Chapter 1569: We Don't Meddle in the Affairs of the Western Heaven!

Dozens of long oars stroked the water together, driving a large oared sailing ship as it wound its way north, kicking up white waves on the Hooghly River channel from the Bay of Bengal to the port of Satgaon, while a huge red banner bearing the character "Roving" fluttered and snapped in the autumn wind.

Along both banks of the Hooghly, it was harvest season. Across the boundless great plain, rolling golden seas of rice stretched in every direction, as if showing the foreign conquerors the fertility and richness of the Bengal plain.

"Morning we beg for a pint, evening we beg for a quart; poor men these days can hardly stay alive. Open the gates early and bow to the Roving King, and he'll see that great and small all rejoice. Slaughter the cattle and sheep, prepare the wine; open the city gates and welcome the Roving King. When the Roving King comes, no grain tax to pay..."

The strains of the "Welcoming the Roving King" ballad drifted over from the embankments on both banks of the Hooghly, reaching the ears of Li Jicheng, Emperor of the Indian Great Shun Empire, as he sat upright on the deck enjoying the rich scenery on either shore.

What? Li Jicheng had already reached India? Wasn't he commanding troops in Dali? How could another Li Jicheng appear on the Hooghly River?

Just how many Li Jichengs are there in this world?

Of course there is only one real Li Jicheng... and that is this Li Jicheng, now advancing on Satgaon, the key commercial port on the Hooghly.

A month ago, he had led a hundred thousand troops of the Great Shun expeditionary force, crossing the sea aboard several hundred oared sailing ships, and arrived at the mouth of the Hooghly. The army rested and reorganized around the river mouth for over ten days, seizing several Timurid coastal defense fortresses along the way. Only then did they advance by both water and land, striking toward the commercial city of Satgaon in the middle reaches of the Hooghly.

Unlike his previous raids into India, this time Li Jicheng was not making a small hit-and-run. He had come with the entire strength of his state. He mobilized eighty thousand land troops and twenty thousand naval troops, built and requisitioned several hundred oared warships, and even sold off everything he could to buy large quantities of muskets, cannon, and gunpowder, properly arming his army... All the savings accumulated over years of plundering India were spent clean in one go. If this effort to "emigrate to India and become emperor" failed — ha, there would be no need for Zhu Hexing to come attacking; the Great Shun Empire would collapse on its own!

The Great Shun, a feudal military empire, feared nothing more than failure in foreign expansion — robbery is not a business entirely without cost, so it is possible to take a loss.

Rob badly enough, and even a bandit gang can go bankrupt!

This is also why the Great Shun Empire in recent years neither marched north nor advanced east, but only kept robbing India — because robbing India was profitable!

Since the Li Jicheng appearing on the Hooghly River is real and unique, then the Li Jicheng appearing in Dali is naturally a counterfeit.

In recent years, Li Jicheng had devoted himself single-mindedly to India, and had not invested much capital in Yunnan or Sichuan — this was also determined by the Great Shun Empire's current geography. From the Great Shun's northern frontier in southern Sichuan and northern Yunnan to Li Jicheng's centers of rule at Haidu, Mrauk U, and Chittagong was a distance of four to five thousand li! And it was mostly overland, with long stretches of mountain roads... A normal march would take over a hundred days to cover that distance, and would depend on supplies along the way.

A small force might manage, but if a hundred thousand troops moved north or south, they would eat every village and town along the route into ruin!

Back when the Great Shun's fubing military households migrated south into Burma, who knows how many native villages and stockades were "eaten out of existence"!

And now the towns and villages in those places had mostly been granted to the fubing households who had come south to settle... Li Jicheng's army could not possibly eat them out of existence! So Li Jicheng simply could not reinforce Yunnan on a large scale.

But he also could not ignore Yunnan entirely, or the Great Shun's rule there would quickly collapse!

If the Great Shun's rule in Yunnan collapsed too quickly, and Zhu Hexing had not yet used up all the strength he had prepared, he would surely press his victory and strike into Burma...

When that time came, could Li Jicheng really ignore his home base and invade India in force?

So Li Jicheng employed a diversionary scheme of "splitting himself in two"!

Of course he could not actually split his body — he used a body double! Because after Li Jicheng became a "filial son," internal struggles within the Great Shun had grown intense. Fearing assassination, Li Jicheng had secretly selected and trained several doubles starting a few years ago, having them appear in public in his place.

Now these doubles came in very handy... Li Jicheng could truly be said to have mastered the art of being in two places at once!

So before Li Jicheng personally led the main army west to conquer Bengal, he had the four-dynasty veteran Luo Hu take one of his doubles, put on the full display of the Great Shun Emperor personally leading a campaign, and march north into Yunnan with ten thousand old, weak, and remnant troops, falsely claiming a hundred thousand, to resist Zhu Hexing — so there was never any "luring the enemy deep"; it was simply an empty-province stratagem!

Luo Hu, holding Dali, had very few troops at hand. Even counting all the local powers in Yunnan loyal to the Great Shun, total strength was only sixty or seventy thousand, and many of them had long been in secret contact with the Great Ming.

So Luo Hu had no choice but to raise Li Jicheng's banner and use every possible means to slow Zhu Hexing's advance.

Meanwhile, Li Jicheng himself quietly put to sea — no cannon fire — and launched a surprise attack on the mouth of the Hooghly. There were Indian agents in Haidu as well, so of course they knew that the Great Ming and Great Shun had begun fighting in Yunnan. When word reached India, Aurangzeb assumed there was no major threat on the eastern front for the time being, and so he gathered his main army and marched off to attack Mysore!

As a result, the mouth of the Hooghly was left empty, and Li Jicheng took it in a single blow!

Now all that remained was to take Satgaon, and the Great Shun would have a firm foothold in Bengal... And by following the Hooghly upstream, one could reach the Ganges. As long as they built fortresses along the Hooghly, deployed naval forces, and extended their defense line all the way to the confluence of the Hooghly and the Ganges, then most of Bengal east of the Hooghly would become the territory of the Indian Great Shun dynasty.

Moreover, Li Jicheng, who had invaded India several times already, had long known what this miraculous land was all about... India's untouchables did not need liberation at all; they needed atonement — sins in a past life had made them untouchables in this one. If they were not allowed to atone properly, they could not even be untouchables in their next life. How could that be allowed?

So the Great Shun dynasty absolutely should not go liberating them!

As for the zamindars, jagirdars, and Brahmins who oppressed the untouchables, they were not the Great Shun dynasty's enemies either... They were tax farmers, helping the Great Shun dynasty or other foreign regimes collect taxes.

What emperor would ever do away with his tax farmers?

"Attend me," said Li Jicheng, who already knew how to conquer India, when he heard the Great Shun soldiers marching along both banks strike up the "Welcoming the Roving King" ballad. He summoned the herald officer. "Tell them to stop singing... The common folk here in India need to atone for their sins. We can't stop people from atoning! And they can't be excused from the grain tax either. Those zamindars, jagirdars, and Brahmins all depend on tax farming for their living. If there's no grain tax, aren't we taking their lives? And killing cattle is even more out of the question... How can you kill cattle? Cattle are their gods, you know. They must not be killed!"

Just as Li Jicheng was speaking, a small boat coming downstream from the upper Hooghly drew alongside, and a Great Shun officer jumped from the small boat onto Li Jicheng's large ship. A short while later, Li Jicheng's military advisor Song Yaowen came to Li Jicheng's side, beaming with joy, holding a freshly received military report.

Song Yaowen smiled and said, "Your Majesty, wonderful news! Gao Yidao and Luo Ke's vanguard has already taken Satgaon..."

"Excellent!" Li Jicheng clapped his hands and laughed loudly. "Victory at the first battle! With Satgaon in hand, we've got a firm foothold in Bengal... Right, I ought to give Satgaon a new name. Military Advisor, work it out — what name would be auspicious?"

"Your Majesty, there's no need to calculate. It should of course be renamed Western Heaven Prefecture!" Song Yaowen said with a smile. "Wasn't this very place where Tang Sanzang journeyed west to fetch the scriptures?"

"Good!" Li Jicheng nodded. "We are now the master of the Western Heaven!"