Chapter 34: Warfare

Si Xiaofei never imagined that the leader of the Taiping Sect rebellion would be someone as aimless-looking as Zhang Jue.

But no matter what, the Taiping Sect uprising is now an established fact.

Now the top priority for Da Qian is to mobilize the entire army and, in an extremely short time, crush the Yellow Turban Army!

As long as the Yellow Turban Army is crushed in a short time, Da Qian will remain one of the five great dynasties of the Heavenly Martial Continent, with no worries over its realm!

On the contrary, if Da Qian, while suppressing the Yellow Turban Army, once shows signs of decline.

then countless ambitious people inside and outside Da Qian will immediately act upon hearing the wind.

Only then will Da Qian truly stand at the brink of survival or extinction.

Although the current Yellow Turban Army appears mighty, it is merely rootless duckweed.

What Da Qian truly fears is the group of instigators behind the Yellow Turban uprising.

Any dynasty, no matter how strong it once was, will always have rebel forces lurking in the shadows.

This has nothing to do with whether the dynasty is strong and its ruler virtuous; it is because human ambition knows no bounds.

If the state is strong, those rebel forces will naturally continue to lurk in the dark, daring not to act rashly;

but if the state weakens, under the push of countless ambitious people, rebel forces will sprout like spring bamboo shoots after rain, endless and impossible to slaughter completely.

Da Qian, since establishing its rule over the Heavenly Martial Continent, has endured over five hundred years, and the slaughter it has caused far exceeds a million.

Not only enemies have died under Da Qian dynasty's merciless iron hooves; many of its own people have as well.

Now, although there are many forces within Da Qian dissatisfied with the court, their strength is overly scattered and of uneven quality.

Although they may cause Da Qian some trouble, they cannot shake its foundation.

But if someone could gather these forces into a single rope, they could certainly deliver a fatal blow to this withered tree of Da Qian.

And now this person has appeared; he is the Taiping Sect's advocate, Zhang Jue.

On the other hand, Da Qian Emperor Si Xiaofei, in order to swiftly suppress the Yellow Turban rebels across Da Qian's Five Provinces, so as to prevent the situation throughout Da Qian from worsening further.

He fully organized capable generals and dispatched elite troops to Da Qian's Five Provinces to quell all disturbances.

After much deliberation, the Da Qian court decided to divide its troops into three routes to suppress the rebellion.

Each of Da Qian's three War Gods would lead the Da Qian army, taking responsibility for the battles in Da Qian's Central Region Five Provinces; two of the War Gods each commanded 150,000 troops, setting out from the two passes on the flanks of Qian Capital.

To suppress the already outwardly expanding Zhang Bao and Zhang Liang.

Meanwhile, the central army, under the strongest War God, led 200,000 troops to the Luzhou battlefield to contend with Zhang Jue's main force.

As for the Yellow Turbans during this period, after the addition of Huang Kui, Meng Hu Wang, and Meng Zhang, the Taiping Sect, which ought to have risen hastily, quickly perfected some shortcomings in their hands.

During this time, the Yellow Turbans not only passively accepted blood transfusions from various behind-the-scenes manipulators, but also actively sought to learn army training methods and such dragon-slaying arts from them.

And for various reasons, the people behind the Yellow Turbans are shady, making it unsuitable to directly send military aid to the Taiping Sect.

However, the Taiping Sect, under Huang Kui's instruction, nevertheless requested many veteran soldiers with war experience or wounded soldiers from those people behind them.

After these people arrived at the Taiping Sect, they cooperated with Meng Zhang, who had just come to take over the forces of Cloud Prince's Mansion, to drill the Yellow Turban army.

This gave the originally scattered peasant militia at least a semblance of a regular army, making it far stronger than the initial Yellow Turban—by hundreds or thousands of times.

Even when the Yellow Turban army first rose up, it did not disappoint expectations, even if Meng Zhang and others did not act directly.

Yet the Yellow Turban army still, relying on basic training and numerical superiority, defeated Da Qian's lax militia, leaving them helmetless and armorless, in utter disarray.

Only a few withdrew afterward; the rest either were captured along with their cities or were sent straight to meet Yellow Heaven.

Therefore, the historical Yellow Turban is by no means today's reality; Zhang Jue, headquartered at the Luzhou headquarters, worried that Zhang Liang's lack of experience in outward expedition would make him inferior to the court's veteran generals who have campaigned for years.

Thus he sent his disciples Huang Kui, Shan Shituo, and Meng Hu Wang to assist Zhang Liang and Zhang Bao.

Thus, in this situation, although the Yellow Turban army consists of civilians and suffers severe shortages of weapons and armor, with low combat effectiveness, it cannot be ignored because of its huge numbers.

Relying on human-sea tactics, the Da Qian army, while defending cities with all its might, still finds major cities in grave peril.

Until the arrival of Da Qian court's three route armies, the main Yellow Turban forces faced off at Luzhou south of Qianzhou (where the Da Qian imperial capital resides) and at the flanking Ruizhou and Wuzhou.

Front battlefield: Zhang Jue personally leads over a million troops, together with Meng Zhang, facing off against the court's state-destroying general Chou Longteng at Luzhou.

Left battlefield: Zhang Bao leads several hundred thousand troops, together with Huang Kui, Shan Shituo, and Zhang Conglong, facing off against the court's forbidden army War God Tan Mengjun at Ruizhou.

Right battlefield: Zhang Liang leads several hundred thousand troops, together with Meng Hu Wang, facing off against the court general Shen Zhian at Wuzhou.

And Meng Zhang is indeed a Saint Rank Commander-in-Chief of Base Command 104; not long after Chou Longteng led the Da Qian army toward Luzhou, he set an ambush in the area north of Luzhou.

Relying on the Yellow Turban army's numerical superiority, in one battle they wiped out 50,000 of the Qian troops and won the first major victory since formally opening war with Da Qian.

Although the battle results were not spectacular, the Yellow Turban army also suffered casualties of over ten thousand men and horses.

However, the Yellow Turban forces stationed at the Luzhou headquarters still number several hundred thousand, and moreover they have recruited another 100,000 able-bodied youths from the populace, restoring troop strength to roughly former levels.

The Yellow Turban army lacks military pay, but as long as they have grain and fodder they can fight, and their reserve troops are also abundant.

However, the Da Qian court's army must be paid; if consumption continues thus, Da Qian, having lost the three central provinces, cannot withstand such drain.

Most importantly, through this battle the Da Qian court also learned that the Yellow Turban army is not as weak as they imagined.

Although their equipment is crude, they have undergone basic training and their resistance will is very tenacious, wanting to swiftly suppress the Yellow Turban army.

Under these circumstances, it is almost impossible.

Currently Chou Longteng still has over ten thousand troops, all of them elite.

But trying to defeat Meng Zhang's command of hundreds of thousands of fearless Yellow Turban troops with these is undoubtedly extremely difficult.

Left with no choice, Chou Longteng was forced to shift to the defensive, meanwhile replenishing troops locally and preparing to hold the city, beginning a defensive counteroffensive.

Both sides clashed dozens of times in these three provinces, with alternating victories, and the situation gradually fell into a stalemate.

Da Qian army's situation on the front Luzhou battlefield is unfavorable, which inevitably makes the Da Qian court worried, but the situation in the other two directions is even more intense.

In the forbidden army, the Confucian-born Tan Mengjun encountered the similarly Confucian-born Huang Kui; their friction was extremely intense, making Ruizhou the main battlefield between them on the left front.

(End of Chapter)