Chapter 443: A Human-Head Armory and the Bondservants

Santunying Fortress was ultimately captured without any real danger.

The soldiers immediately extinguished the fire in the rear hall, preventing the blaze from spreading. At the same time, the total of 556 Tartar soldiers inside and outside the city, dead or alive, not a single one missing, were all left on this land that did not belong to them.

When the first ray of sunlight shone from the east, Santunying Fortress had already returned to its appearance of yesterday. Looking from the outside, everything was normal, with absolutely no trace of battle.

The drawbridges of the three city gates were raised high, the banners of the Bordered White Banner still fluttered atop the walls, and the lookouts in the corner towers were on duty as usual.

The dead men and horses that had fled outside the city last night had all been carried back inside, and even some fresh bloodstains outside the moat had been carefully covered with sand and soil.

And inside the city? A slaughter assembly was underway.

On Cross Street in the city, rows of corpses were being processed.

All the Banner troops' clothing and armor were stripped off, their heads were chopped off, and the identification tags on their bodies were collected. The old guardsmen moonlighting as executioners were busy cutting off heads, while quartermasters with paper and brush stood by, registering and recording everything.

The severed heads would be immediately pickled with salt... It was already the end of March, and with temperatures rising in the north, these heads would rot if not pickled.

Under normal circumstances, heads used for claiming merit were simply coated with a layer of calcium oxide, but this method caused the heads to deform significantly, affecting their appearance.

So the Transmigrators, who were not short on money, ordered their men to take out the crude salt from the warehouse, grind it into fine powder, and use it to pickle the heads.

It was at this moment that the group of Transmigrators gained a deeper understanding of the complexity of war: no matter how well you plan beforehand, there are always oversights. This pickling of heads, for instance, had been overlooked by everyone. Had Santun Camp's military supplies not been so abundant, another blunder would have occurred.

Fortunately, pickling heads was not an urgent military matter; mending the fold after the sheep were lost was perfectly fine, and they could just have some more sent over from Tianjin. Not only that, Santun Camp even sent a report back to their old nest: when the next transport fleet comes, send an extra boat or two of refined salt — the lads here need it for making roasts!

Before this, the Transmigrators heading north had no intention of dumping salt in Tianjin. They knew that the north was even more short of salt, so every interest group kept a very close eye on the salt trade. With the northern expedition team's current strength, there was no necessity to poke this hornet's nest.

Therefore, even the salt the Transmigrators themselves ate was initially purchased locally in Tianjin.

Now it seemed this model needed to change: first send a few boats of refined salt for their own use, and after Cao Zong presented the heads and made a name for himself before the Emperor, then consider the issue of dumping salt in the north.

Apart from the heads, the remaining corpses were piled behind the Water Pass, awaiting transport. Santunying Fortress was connected to the river; a tributary of the Luan River in the north could reach all the way to Xifengkou. At this moment, in a mountain col to the north, someone was digging pits, and all the corpses would eventually be shipped by boat for burial.

In fact, not long before, the bondservants in the city had buried many corpses in the same way.

When Santunying Fortress was breached previously, aside from Regional Commander Zhu Guoyan who hanged himself, one part of the people fled, one part died in battle, and one part surrendered.

At that time, it was the bitter cold of deep winter, so the corpses in the city were carelessly piled inside houses, with no one bothering about them — the Tartars never imagined they would end up garrisoning this place permanently.

By the end of February, the great army returned, and all those who had surrendered were taken away beyond the pass. Not long after, as the weather warmed, the remaining bondservants, fearing the corpses would spread plague, went outside the city, dug pits, and hastily buried these bodies.

Unexpectedly, today, buried beside these soldiers were the corpses of the very perpetrators from back then — one could call it karmic retribution.

While the underlings were busily processing the spoils of war, the leaders were also inspecting the spoils... Several Transmigrators were examining the storehouses inside the city one by one.

As a strategic location, Santun Camp was normally responsible not only for supplying several Great Wall passes in the north but also for supplying the route to Shanhai Pass in the east, so the city had many large military supply warehouses.

Currently, the majority of these warehouses had been emptied, leaving behind only some "unique" materials. For example, the stock in this armory was very complete.

"Damn, I've heard about this for ages, but today's the first time I'm seeing it."

The speaker was Zhang Zhongqi, and he was holding a suit of Zhajia Armor Armor armor in his hands.

The armor plates of the Zhajia Armor Armor were already rusted, covered in holes from corrosion, and even the cords threading the armor were rotten and tattered, snapping at the slightest tug.

"What you've got there is nothing. Look at this."

The speaker was Qian Tieshan. The burly old Qian was now picking up a chopping blade and swinging it down at a wooden rack in front of him.

The outcome was as expected: the blade broke. Looking at the cross-section, the iron material, riddled with black impurities, was discernible to the naked eye... Iron of this grade, in the Kiln District, was used as high-quality ore.

There were also bows that snapped at the first pull, gun barrels full of burrs inside, Three-Eye Blunderbusses that made one's blood run cold, and so on and so forth.

"How the hell could this dynasty not fall? Look at the crap stored in this critical military location — it's not even as good as the equipment of the bondservants outside! No wonder even the Tartars didn't want it."

After the inspection, Zhang Zhongqi said, both helpless and somewhat angry.

"There's one point you're wrong about." Qian Tieshan smiled, his expression one that said you're still very young: "The equipment on those Manchu and Mongol warriors outside, including the bondservants, was all taken from Santun Camp."

Qian Tieshan continued to explain: "With the Tartars being so dirt-poor, giving a bondservant a suit of leather armor would be considered generous. Iron armor was simply impossible, let alone three layers inside and out. The good equipment on these garrison Banner troops was all plundered from the local armories. If you don't believe it, you can check the markings — I guarantee they're all produced by the Great Ming."

"Then what about all this?" Zhang Zhongqi gestured around him in a circle.

"Apportioned by the civil officials." Qian Tieshan spread his hands, a sheepish smile on his face: "No one can block the right of the civil official systems in the Ministry of War and Ministry of Works to rake in silver, so everything in this storehouse is junk and rejects used to make up the numbers."

"Every military supply base basically has this kind of scrap warehouse; it's already an open secret. If a military unit wants good armor and weapons, they have to pay extra silver to buy them. The poor ones, the guest armies, those stubborn and honest fools who need to be taught a lesson — they get sent here to receive junk equipment for battle, and then lose their lives."

After listening to Qian Tieshan's account, all the helplessness and anger among the people present ultimately turned into a long, deep sigh.

After inspecting the armory, the Transmigrators also went to inspect the grain storehouse, the general supply storehouse, and the fodder depot outside the East Gate.

Aside from the grain storehouse and fodder depot, which still held enough grain and fodder for two Niru to consume, the remaining storehouses, as expected, had nothing left — all had been looted by the Eight Banners Army.

After roughly tallying the remaining quantity of grain and fodder, the Transmigrators discovered that these supplies were just enough for the defending troops to last three months.

Zhang Zhongqi had something to say again: "It seems Comrade Huang Taiji, while verbally insisting on holding the cities and not leaving, actually had some vague idea in his heart."

The others all nodded in agreement.

This Jisi Incident was the first time the Manchu Qing entered the pass. Throughout the entire process, it was not only the Great Ming's ruler and subjects who responded with chaos; in truth, Huang Taiji and the Eight Banners troops were equally cautious and anxious, crossing the river by feeling the stones.

Therefore, despite achieving unimaginably huge military gains beforehand, the impoverished Manchu Qing rulers still placed themselves in a weak position. Their style of action was always to test each step as they went. Regardless of what their propaganda said, what they actually presented was a posture ready to retract at any moment.

These three months' worth of grain and fodder were also of no small help to the Transmigrators. Apart from the first batch of grain and fodder shipped over, future transport convoys departing from Tianjin could be reduced in scale, eliminating the large cart convoys and using only horses to transport some other supplies.

The underlings were busy, the military personnel were inventorying supplies, so what was the Intelligence Department doing? Subversion.

The two heads of the Intelligence Department, who had remained obscure and almost never spoke during battle plan discussions, finally became busy after the capture of Santun Camp this time.

Yao Jianshe and Xue Haiyuan were now in a side hall of the General Headquarters, organizing manpower to conduct rapid interrogations of the prisoners.

After last night, including the lightly and seriously wounded, there were over seventy prisoners in total who could still breathe. Among these, the seriously wounded were simply finished off; those left now were mostly lightly wounded and some bondservants who had surrendered.

The first batch to be interrogated were naturally these surrendered bondservants. As for those steadfastly unyielding and the genuine Tartars, they were locked up for now, to be dealt with when they had the spare time.

Since they were willing to surrender, these bondservants were the type who valued their own lives more heavily. This kind of person usually didn't require severe torture, and this era lacked various ideologies and thoughts to arm them, so very quickly, these twenty-odd people spilled all the intelligence they knew.

The profession of bondservant, though they also kept the money-pig-tail queue, had a difference of heaven and earth from the genuine Tartars; after all, one was a slave, the other a slave owner.

The bondservants appeared to be aiding the tyrant, farming and fighting for the Manchu Qing slave owners, but the root of the problem did not lie with these people.

All the bondservants were Han people who had previously lived in Liaodong. These ordinary farmers and military households were subjected to mass slaughter and capture after Nurhaci raised his army. By the Chongzhen era, it could be said there were no Han people left in Liaodong — the survivors had all been turned into bondservants.

Later, after the fall of the Ming, the entire Qing state became a semi-slave society. By then, the bondservants had continued for several generations, and their descendants had long been assimilated, becoming true Manchu people.

Therefore, the root cause still lay with the Ming court.

It was precisely because the Ming state's national power was weak and the court was fatuous that they retreated step by step, handing over the vast land and people of Liaodong entirely to the Manchu Qing, causing them to become bondservants in helplessness — if they had any choice at all, who would be willing to be captured and turned into slaves utterly without dignity?

On this issue, the Transmigrators were also quite helpless.

These Bondservants, just over a decade ago or even a few years ago, were actually all subjects of the Great Ming — Military Households who honestly farmed the land and delivered grain to the General-in-Chief.

In the Current Age, these people have been captured, surrendered, and passed between masters, and now they've fallen into the hands of the Transmigrators... Forget it. Once we're done using them, let's just send this bunch off to Southeast Asia. No one there treats them as Slaves; on the contrary, if they work hard and are lucky enough to survive, they might even enslave some natives to open up plantations and become true masters themselves for once.