Chapter 128: Li Zicheng's Beijing (Seeking Recommendations, Seeking Collections)

Today was the eighth day of the fourth month, only one day away from the date Song Xiance had calculated on his fingers for the Shun Emperor's second enthronement ceremony. According to the original schedule, he should have been happily carrying out the rehearsal for the enthronement ceremony — that is, the dress rehearsal.

But yesterday morning, after the memorial of apology from Li Guo, the Marquis of Bo and General of the Rear Camp, was delivered to the Hall of Martial Valor where the Shun Emperor was staying, the enthronement ceremony set for the ninth of the fourth month was cancelled, and the Shun Emperor's good mood vanished in an instant.

Because in his memorial of apology, Li Guo reported shocking bad news — the attack on the Tianjin garrison had ended in disastrous defeat!

After four consecutive days of bloody battle, and having at one point fought their way into the southern city of Tianjin, the sudden arrival of several thousand iron cavalry personally led by Wu Sangui turned the originally favorable battle situation sharply around. The forces under Li Guo, Li Yan, and Chen Yongfu fled in panic with heavy losses! Tang Tong's entire force was annihilated!

In addition, Li Yan's wife, the female general Red Lady, was defeated by the Zheng family's naval force in the battle on the Wei River, and her whereabouts are unknown.

At present, Li Guo, Li Yan, and Chen Yongfu have gathered their remaining troops and retreated to hold the county seat of Wuqing, and they are requesting that Li Zicheng send a large force as reinforcements to fight for the Tianjin garrison again!

A little later, Tian Jianxiu, who had personally gone to the Yutian front to supervise the army, sent a report saying that the envoy sent to Wu Sangui's army had returned and reported that the morale of the Guanning Army was low, and that there had been no word of any talk that the eastern barbarians' Prince Regent wished to marry his daughter to the Ming Crown Prince. In addition, Tian Jianxiu's envoy had also learned that the daughter of the eastern barbarians' Prince Regent Dorgon was only six years old, and could not possibly be married off.

Tian Jianxiu also reported at the same time that there were rumors that Wu Sangui intended to abandon Shanhai Pass, sail south across the sea, and defect to Zhu Cilang, as well as rumors that the eastern barbarians were concentrating their forces, intending to seize Shanhai Pass while it was undefended.

After all this information was gathered together, Li Zicheng felt a headache coming on just looking at it. Because Wu Sangui was still a double for him, damn it! And there was no telling which side was true. But whichever side was true, neither was good news. If Wu Sangui had already reached Tianjin, then the area around Shanhai Pass was surely empty, and it could be occupied by the eastern barbarians at any moment!

If Wu Sangui was still at Yongping, then who had defeated Li Guo and the others? Li Guo and the others had more than twenty-two thousand troops combined. An opponent capable of inflicting such a crushing defeat on them could not be weak, no matter how one thought about it.

Where had Zhu Cilang found such elite reinforcements? If Zhu Cilang truly had crack troops capable of defeating Li Guo, then once the eastern barbarians marched west, the Shun would be attacked from both front and rear!

Under these circumstances, how could Li Zicheng have any mind for a second enthronement? There wasn't even time to prepare for war — what enthronement was there to hold!

But the moment he thought about preparing for war, Li Zicheng's head swelled. The old-camp brothers below were all howling for money!

These bastards were all damn creditors of Li Zicheng, every one of them thinking their own merits were enormous and that they must be richly rewarded. Yet the treasury left behind by that pauper Chongzhen was utterly empty — so empty you could race horses in it. What was Li Zicheng supposed to use to reward them?

Besides being unable to hand out satisfactory rewards, the Shun court was now even running short on grain.

When you looked into it carefully, this too was Zhu Cilang's fault! After the Incident at the Gate of Imperial Supremacy, hadn't he issued a whole stack of princely decrees? One of them was to distribute the grain stored in the Grand Granary to the common people of Beijing's inner city. Although this decree was carried out rather hastily, it still basically emptied the Ministry of Revenue's grain stores.

Furthermore, after Zhu Cilang escorted Chongzhen south to the Tianjin garrison, the large quantities of sea-transported tribute grain piled up at Dagu could no longer be shipped to Beijing.

As a result, Li Zicheng not only had no money to hand out rewards, but even supplying his troops had become difficult. Those old-camp soldiers who had followed him through all the hardships of campaign after campaign, who had fought their way into Beijing with such difficulty, not only failed to get the wealth they wanted, but could not even eat their fill of rice and white flour, let alone meat.

This treatment was completely out of line with being founding heroes of a dynasty!

Under these circumstances, the discipline and morale of the old camp became harder and harder to maintain. Military discipline in many units deteriorated, and incidents of old-camp officers and soldiers raping and looting occurred from time to time. Li Zicheng flew into thunderous rages several times and had quite a few men killed, but could not put a stop to it. As for the daily drills of the various units inside Beijing, they had basically stopped from the beginning of the fourth month. No food, no drink, and no money — and still drill? Drilling his damn mother was more like it!

If he still could not produce enough silver to hand out rewards, the hearts of the old-camp soldiers — whom Li Zicheng relied on as his Great Wall — would likely scatter completely.

He had only been sitting securely on the dragon throne in Beijing's Forbidden City for a few days — how was it that he already felt as if he were standing on the edge of an abyss? That fatuous ruler Chongzhen had actually managed to sit on this very chair for seventeen years — truly not easy!

Just as Li Zicheng sat dazed and worried in the Hall of Martial Valor, Liu Tichun and Wu Ruyi, who had taken over military affairs from Tian Jianxiu and Li Yan, strode in briskly. After exchanging greetings, Li Zicheng noticed that both men wore pleased expressions, so he asked: "Is there good news?"

"Reporting to Your Imperial Majesty," Liu Tichun said with a smile, "the Marquis of Bo's military dispatch — Tianjin's northern and southern cities were taken yesterday."

"What?" Li Zicheng was stunned. "Only yesterday I received his memorial of apology, and today he reports victory? What kind of battle is this One-Tiger fighting?"

Wu Ruyi said: "It was not the Marquis of Bo who took the Tianjin garrison. It was the Red Lady, missing for many days, who infiltrated the Tianjin garrison with her brothers, and seized the moment when the main force of the Zhu rebels was shifting toward Dagu to rise up, driving out the Zhu rebels' garrison troops and taking all three Tianjin garrisons in one stroke!"

"So it seems the Zhu rebels still intend to move south." Li Zicheng let out a soft breath of relief, and a long-absent smile appeared on his face. "The Zhu rebels have still fallen one move short after all! If they had stayed put in the Tianjin garrison and not left, We would have been attacked from both front and rear. If the Manchus truly lent them troops, We fear We would have had to hand over this city of Beijing."

Liu Tichun laughed: "Beijing was never our Shun's capital anyway. Yielding it temporarily would do no harm, as long as we empty out all the mountains of gold and silver inside the city first."

Li Zicheng nodded, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. He had never regarded Beijing as the capital. After entering Beijing, he had made it clear that Beijing was merely a temporary imperial residence, and would later be changed to Youzhou Prefecture, serving as a key northern defensive stronghold, no longer a place to establish the capital. And the capital of the Shun had always been Chang'an, the imperial capital of emperors in the Guanzhong region!

So for Li Zicheng and the Shun army, the gain or loss of Beijing was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the ill-gotten wealth of the corrupt officials inside Beijing!

Thinking of this, Li Zicheng muttered to himself: "We must get Yellow Tiger to put in more effort and squeeze out more military funds! Once the military funds are secured, We can fight a decisive battle with the remnants of the Zhu rebels and the Manchus!"

"My Lord, this is the account just completed. Please review it."

"Review what? Just report the number!" Yellow Tiger Liu Zongmin waved his hand, telling Luo Xiushen to take away the account book that had been brought before him.

He was a bandit and a rebel — how could he read account books? If he had that ability, why would he have rebelled in the first place?

"In total, we have obtained more than twenty-two million eight hundred fifty-three thousand taels of silver, plus more than five hundred sixty-four thousand taels of gold. My Lord, this is truly an enormous fortune!"

"Enormous my ass!" Liu Zongmin waved his hand dismissively. "Our Shun is now a great enterprise with a great household — over a million people from top to bottom. Give each man ten taels of silver, and ten million taels are damn well gone!"

"My Lord..." Luo Xiushen looked at Yellow Tiger Liu Zongmin's expressionless face, his heart leaping into his throat.

He was now keeping company with a tiger! If he had known earlier how vicious these roving bandits' methods of torture and extortion were, he would not have stayed behind to be Zhu Cilang's spy — the reason he had taken on this role was, in truth, simply that he could not bear to abandon his family's property in Beijing!

His Luo family had controlled the Embroidered Uniform Guard for decades, and the profits they had skimmed were nearly overflowing. It was fundamentally impossible to pack it all up and take it away. But he had never imagined that the roving bandits would be so ruthless and merciless! In order to torture and extort money, they truly worked people to death!

And handing over silver did not necessarily guarantee survival. They were somewhat more polite to low- and mid-ranking civil officials. But for civil officials of Vice Minister rank and above, and for hereditary noble houses, military officers, imperial relatives, and powerful eunuchs, they truly stopped at nothing! Those who lost both their wealth and their lives were everywhere!

And Luo Xiushen's family counted as one of the hereditary noble houses. Although his ancestors had not passed down a title of nobility, they did have a hereditary military post that could be inherited. And they were famously wealthy.

Liu Zongmin's brows furrowed, and his face instantly took on a savage look. He said to Luo Xiushen: "Go and have another good talk with them. Forty or fifty million — no matter what, that amount must be squeezed out!"

Recommending a new book, "Zhao of the Three Kingdoms as Emperor." The wolf smoke rises, the north wind howls, the silver spear parries the painted halberd, the white horse tramples the enemy camp. The war drums sound, the carved bow drawn full as the moon, one hand raises the great banner, a thousand riders sweep the flat ridge.

(End of Chapter)