Chapter 626: Zhang Tianlin Has Arrived

Liu Chengzong's idea was trade — border market trade.

Though summer had not yet passed, the grasslands were already about time to prepare for winter.

The Monan Commandery had acquired quite a lot of livestock, but livestock on the grasslands ultimately cannot be eaten as food.

As the saying goes, a household's ten thousand strings of cash don't count the hairy ones — because the risk in animal husbandry is too great, especially on the grasslands; one windstorm, one harsh winter, and it's likely all gone.

Just like the Haracin tribe — on a single calm summer day, that many cattle and sheep were all gone.

But trade can solve this problem very well: keep the essential livestock, and the surplus animals can perfectly well be traded south of the Great Wall, exchanged for iron pots, padded clothes, bedding, even cloth, making the coming winter that much warmer.

The Great Ming could have border trade, and Liu Chengzong could too — he could even conduct fully complementary trade inside and outside the Great Wall.

This would not help much with short-term military grain supply, but it would greatly help the Marshal's Manor restore local production — after all, since the drought began, the economy everywhere in Shaanxi had been tending toward collapse.

Many people had been driven into destitution and wandering; even if resettled, the localities had completely regressed to an incomplete small-peasant economy, where even self-sufficiency had become a problem.

To restore production, one must first stabilize the environment, restore contact between the counties within the war zone, and let trade arise and generate demand.

And this batch of livestock from the Monan Commandery, if it could be bought into the interior through trade, could very well solve the problem that every county currently had not even a single animal for breeding stock.

The counties on the Guanzhong Plain were in slightly better shape, but in the many prefectures, subprefectures, and counties further north where troops had tramped back and forth, the situation had deteriorated to the point that an entire subprefecture or county had not a single head of livestock left.

Take a place like Jingning Subprefecture — never mind large draft animals, even the people numbered only one thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven, most of them disabled; if left unattended, soon there would be no one left at all.

Liu Chengzong sent this idea in a letter to Zhang Zhen, resolving a worry in his heart, but the army's immediate short-term grain problem still remained.

He could only set his sights on Xi'an Prefecture.

However, before the army marched east, the work of settling the wounded and collecting the spoils of battle continued for two days, also giving the soldiers who had fought in succession a brief rest.

Yet in just these two days, from Qinzhou to the west, good news about army grain arrived.

Mo Yujing and Xie Erhu led seven thousand Mongol cavalry charging out of the Huating Ancient Road, galloping all the way to Jingning Subprefecture; after circling once and finding no trace of the enemy, they spread out southward along both banks of the Hulu River, searching every mountain plateau and flatland along the way, fanning out southward in a vast, sweeping tide.

The two of them kept going until they reached Qinzhou Guard, and only then discovered traces of Ming troops — it was Bai Guang'en, who had struck camp and left the Ningxia Army encampment before the battle began.

Discovered along with him were cart after cart of grain being transported toward Qinzhou Guard.

Bai Guang'en had received orders from Cao Wenzhao to raise grain and fodder, and had thus left the main Ningxia Army corps to go alone to Longxi to collect army grain. Bai Guang'en had never intended to run toward Pingliang City; he had his eye on Qinzhou Guard from the very start.

In the Longxi region at present, Qinzhou and Pingliang were good places that had not suffered from the soldiery. Of course, comparatively speaking, Qinzhou was far less prosperous than Pingliang, and its grain stores could not possibly supply Cao Wenzhao and Zuo Liangyu's massive allied army for long.

But correspondingly, Bai Guang'en also knew he could not afford to provoke Pingliang City, and he dared not go plunder the Prince of Han's estate, so no matter how wealthy Pingliang was, it had nothing to do with him.

Qinzhou Guard was different. Earlier, because Zuo Liangyu had been garrisoned there, Liu Chengzong's main army had chosen to take the mountain roads into Guanzhong. Later, although the allied forces of Zhang Yichuan and Li Zicheng had passed through, at that time a great enemy loomed, and the peasant army had no time to bother with plundering, so a meager amount of grain remained.

Most importantly, Bai Guang'en could forcibly requisition grain at Qinzhou Guard without any burden.

If they won this battle, then this bit of grain would be no big deal — it might even count as his achievement.

If they lost this battle, then this bit of grain would be even less of a big deal — the entire Qinzhou would by then become territory under Liu Chengzong's rule, and the Great Ming would have no say.

So forcibly requisitioning grain in Qinzhou — safe and secure!

Xie Erhu's Mongol troops had discovered traces of Bai Guang'en two days earlier, but Mo Yujing would not let him make a sound, and even strictly restrained the Mongol Brigade's cavalry, forbidding them from attacking Bai Guang'en's army.

"The Grand Marshal is short of grain too."

Xie Erhu had started out as a Mongol horse-bandit chief. In recent years he had devoted all his energy to learning how to command troops; whatever spare strength he had, he put into improving his Chinese. His cunning was no greater than Zhang Tianlin's — only less.

At this moment he was utterly unable to grasp Mo Yujing's thinking. He blurted out, "With me, Xie Erhu, here watching, you think I'd let him steal the Grand Marshal's grain? I'll go get the Grand Marshal..."

But he saw Mo Yujing shake his head and say nothing. Xie Erhu stared at him blankly for a long while before it dawned on him. "Let him plunder first, then plunder him after?"

Mo Yujing slowly nodded. "Brigade Commander Xie, it's wait until he finishes plundering, then exterminate him."

Actually, Bai Guang'en was not plundering grain — he was requisitioning grain.

Bai Guang'en, a former bandit who had surrendered and turned government soldier, was even better at requisitioning grain than many regular officers of clean background.

As soon as he garrisoned his troops at Qinzhou Guard, he began imposing quotas.

Bai Guang'en did not assign the grain-requisitioning tasks to the village tithing chiefs, village elders, or local constables — he directly assigned the grain-requisitioning quotas to the Qinzhou civil office and the officers of Qinzhou Guard.

He was no fool. Going directly to the common people to impose quotas drew too much hatred and could easily make the hereditary military officers of Qinzhou Guard unite against a common foe. Instead, giving the task to the Qinzhou Guard officers, granting them the authority to requisition grain — perhaps they would not be able to collect quite so thoroughly, but it would also share the hatred around.

The officers of Qinzhou Guard were certainly not happy to do this, but once it was assigned to them, they had no choice.

For them, being sent to requisition grain from others was still better than Bai Guang'en requisitioning grain from them.

In no time, the hereditary military officers of Qinzhou Guard led their troops out in all directions, heading straight for every village and hamlet among the mountain ridges and loess plateaus, imposing one deadly requisition list after another.

Rice, flour, beans, dried persimmons and dried fruit, even firewood, charcoal, and stone, vegetables and fruit, mangers, carts, and all manner of things — at the very least they conscripted people as porters and laborers; in short, they never came back empty-handed.

Among these items, some were things Bai Guang'en had explicitly ordered requisitioned, and others were things Qinzhou Guard wanted requisitioned.

Mainly things like stone, timber, and laborers. With battle looming, the several commanders of Qinzhou Guard, seeing that Bai Guang'en had come all the way to Qinzhou to requisition grain, clearly sensed very bad signs from the Guanzhong battlefield to the east. They had to find a way to protect themselves, and the first priority was to fortify the Qinzhou Guard city walls.

No one was a fool. Even if Bai Guang'en's troops kept their mouths tightly shut, people could still guess that the Ming court's heavy troop concentrations in Shaanxi had clearly been divided and encircled by Liu Chengzong.

Otherwise, they would not have needed to come to Qinzhou to requisition grain — if they were going to requisition, they should have gone to Guanzhong.

Unless they simply could not make contact with Guanzhong.

Bai Guang'en was fairly cautious, always paying close attention to the situation to the east, but he had not considered the direction of Pingliang Prefecture to the north. He only sent men to garrison along the Wei River line while simultaneously observing Gongchang Prefecture to the west and Fengxiang Prefecture to the east.

As it turned out, his observation was not in vain — he discovered signs of Ming army activity in Gongchang Prefecture.

At first he thought it was the Marshal's Army that had changed banners but not equipment; later, when scouting parties from both sides clashed, he discovered they were actually his own side.

The commander over there was Ningxia Mobile Corps Commander Tu Shixian, who had earlier been dispatched by Cao Wenzhao to lead a battalion to attack the undefended Lanzhou.

As it turned out, Lanzhou was not undefended at all. Wang Wenxiu, who had been guarding Lanzhou, had been summoned to Guanzhong by Liu Chengzong, and Brigade Commander Yang Yao, originally garrisoned in Hehuang to guard the home base, immediately shifted his forces to Lanzhou.

Moreover, his garrisoning style was even more aggressive than Wang Wenxiu's. He dispatched Mobile Corps Commander Feng Rang to lead a combat-troop wagon battalion to garrison Chankou in Gongchang Prefecture, directly sealing shut the Ming army's westward advance gap.

He further brought in from Qinghai a thousand new recruits from the Training Guard that Liu Chengzong had prepared for the Tianshan garrison, led by Assistant Commandant Dalai Taiji, chief of the Durbet tribe of the Oirat, advancing into Weiyuan County in Lintao.

In fact, this Training Guard originally had three thousand men and horses, but as soon as the eastern campaign began, Liu Chengzong had transferred two thousand to Gansu, led by Commandant Zhong Hu, to fill the undefended Ganzhou. With Yang Yao's troop transfer this time, the Training Guard was simply wiped out of existence.

But as a result, Ningxia Mobile Corps Commander Tu Shixian was dumbfounded.

The intelligence he had received told him that Liu Chengzong was advancing eastward in force, that before the war he had resorted to extortionate taxes and levies, causing the people's hearts to turn against him, and that he had pulled away all the Marshal's Manor's troops, leaving the rear extremely undefended — therefore, taking Lanzhou would be as easy as flipping a hand.

In the end, he led three thousand troops on a lightning raid to the vicinity of Chankou, and found himself directly surrounded by enemies on all sides.

To the north, at Jinglu Guard, was Gansu Commander-in-Chief Cao Yao's eastward-advancing corps, which was gnawing its way toward the Ningxia border wall one fort at a time, and sending out small squads along the mountain paths to harass him was merely a matter of convenience.

Southward at Lintao Prefecture, Dalai Taiji led a thousand men of the Training Guard. These troops lacked fighting strength, but they were equipped with the rocket carts Liu Chengzong had built for his elder brother Liu Chengzu — their firepower was more than ample. The moment they met the enemy, they would first unleash a curtain of rockets blanketing a radius of five hundred paces.

The most infuriating of all was the garrison at Chankou right in the center.

The terrain at Chankou was extremely narrow. Feng Rang, with his back to the Jincheng Valley that connected to the Yuzhong Basin, deployed his wagon fort on the spot like a complete scoundrel.

This wagon fort contraption — so long as it didn't run into Liu Chengzong's rockets — was utterly shameless on a narrow battlefield, practically invincible against equal numbers.

Tu Shixian could neither charge through nor fight his way past. His firearms and artillery were inferior to Feng Rang's, his army provisions were fewer than Feng Rang's, and he also feared being encircled in the Guanchuan River basin. He had no choice but to withdraw into Gongchang Prefecture.

And Gongchang was a very strange place. It originally had a prefect, but he died when Wang Wenxiu dispatched Luo Rucai and Li Wanqing into Gongchang Prefecture to seize the pass. They did not kill him — he committed suicide out of fear of being punished for losing his jurisdiction.

For a time afterward there was no prefect, until this year, on the eve of Liu Chengzong's offensive, the Ministry of Personnel selected and appointed a man from Shanxi to come serve as prefect, named Qiao Qian'gao.

But by the time Qiao Qian'gao took office, the situation in Gongchang Prefecture had grown even worse for the imperial court.

Liu Chengzong launched his eastern campaign, and half of Gongchang Prefecture fell to the Marshal's Army. The parts not occupied by the Marshal's Army were occupied by peasant armies.

Li Yangchun, the Fourth Heavenly King, held Xihe County; Fatty Zhang, the Tidy King, held Ningqiang County; Zhang Yichuan, the Sweeping King, held Ningyuan County. Nearby, only Fugou County, which had been plundered by Zhang Xianzhong earlier, was temporarily unoccupied.

Prefect Qiao Qian'gao therefore stationed himself in Fugou County, remotely holding the title of Prefect of Gongchang.

That Fugou County could avoid being overrun by troops was not thanks to Qiao Qian'gao, but because Fugou County itself had already become the Ming court's main base of operations in Gongchang Prefecture after the war began.

There was not only Fugou's county magistrate Wang Ru, but also Guo Erzhao, the county magistrate of Ningyuan who had earlier retreated after being defeated in battle against the peasant armies; Zhang Zhaoceng, the Military Defense Circuit Intendant of Lin-Gong; Zhao Yinggui, the prefectural judge of Gongchang; Zhu Tingzhang, the assistant prefect; the commandants Tian Yinglong and Zhang Yingchun; plus over a thousand government students, officers of various ranks, and yamen runners from the various counties.

Earlier, Li Yangchun the Fourth Heavenly King and Fatty Zhang the Tidy King had both come to attack Fugou County. Military Defense Circuit Intendant Zhang Zhaoceng and Prefectural Judge Zhao Yinggui joined forces to hold the defense. The peasant armies attacked for a long time but could not take it. County Magistrate Wang Ru then rode out of the city alone, treated these peasant army leaders with great courtesy, and relying on his silver tongue alone, negotiated a peace.

It could be said that everyone gave their utmost, and only thus was the last city in Gongchang Prefecture still belonging to the Great Ming preserved.

Tu Shixian fought several battles with Feng Rang to the north. His Ningxia border troops were reduced to just over two thousand. He fled south to Fugou County, which gave Prefect Qiao Qian'gao and the others a shot in the arm, but their handling of military-political relations was abysmal.

Everyone in Fugou County hoped that Tu Shixian could lead his troops to attack the prefectural seat at Longxi County, while Tu Shixian's exhausted Ningxia soldiers hoped they could enter Fugou County town. They had already fought Cao Yao, Feng Rang, and Dalai Taiji in succession.

To put it bluntly, if Tu Shixian had the ability to break through Longxi, he would have attacked it long ago and would never have retreated to Fugou County in the first place.

Meanwhile, on the other side at Qinzhou Guard, Bai Guang'en, with the help of the Qinzhou civil office, scraped together the first batch of over a hundred carts of grain and vegetables in just a few days and immediately began shipping them east.

Afterward, without any suspense, the Mongol brigade cavalry of the Marshal's Estate came swarming mightily out of the mountain paths from every direction, terrifying Bai Guang'en's garrison troops out of their wits. They abandoned the carts, turned around, and fled.

It was not that they feared the Mongol cavalry, but rather that the moment they spotted the Marshal's Estate's Mongol troops, everyone assumed that the great armies of Cao Wenzhao and Zuo Liangyu to the east had been routed, or even annihilated. They could not muster the slightest thought of making a desperate last stand.

Bai Guang'en, in Qinzhou, clearly had broader experience than his border troops and did not believe that Cao Wenzhao had already been defeated.

Yet his own feeling was not much better than that of his border troops.

One would think Bai Guang'en feared nothing in heaven or on earth, and he had a group of true desperadoes under his command. Later, after they became Ming army officers and received arms and equipment, their fighting strength rose to an even higher level.

Even among those full-fledged Ming regional commanders, he submitted to no one, considering himself the third-best fighter under heaven.

Only Liu Chengzong, that legendary figure who had risen in revolt in Shaanxi, was his inner demon.

It was like being beaten up as a child and still feeling afraid when that person so much as glared at you once you were grown. To exorcise that inner demon, he would have to truly trample that person underfoot — only then could he achieve an inner transformation.

Yet this was hardly his first time facing Liu Chengzong in battle. He had long since witnessed Liu Chengzong's strategic and tactical style: leveraging numerical superiority, freely unleashing his mobility, favoring frontal assaults and breakthroughs by detached forces.

In Gansu, Liu Chengzong had advanced to the outskirts of Jiayu Pass, while Zhang Tianlin charged left and struck right inside the pass, blasting half of his elite battalion sky-high.

At the Zhuanglang River, Liu Chengzong besieged Yingpan Ridge, and Zhang Tianlin blocked his retreat at Huangyang Stream. A crowd of monks chanted sutras before the battle lines and sent another half of his battalion to the afterlife.

The biggest problem in all of this was that, although his heart itched to try, always wanting to pull off something spectacular in front of Liu Chengzong — a kind of unfulfilled craving of "Dad, I'm going to make you look at me with new eyes" — every single time, he could not even catch a glimpse of Liu Chengzong's main force before a detached force slapped him to the ground and he could not get back up.

This time, Bai Guang'en's judgment was not faulty. He immediately realized that this was not a signal that Cao Wenzhao and the others had already been defeated, but rather meant that all Ming forces in Guanzhong had fallen into Liu Chengzong's encirclement.

But realizing this was of no use.

Soldiers came to report that Mongol cavalry had been spotted on the outskirts of Qinzhou, described as armored horses and gleaming blades.

When the words reached Bai Guang'en's ears, the image of rockets launching directly surfaced in his mind, paired with the sharp shriek of gunpowder burning in short bursts — the visceral sense of an imminent beating came crashing over him!

Bai Guang'en immediately summoned his brigade commander Bai Chaozai and ordered the troops to assemble.

"To hell with the grain carts! Grab your marching rations — we're going to find Tu Shixian!"

"Move, move, move! Chaozai, have the brothers spread out on the march, don't bunch up — Zhang Tianlin is coming!"