Chapter 746: A Gushing Nosebleed

Liu Chengzong was at the Taizi River; Huang Taiji was also at the Taizi River.

Only Liu Chengzong was on the western stretch, while Huang Taiji was on the eastern stretch, separated by four hundred li of mountain roads.

Huang Taiji's march to suppress the rebellion was extremely swift — first he covered nearly four hundred li in three days to reach Yiduqiang Fort, then sent men to glance at Jianchang City; seeing it was beyond saving, he immediately led his army back toward Shenyang in relief, leaving only a small force to continue pursuing and harrying the fleeing Shen Shikui.

The Pi Island troops could really run — the moment they heard the Eight Banners' main force was coming, they were so terrified their legs trembled and they fled like mad.

After all, they had already finished their looting and reaped quite a haul.

They had raided Xiuyan, burned Jianchang, torched several company stockades along the way, and were pushing carts loaded with padded coats and bedding, kimchi jars and rice sacks, valuables, severed heads, and dead dogs, fleeing south without looking back.

Huang Taiji hated the Pi Island troops so much his teeth itched — given any chance, he would kill every last one of Shen Shikui's men, no exceptions.

But he had no chance; he dared not linger in the south at all.

Because Liu Chengzong had been pressing him to advance — ever since he marched southeast to suppress the Dongjiang landing force, urgent dispatches had arrived at the army without pause for three straight days.

First, the Qinghai vulture flock descended upon Shenyang, driving off the crows, seizing their grain, prying up several glazed tiles from the Ten Princes' Pavilion, pecking apart the roof beasts, then spreading their wings and soaring toward Changbai Mountain.

After that, a large mounted force pressed close to Shengjing, striking out everywhere in the outskirts to loot, burn, and kill, abducting people and livestock, torching manors and stockades — they stopped at no evil.

This was not even the major matter.

He had long anticipated that Liu Chengzong would strike directly at Shenyang and wreak havoc on the capital's surrounding estates; the Chongde Emperor was already mentally prepared for this.

Estates destroyed could be rebuilt; the people and livestock outside the city who could be brought into Shengjing had already entered — those left outside were not… not too many.

In truth, Huang Taiji's strategy was also "pacify within before resisting without," only the "within" he wanted to pacify was the Liaonan coast.

Because the King of Joseon had issued proclamations to all eight provinces to oppose Daiching; the Great Ming was about to land Chen Hongfan in Liaonan, and the Jinzhou army was massed in Liaoxi, while now Shen Shikui of Pi Island had taken the lead in landing and attacking.

No one could be certain whether what appeared in Liaonan was a joint army or only the Pi Island force.

To deal with the Guanning Army, he had to draw the decisive battle with Liu Chengzong to Shengjing; and to deal with Liu Chengzong, he first had to drive off the armies of Shen Shikui, Chen Hongfan, and Joseon before he could commit his full strength.

Therefore, at the cost of Shengjing's outskirts being raided, he pinned down Liu Chengzong, led his army south to expel Shen Shikui, then would march north to fight the decisive battle with Liu Chengzong, who was attacking Shenyang.

Victory, and all would be well; defeat, and the Guanning Army would also have to enter Liaodong.

Now that he had come south and looked, it was a false alarm — nothing but Shen Shikui's bluster, all thunder and no rain.

For the Chongde Emperor, the price was entirely bearable; everything was within his calculations, and he could lead his troops to the decisive battle with Liu Chengzong with a light heart.

But the urgent military reports coming from Shengjing could not help but give Huang Taiji a headache.

The biggest problem now was that Liu Chengzong had not attacked Shenyang — he had not even come to Shenyang in person, and had sent a bunch of Mongol soldiers instead.

Huang Taiji was furious.

Because without Liu Chengzong coming, the Mongol troops posed a limited threat to the nobles left to guard Shengjing, and those nobles had sallied out of the city.

Sallying out was nothing — the problem was that the man leading the troops out of the city was his second elder brother.

The long-marginalized Prince Li, Daišan, at the advanced age of fifty-four, led the remaining men of the Plain Red Banner out of the city to fight on horseback, sent the Mongol cavalry scattering across the Shengjing outskirts, captured one hundred thirty horses and thirty-three prisoners, and won the acclaim of the entire city.

Huang Taiji's face beamed with great joy, but inside he felt as though he had swallowed a fly.

He was not a petty, narrow-minded man; it was just that the conflict between him and Daišan over the succession was too great.

Back when Nurhaci was still the Jianzhou chieftain, after executing his eldest son Cuyen, he intended to make his second son Daišan his heir and left a will that after his death, his widows and young sons were to be left in Daišan's care.

Then came the Great Consort Incident — the scandal of Ajige, Dorgon, and Dodo's mother, Abahai, sending food to Daišan and exchanging flirtatious glances.

A junior mother sending food to the children was perfectly normal, and she did not send it only to Daišan — she sent it to Huang Taiji as well.

The problem was Huang Taiji.

He did not eat it, setting it aside as evidence and waiting for it to rot.

Then two secondary consorts secretly informed, letting Nurhaci know, and he formed an enormous prejudice against Daišan: No one else ate it — only you did?

This planted the seeds of Daišan's deposal.

Nurhaci died on the afternoon of the eleventh day of the eighth month, forty li outside Shenyang; on the morning of the twelfth, Huang Taiji stormed into the rear palace and forced Abahai to hang herself, and also forced the two secondary consorts who had informed six years earlier to hang themselves.

With that, the matter of those years was dead without witnesses.

The other secondary and lesser consorts were all unharmed.

After that, the Jin Khan's throne sat vacant for twenty days; Daišan was not a man keen on power struggles, and prioritizing the greater good, he was the first to bow his head.

Even so, after succeeding to the throne as Khan, Huang Taiji still treated Daišan with outward respect as an elder brother while suppressing him whenever he gained prestige.

Daišan might not have been keen on power struggles, but Huang Taiji certainly was!

Anyone else having prestige was fine — Daišan alone could not.

As long as Daišan lived, he would forever be a threat to his Khanate, his imperial throne; after Nurhaci's death, Daišan was the eldest of the Aisin clan.

If Daišan leading troops to victory only made Huang Taiji feel displeasure in his heart, then the news that arrived next truly made Huang Taiji furious — his eldest nephew, Dudu, had been captured by the Mongols.

Seeing his own father win a battle, Yoto also sent the remaining men of the Bordered Red Banner into the fray, only for Dudu, who led them, to be lured deep into enemy territory and captured.

Daišan interrogated the prisoners through the night and got even more explosive news.

Those defeated and captured by the Plain Red Banner were cavalry from Mobei — to be precise, most of those plundering the Shengjing capital region this time were troops of the three Mobei Khans.

The prisoners' confessions said that Subadi Khan, Gombu Khan, Babu Taiji, and Erdeni Hun Taiji were all present in the ranks.

There are no airtight walls in the capital; within an hour of the confessions being extracted, the news had spread throughout Shengjing.

The Eight Banners nobles nearly exploded.

Shen Shikui's Dongjiang Garrison had marched; the Ming court's Chen Hongfan was building great ships; the tethered King of Joseon had issued proclamations to all eight provinces to resist the Jin; the Northwest Marshal's Office was raiding the border under Liu Chengzong's command; Khorchin had been beaten to a pulp.

And now even the Mobei Khalkha had come to attack us — weren't they outer vassals?

The optimists drew their blades and rolled up their sleeves, wanting to go punish the Sholui… after all, Subadi and Gombu's territories were indeed beyond their reach.

The pessimists simply felt that the Later Jin, after the Tiancong Khan ascended the throne, had finally, under the Chongde Emperor's brilliant leadership, become loathed by man and beast alike, with enemies on every side.

This crushing sense of impending doom was no less than before the Battle of Sarhū in the Jianzhou era.

In the urgent letter Daišan wrote to Huang Taiji, he said that some nobles without foresight had already proposed that they might as well surrender to the Great Ming, and therefore begged His Majesty to return to Shengjing as soon as possible to calm people's hearts.

In truth, it was not only the nobles left to guard Shengjing.

Even Huang Taiji himself was stunned dizzy by the string of urgent reports from Shengjing, his head buzzing.

The battle outside Shengjing City — winning it and taking captives caused an extremely bad impact; it would have been better to lose.

What made him even more anxious to know, of course, was: since Liu Chengzong hadn't struck Shenyang, where exactly had he taken his army?

Huang Taiji soon found out.

The Chongde Emperor's traveling headquarters had just entered Shengjing when urgent reports of Liaoyang's fall in the west came through.

In fact, over these past few days, various forces west of Shenyang had used every means to send over a dozen waves of messengers with urgent dispatches toward Shenyang — only this one got through.

The man who sent this message was Yile Shen, the Plain Blue Banner garrison commander stationed at the Haizhou river mouth, a veteran general from Nurhaci's era who had just been promoted to Third-Class Meile Zhangjing early in the year. From the moment Liu Chengzong appeared outside Liaoyang, he had tried every way to send word, losing three waves of messengers alone in the attempt.

First he sent three Fishskin Tatar slave soldiers, promising to make them regular bannermen if they delivered the message — they ran into Zhang Xianzhong, who was out looting; one dead, one wounded, one fled back.

The second wave he sent his household Han Chinese slaves, digging out old Liaodong army uniforms and posing as Jinzhou troops. Good lord, when the Marshal's Army spotted them it went even quicker — all of them cut down dead.

The third wave got clever: no armor, just dressed as Liaodong common folk wanting to join the peasant army. Outside Liaoyang city they ran into Gao Yingdeng's men, who feared they were spies, refused to take them, and let them go.

In the end, after all that trouble they reached the outskirts of Shenyang, where Subadi's Mongol soldiers casually shot them dead with an arrow.

By the time the last wave went out, the message's content had changed from "Liaoyang under attack" to "Liaoyang has fallen."

These last few men, however, had better luck — over at Liaoyang they were busy melting down gold and silver and hauling away treasure, the blockade zone was contracting, and it happened to coincide with Huang Taiji's Eight Banners main force returning to relieve Shenyang and driving off the Mongol troops in the outskirts. Only then did they succeed in delivering the message into Shengjing.

Liaoyang has fallen.

Those four words alone sent blood gushing unstoppably from Huang Taiji's nose.

He had already ridden fast enough — both his large and small white imperial horses had collapsed from exhaustion.

And that strong fortress of Liaoyang — back in the day, when the Great Ming still held the hearts of the people in Liaodong, his father had still needed three days to take Liaoyang.

Liu Chengzong had breached it in a single short day?

Huang Taiji could not understand.

He dared not rest. He obtained all the intelligence from the prisoner interrogations from Daišan, immediately issued a secret edict ordering the banner lords and gūsas in the capital to strictly control their men, then picked out four bannermen who had spread the rumor that the Three Khans of Mobei had invaded the capital region and had them executed.

He formally informed all officials: the ones who had struck in were Yang Qi's Monan cavalry.

That was, of course, no rumor — the nobles and those leading troops fighting abroad all knew exactly what was going on.

But for the noble families, servants, and bannermen of the Daicing Empire living in Shengjing, it could only be a rumor.

It was not that Huang Taiji deliberately concealed the truth; in fact, if he could tell the populace all the intelligence he knew, that would actually save him trouble.

The problem was precisely that this was impossible. People invariably know only one side and not the other — they would know only that enemies were on all sides, but not who those enemies actually were or how many troops they had.

Letting rumors spread unchecked would ultimately coalesce into a powerful tide that would in turn influence the nobles' judgment of the situation.

Just worrying about his own family's troublesome relatives was headache enough for the Chongde Emperor.

The prisoners' confessions proved that his speculation about the relationship between Liu Chengzong and the Guanning Army was correct.

The Jinzhou Army was stationed in Liaoxi without advancing — and it was actually because they were under threat from Liu Chengzong.

This matter struck Huang Taiji as rather amusing.

He had just learned from Daišan's battle intelligence that Liu Chengzong was actually arming the Mongols, which made him think this Han Chinese had the breadth of a great ruler — then the next moment he heard that Liu had threatened Zu Dashou... It made his assessment of Liu Chengzong swing wildly up and down in his mind.

Arming the Mongols was a brilliant move. The Mongol tribes had suffered a hundred defeats in a hundred battles since the Wanli era — first, because each tribe served its own master and was a scattered sheet of sand; second, because though they had superb herdsmen, they lacked arms and armor and had no foundation for fighting to the death.

The Great Ming, as the instigator of all this, had indeed once had a policy of placating the Mongols, but that amounted to nothing more than giving silver and grain to keep Mongol cavalry barely alive so they would fight desperately for the Ming. Yet this poison-laced strategy made it hard for even minor tribal chieftains to truly pledge loyalty, let alone Ligdan Khan.

No amount of silver was any use.

At its root, the nomadic mode of production made it very difficult to forge a standing army with strong armor and sharp weapons.

If fifteen cavalrymen had one suit of iron armor, on the steppe that counted as well-equipped.

Yet according to Daišan's intelligence, among this Mobei cavalry, four or five men out of ten had iron helmets and armor, and quite a lot of it was standard Ming army issue.

Without a doubt, at some point unbeknownst to the Chongde Emperor, the Three Khans of Mobei had already gotten into bed with Liu Chengzong.

This could not help but make Huang Taiji admire his breadth of vision, and envy his population... He wasn't afraid of the Mongols turning on him — that was why he dared to arm the Mongols.

Even during the Later Jin period, although they had provided some arms to the Left and Right Wing Mongol Two Banners, they had never dared to arm Mongol troops so completely and without holding back like this.

But this was actually a misunderstanding. What Liu Chengzong was arming was the Monan cavalry, and his main method of arming them was simply sending Yang Qi's unit directly into Monan; very little arms and equipment were actually provided.

The ones providing arms and equipment to the Monan cavalry were, in fact, the Haracin tribe that had submitted to the Later Jin.

As for the cooperation between the Marshal's Office and the Three Tribes of Mobei, it could only be said to have just begun. This was the first battle in which the armies of the Three Khans of Mobei entered the field as a flanking force of the Marshal's Army.

As for that exaggerated armor rate of five suits of iron armor for every ten riders — that was entirely a misunderstanding. Three of those suits belonged to the Marshal Army's Northern Yuan Battalion.

And another suit came from the Marshal Army's relay cavalry — of course it was standard Ming army issue, because those men were Ming troops.

The Northern Yuan Battalion contained the entire cream of the Mongol elite. Half its soldiers bore the surname Borjigin; the other half were jasaghs, darhans, and other khanate administrative and command officers. Of course they had iron armor.

On the other hand, what he thought was Liu Chengzong intimidating Zu Dashou — a rather unwise decision — was in fact Liu Chengzong's true intent.

In Huang Taiji's heart, Zu Dashou was the white moonlight, like Guan Yu to Cao Cao.

Like a man slashing with a blade, Huang Taiji always felt that he himself had not tried hard enough — that if he tried just a little harder, he could win over Zu Dashou and the entire Jinzhou Army. He had practically turned into a desperate simp.

How exaggerated was it?

Shaving the head and submitting to the Jin — this had been the Later Jin's consistent state policy ever since Nurhaci took Shenyang and Liaoyang, used to distinguish friend from foe and cut off the retreat of those who surrendered.

Zu Dashou's captured and surrendered relatives, just because their surname was Zu, did not have to shave their heads. To this day, the Zu family members in Shengjing still do not have to shave their heads.

But Zu Dashou was not Liu Chengzong's white moonlight. There was no goodwill and no contact between them. Liu Chengzong was not willing to say even one extra word — was saying a few nice things going to persuade the man to surrender and drag his whole family back to Shaanxi with him or something?

In reality, Zu Dashou was an honest man, and he really did fall for that sort of thing.

Huang Taiji treating him well made him feel that Huang Taiji was a wise and heroic ruler. Even if he escaped, his captured family would not be killed, so he could flee back and continue serving the Great Ming loyally.

Liu Chengzong was different. He commanded a pack of jackals and hungry tigers — western bandits and northern caitiffs. Before the man himself even arrived, vultures were already tearing up roof tiles and tormenting crows above Jinzhou city. Wherever his army passed, within a single shichen, black smoke would be rising everywhere across the land.

A villain more terrifying than smallpox — either you killed him outright, or if you couldn't kill him, you didn't provoke him.

So Zu Dashou was extremely obedient. Told not to cross the Liao River, his twenty thousand Jinzhou troops really did squat on the western bank of the Liao counting minnows.

For Huang Taiji, however, things on the battlefield were not entirely bad. At least with the Eight Banners' main force returning to relieve Shengjing, the armies of the Three Khans of Mobei had been driven off one after another.

They were not as bold as the Monan Mongols in Khorchin, running wild in all directions — they focused only on retreating westward with their heads down, which meant that following them would lead straight to Liu Chengzong's main force.

A decisive battle was now unavoidable.

Huang Taiji no longer rode his imperial horse — if he kept riding, he'd run both Big White and Little White, his two precious steeds, to death.

He prepared seven warhorses, even had men bring a sedan chair, mustered the Eight Banners' full and surplus household men along with banner slaves, armed the Fish-Skin Tatars and Solon troops, mobilized the Khorchin Left and Right Wings' inward-relocated cavalry, as well as the Ujen Cooha muskets and cannons under Geng Zhongming's command, and marched the army westward.

Punish Liu Chengzong, retake Liaoyang!

?? Good evening!

? (End of chapter)