally won over the officers of Mount Dajiao origin — Ge Zheng, Zhao Sihai, Ge Yi, Jiang He, and the rest.

What he said most to these men was that Luoding was too poor and Xiangshan too rich. If they stayed in Luoding, not only would there be no profit to be made, they would also be vulnerable to Qing attack.

Going to Xiangshan — though the road was dangerous — once they actually got there, they could make a fortune, and they would not have to fear the Qing army coming to fight.

If they truly could not hold, they would all just slip into the mountain hollows and go back to their old trade. Those who died would be the new recruits anyway; as long as the old brothers were around, what was there to fear?

In the end, Zhou Shixiang pounded his chest and painted glowing pictures of the fine prospects awaiting them in Xiangshan.

With a mix of coaxing and deception, he had the bandit-born company commanders grinning from ear to ear, every one of them rubbing his fists and wiping his palms, itching to set off at once for that Xiangshan County Brother Zhou had spoken of, to make their fortune.

As for the dangers they might face, they turned a blind eye to them. In any case, with Brother Zhou around, the brothers could not come to harm!

This blind arrogance and confidence was exactly what Zhou Shixiang needed. He did not fear these company commanders being arrogant; he only feared they were not arrogant enough.

Before an army was truly regularized, arrogance was a kind of capital, a kind of nerve. Of course, with Zhou Shixiang personally in command, he naturally had no need to worry that this arrogance would become the seed of defeat.

The only one whose head remained clear was Shao Jiugong. He was no fool — others might not know what going to Xiangshan meant, but how could he not?

Yet seeing everyone stirred up by Zhou Shixiang, he did not dare step forward and sing a different tune. Only after the others had left in high spirits did he haltingly voice his worries to Zhou Shixiang.

Shao Jiugong's worries were essentially identical to Song Xianggong's. The difference was that to Song Xianggong, Zhou Shixiang had offered a long explanation, while to Shao Jiugong, Zhou Shixiang needed only one sentence to make him give up the idea.

What Zhou Shixiang said was: "If you can scrub those few characters off your back, then you may stay."

You son of a bitch!

That was the first time since joining the Taiping Camp that Song Xianggong had cursed Zhou Shixiang in his heart.

After cursing, all he could do was heave a long sigh, with the helpless feeling of having boarded a pirate ship and being unable to get off: go to Xiangshan County it is, then. He could only hope that this son of a bitch Scholar Zhou was not leading him down the road to his death.

Tie Yi, as one of the Taiping Camp's only two probationary centurions, and also the commander of the engineer battalion that Zhou Shixiang relied on as his "magic weapon," received the most detailed instructions from Zhou Shixiang, who at the same time told him to return to camp immediately and prepare the weapon most urgently needed on the southward march — the Heaven-Shaking Thunder.

The so-called Heaven-Shaking Thunder was, in fact, a firecracker, only far more powerful than the traditional kind. The prototype of the Heaven-Shaking Thunder was made by Zhou Shixiang himself.

Because there was not enough iron, he could only make it from bamboo. The specific manufacturing process was this: take a section of bamboo with a node, clean out the debris inside the tube, bore a small hole in its side, then pour gunpowder into the tube.

After that, twist a fuse by wrapping gunpowder in paper, with one end resting on the powder inside the tube and the other end passed through the small hole in the bamboo wall and tied outside with hemp cord.

Once these steps were complete, a sheet of paper was stuffed into the tube over the surface of the gunpowder as a separator, some broken iron nails were sprinkled on the paper, and finally the tube was sealed shut tight with earth.

Traditional firecrackers used black powder, but this time Zhou Shixiang used corned powder, and added lethal iron nails. He had personally detonated one, and its effective kill radius was five meters.

That is to say, when a Heaven-Shaking Thunder exploded, not only would people within one to two meters of the blast center be directly harmed by the powder explosion, but the iron nails thrown out by the blast would also kill or wound enemies within five meters.

Beyond five meters, the penetrating power of the nails weakened. This was the shortcoming of using bamboo for the Heaven-Shaking Thunder.

If it were wrapped in iron, made into a true grenade like those used in later ages, the shrapnel alone could kill or wound a whole swath of enemies.

Conditions being inadequate, Zhou Shixiang could only pin his hopes on mass production of the Heaven-Shaking Thunder. He made three prototypes — two detonated, and one he gave to Tie Yi to take back to camp for trial manufacture.

The process for making the Heaven-Shaking Thunder was simple, and the raw materials were simple too, but a single thunder required at least five ounces of gunpowder, and the camp had in total less than two hundred jin of powder.

That meant that even if all the powder were used to make Heaven-Shaking Thunders, only four hundred could be produced.

For this, Zhou Shixiang simply told Tie Yi to start making them, because he needed to have a batch of Heaven-Shaking Thunders in hand immediately, so that Song Xianggong could truly believe they could blast their way all the way to Xiangshan.

As for gunpowder, Tang Sanshui would more or less have a batch, and once they set out, they would find ways to gather saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal to prepare their own manufacture.

Otherwise, even with the best tools and the best methods, limited by the shortage of powder, it would be hard to bring out their full power.

When Zhou Shixiang and Song Xianggong did the ideological work on the squad leaders together, Zhou Shixiang's message was completely different from what he had told the company commanders. What he spoke of most was survival — going to Xiangshan for no other reason than a mouthful of food!

The squad leaders all came from dire poverty. Before joining the Taiping Camp, they had been honest, simple farmers.

They were not like Ge Zheng and the others, who had dared to become bandits who robbed homes and plundered houses, so they had lived very hard lives, often with the whole family having no idea where the next meal would come from.

Now that the Taiping Camp had finally taken them in, given them a future, and given their wives, children, and elders a full belly, what more could they ask for?

The Battalion Commander said that if they stayed in Luoding, everyone would starve to death. That was no lie.

Everyone could see the state of Luoding with their own eyes — it was so poor it rattled. Though they had seized some grain from the Deqing Green Standard, it could not withstand so many mouths eating.

Everyone had managed a household before; could sitting and eating through a mountain ever last in this world?

So be it. Since the Battalion Commander had found a way out for everyone, and Luoding truly could not feed them all, then they would grit their teeth and follow the Battalion Commander.

As long as their wives and children got a mouthful of food, even if they died on the road, it would not be in vain.

On the nineteenth, Tang Sanshui of Deqing sent word that he was willing to do this deal with Zhou Shixiang, but the deadline would have to be pushed back a little, because he did not have that much powder on hand.

He had already sent men to Guangzhou to buy it secretly, and once the powder was gathered, the two sides could trade at once.

Zhou Shixiang was not worried that Tang Sanshui would back out of the deal, because the benefits to him were too great.

If he himself were not a Han, Zhou Shixiang would even have wanted to sell Gaozhou to Tang Sanshui as well — and he would not have had to do anything, only reveal to the other side that Gaozhou no longer had any Daxi Army garrison.

The Qing army in Guangdong could not beat the Daxi Army, but dealing with the other Southern Ming forces was a trivial matter.

First take Luoding, then seize Gaozhou — with one great merit after another, this former Battalion Commander Tang Sanshui could surely get himself a Vice Regional Commander's post.

But alas, he was a Han. Selling Luoding was already disgraceful enough; if he truly sold Gaozhou as well, then even if he was not a traitor to the Han, he might as well be.

Besides, the Luoding he sold to Tang Sanshui was nothing but an empty city, with no common folk for the Green Standard to prey upon. But Gaozhou had over a hundred thousand subjects of the Great Ming.

If the Qing army truly took Gaozhou, the sin he committed would be enormous. Knowing the Qing army's character, if they did not massacre the city, it would be as if the Buddha himself had burned incense.

Let him wait a little longer, then. A thousand-li redeployment was not armchair strategy, something you could accomplish with a wave of the hand.

If only the forward camp were moving, the difficulty would not be great, but with nearly ten thousand old, weak, women, and children of the rear camp following, the road would be far harder.

Before setting out, all preparations had to be done thoroughly, to minimize unnecessary casualties on the road, and to make every effort to carry away all the supplies that could be carried.