Chapter 328: Liu Xiang's Anxiety

Liu Xiang hailed from Lamma Island, but he made his fortune in the Chaoshan region. So just as Zheng Zhilong made Anping his old nest, he too was a local powerbroker throughout Chaoshan. And the main force of the Liu Xiang Gang was now entrenched around Dahao Island at the Haojiang Estuary.

Half a year had already passed since the destruction of Li Kuiqi's bloc. After a series of probes and consolidations, the power structure of the South China Sea had stabilized.

Bounded by the blockade line of Xiamen, Penghu, and Tainan, the Yuehai pirates to the south now dared not cross that line by a single step. As for the Min Sea pirates who once rode the storm... they had long since vanished like smoke.

Using Fuzhou and Xiamen as strongholds throughout Fujian, the subordinates of "Cao Chuan, Assistant Regional Commander of Coastal Defense for Xiamen and Other Places, Acting Deputy Regional Commander of Great Ming Fujian" had swept the coastal areas countless times with a dragnet screening method, forcibly creating a splendid scene of stability and unity.

Yet for traditional pirates, this situation was unbearably vexing — Liu Xiang, for example.

The matter went back to that great battle.

On the day Li Kuiqi's Great Gang was annihilated, large numbers of scattered pirates fled south and, on the spot, threw in their lot with the Liu Xiang Gang, which had been watching the situation from Dongshan Bay.

Shopkeeper Liu, congratulating himself on having escaped disaster, saw his strength swell dramatically. At the same time, he not only received battle reports from the mouths of the fugitives, but also frequently dispatched scouts to the Xiamen area to gather intelligence, feeling rather eager to make a move. After all, the north had become a chaotic mess, and his own forces were expanding massively — any normal person would have had ideas.

However, a few days later, Liu Xiang reversed his original intention and led his followers south to Chaoshan — strategically, this was equivalent to turtling up. Great Boss Liu had abandoned any intention of stirring the muddy waters around Xiamen.

What drove his decision was the hard power the other side kept revealing.

First, the transmigrators' warships were gradually exposing their terrifying side.

Originally, to Liu Xiang's ears, the so-called Cao Clan warships that had suddenly appeared were merely Chinese-style imitations of the foreigners' square-rigged ships — fierce though they might be, they had actually taken advantage of surprise, landing a sucker punch on Li Kuiqi.

If you dealt with that kind of opponent properly, the brothers still had ways... back in the day, Zheng Zhilong hadn't let the Red Hairs get the better of him either.

Yet reality was nothing like he had imagined. When Shopkeeper Liu's own scouts returned, he instantly felt as if he'd taken the Ice Bucket Challenge: cold from head to toe.

The scouts were all old brothers who would never exaggerate: warships swift as galloping horses and fierce of cannon fire were hunting down remnants everywhere in Zhangzhou Bay. The imagined scene of Fujianese pirates and government troops locked in mutual slaughter and pursuit simply did not exist.

The Official Army had indeed taken only a few days to completely stamp out and crush a great gang of tens of thousands; the latter had been utterly powerless to fight back.

This unprecedented bandit-suppression model, like chopping melons and slicing vegetables, exceeded the understanding of Liu Xiang's group — medieval naval warfare was not fought this way. Even if the pirates lost a round, the contest should have dragged on for a period before the outcome was decided.

The successive great battles Zheng Zhilong had fought against the government troops at Tongshan Garrison back then had followed that model.

By this point, Liu Xiang had no choice but to elevate his assessment of the Cao Clan's gunboats to an unprecedented level.

But that was only the beginning. When more scouts hurried back, Liu Xiang received another piece of dire news: the Cao Clan's gunboats could lower their sails and move against the wind, as swift as galloping horses...

After hysterically verifying the truth of this intelligence N times, the Grand Steward finally grasped the opponent's true capability and understood the reason this naval battle had been so bizarre.

At this point, the pirate leaders, who had originally been full of ideas, all shut their mouths one by one and turned into little brothers. No one understood better than pirates what moving against the wind signified: regardless of how this suddenly emerged Cao fleet had done it, in short, the current situation was certainly not good.

And as a Grand Steward who commanded tens of thousands, judging the disparity in strength between enemy and self was a fundamental skill. So he swiftly issued the order for the entire gang to prepare for battle. This was not to fish in troubled waters at Zhangzhou Bay, but to be ready to flee south at any moment.

Soon, two more pieces of intelligence arrived.

One: the Official Army had unprecedentedly offered bounties of genuine gold and silver. The coast of Zhangzhou Bay had now become a death zone. Pirates who in the past could easily rest and reorganize in villages were now all being seized and sent to Xiamen to claim rewards.

Two: strange ships were cruising near Da'ao Bay.

Upon hearing the second piece of intelligence, Liu Xiang knew perfectly well that this was aimed at him. Although Shopkeeper Liu could not articulate phrases like "the vast ocean of a people's war," he understood the meaning: the remnant pirates in Zhangzhou Bay were already finished, and the Official Army was beginning to free up its hands and intended to head south!

Da'ao Bay lay between Xiamen and Dongshan Bay, where Liu Xiang was entrenched — not far at all. Sensing a dense crisis, Shopkeeper Liu no longer hesitated. He immediately led the bulk of his bandit gang south from Dongshan Bay, heading straight for Chaoshan to temporarily evade the Official Army's sharp edge.

As he set sail, the Grand Steward silently cast a glance to the north: he had a premonition that going to Fujian to "do business" in the future would likely be very difficult.

Bad premonitions always prove true. After the large force arrived in Chaoshan for rest and reorganization, Shopkeeper Liu, still receiving a constant stream of intelligence, found the situation sliding more and more in the direction he had guessed.

After mopping up Zhangzhou Bay, the Cao forces, with their Kun hair, soon coerced those few good-for-nothings of the Zheng Family into surrender, sweeping away the family fortune Zheng Zhilong had painstakingly built.

Upon receiving this news, a certain Liu could not help but heave a long sigh: though there had been constant friction between everyone in the past, without a doubt, he, Liu Xiang, still respected Zheng Yiguan as a hero. Now, learning of the Zheng Family's downfall, he felt the grief of the fox for the hare, a pang of sorrow in his heart.

After this, the Cao Clan began large-scale construction at Zhongzuosuo, expanding the harbor, looking every inch the owner.

Liu Xiang could only smile bitterly once more: back then, Zheng Zhilong had described this post-amnesty scene to everyone more than once. Now Zhilong was dead, and Zhongzuosuo had been taken over by the Cao Clan, still bustling with construction — truly, the affairs of the world are hard to predict!

Having fled to Chaoshan, Liu Xiang reorganized his forces while continuously dispatching numerous scouts to Xiamen, and even to Taiwan: no one dared to underestimate this unknown power base any longer.

Yet over the following half year, Shopkeeper Liu gradually turned into a mild melancholic.

What drove him to such extreme dejection was a series of "friction" incidents that could only be described as "paranormal."

After completing reorganization in Chaoshan, the great gang, now swollen to 25,000 men, was ready to "get to work."

Getting to work was a necessity. The daily consumption of tens of thousands of men sitting idle was an enormous figure — without working, what would they eat?

However, times had changed: without first ascertaining the details of the powerful enemy to the north, the great gang naturally dared not test its edge again. So Liu Xiang led the main force south to Guangdong to forage, while leaving a detached force behind to probe the Cao Clan's response.

Historically, after Zheng Zhilong received amnesty and occupied Xiamen, it was not all smooth sailing — he subsequently carried out a series of campaigns to cut down his old brothers, and it was only after the last one, Liu Xiang, was finished that the Zheng Clan formally unified the seas.

This process of "cutting down the feudatories" was very lengthy. Liu Xiang's death occurred in 1635, meaning Zheng Zhilong spent a full seven years to settle all the pirate strongholds in Fujian and Guangdong.

During those seven years, Liu Xiang repeatedly plundered the coastal areas of Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang, burning and killing everything in his path, his destructive power immense.

From this, one can see that the effective defensive range of medieval maritime territory was very small: after Zheng Zhilong occupied Xiamen, Liu Xiang and other pirates all repeatedly led forces to raid and plunder the Fujian coast.

This was equivalent to swaggering right past the doorstep of the Zheng Clan's defense zone, yet it was useless — the Zheng Clan simply did not possess that kind of tight maritime blockade capability. Hostile pirates, and large bands of them at that, could very easily bypass the Xiamen area and reach the Fujian and Zhejiang coast further north.

Thus, after the transmigrators occupied Xiamen, Liu Xiang likewise launched operations just as he had historically.

Of course, due respect still had to be given; after all, the strength the Kun People had displayed was beyond what the historical Zheng Zhilong could match. So before leading the main force to Guangdong, Liu Xiang deliberately arranged for several bands of varying sizes to raid the Fujian coast via different routes.

If the transmigrators responded feebly, then what would come next would be the great gang of tens of thousands. Yes, this was a simple probe... a probe wouldn't get anyone pregnant.

Yet any traditional method that seemed perfectly normal became utterly useless when it encountered a certain mysterious power.

After grabbing a few hauls at the Pearl River Estuary and just as he was mulling over his next move, Shopkeeper Liu received an urgent report and instantly got pregnant on the spot — every single one of the detached forces he had sent out had been completely annihilated.

These detached forces varied in size; the largest was a bandit gang of 500 men and 10 ships. There were also two other bands with fewer men and ships, but all were pirate elites intimately familiar with the sea conditions of Fujian and Guangdong and veterans of a hundred battles.

Yet the matter was just this bizarre: whether they took the Xiamen route, the Penghu route, or the mid-strait route, the three pirate bands — which had set out at different times and had no communication with one another — were all intercepted by enemy ships along the Xiamen line, and quite a few of them ended up feeding the sea turtles.

The battle scenes were extremely brief. This time, the Liu Family pirates finally experienced firsthand the helplessness Li Kuiqi had once felt: a single Youguang-class Type 3 ship, ignoring wind direction, surrounded ten Chinese-style ships on the open sea, constantly circling and pounding them with cannon fire. The pirates aboard were like chickens in a cage, blasted to death by dense artillery fire within that cordoned-off area.

The so-called scattering in all directions to escape was utterly useless: like chasing old oxen with swift horses, before these men could flee beyond visual range, the gunboat intercepted the scattered pirate ships one by one, and every ship that was a bit slow to surrender was blasted and sunk into the sea.

The battle of one versus ten ended just like that; the pirates found it profoundly surreal.

The encounters of the other two bands were much the same: two patrol ships equipped with only a small number of cannons very easily captured five pirate vessels. The pirates, having suffered heavy death and injury, were all escorted back to Xiamen and herded into labor camps.

Fortunately, Xiamen was in a construction phase, with many long-term and short-term laborers sent from various places, so the scouts very easily made contact with these unlucky fellows who had been sent to build roads and then learned everything.

And then Liu Xiang also learned of it.

And then Shopkeeper Liu was so enraged he got pregnant... who said a probe wouldn't get anyone pregnant?