Chapter 797: Golden River Camp

Erdeni's return to Lake Ubsu this time drove his whole tribe half insane.

As the saying goes, those below follow the example of those above — a ruler's will often influences his vassals in the most unexpected ways.

Before this, the nobles of the Khotogoid tribe had all regarded Liu Chengzong as a mortal enemy.

Because they had long since heard of Liu Chengzong.

As early as when Ligdan Khan passed away, Liu Chengzong took the title Daiching Khitan Khan and his name had already spread ten thousand li across Mobei.

Only back then, though his fame was immense, his reputation was utterly rotten.

Whether it was Ligdan Khan personally abdicating or that Khuriltai assembly held in Qinghai, the Mobei nobles saw no legitimacy in any of it.

Especially Erdeni.

Because the three great feudal lords of Mobei were Gombu, Sholoi, and Subadi.

Erdeni, as a minor lord of a branch family, had a name that merely awed parts of the Oros regions; in traditional Mobei and among the Oirat, no one regarded him as a khan.

So much so that when Liu Chengzong proclaimed himself khan, Erdeni did not even have the standing to be nominated.

The three Mobei khans received the silk missive delivered to their tribes — not pledging allegiance would mean making an enemy of him, and since they didn't know enough about Liu Chengzong's situation at the time, they held their noses and accepted it ambiguously.

Erdeni was different. From start to finish, he simply never acknowledged Liu Chengzong's bullshit khan title.

Because a surge of indignation drove him — he just refused to submit.

On what grounds?

You hold a blade to people's necks and hold a Khuriltai assembly in a prisoner-of-war camp — who would dare not pledge allegiance? That thing was entirely spawned by brute force, with not a shred of legitimacy.

Say you have strong soldiers and sturdy horses — fine, no choice but to acknowledge that; but to say you are where divine favor rests and virtue must reside — that is utter crap.

I just refuse to submit!

Beyond this reason that could be laid out in the open, the deeper cause was Erdeni's jealousy.

He was jealous of Liu Chengzong.

Erdeni's hostility was born of jealousy.

His tribe, at its founding, was meant to rule the Oirat; his father had indeed once ruled the Oirat, until he was killed by nobles under Khara Khula.

When Erdeni took over the Khotogoid, their grazing lands were shrinking, their livestock were being plundered, and their population was withering.

Men died in battle on the Irtysh River, their bodies returning home without even enough cloth to wrap them; elders dug graves in silence with wooden spades at desert oases.

Widows wailed and asked him: the next generation has yet to grow up — who can protect us like those warriors who fell in battle?

No one.

At that time, Erdeni himself was no more than a youth who had lost his father early.

He could protect no one; only the towering Altai and Sayan Mountains could delay the Oirat counterattack.

Later, even the Sayan Mountains could no longer hold them — the Uriankhai territory was mostly lost, and the remnants of the Tuba tribe to the north could only flee across the Tannu-Ola Mountains.

Erdeni tried to reclaim his honor, attacking the Oirat when Taiji Chokur rebelled.

But the Oirat army, through several great victories, had acquired fine equipment and fierce tactics, and Khara Khula commanded with divine skill — while dealing with his rebellious son Chokur, he freed a hand and still beat Erdeni senseless.

Erdeni dreamed of killing Khara Khula.

A colossal resentment hovered over Lake Ubsu.

Until Khara Khula died of old age in the Tianshan Mountains.

Erdeni raised his troops once more, yet still suffered defeat after defeat.

The successor, Baatur Khong Tayiji, was not as invincible as his father Khara Khula, but he possessed far greater kingly bearing — he healed the rifts among the Four Oirat tribes and gave them stronger cohesion.

They were no longer evenly matched; the Oirat became a mighty alliance dominating the northern foothills of the Tianshan, while the Khotogoid tribe's patrimony had been completely gambled away in the war of revenge.

Erdeni dreamed of defeating the Oirat.

But the gap grew wider and wider. Erdeni no longer spoke of raising troops for revenge; even when he demanded soldiers from the Oros, he merely used revenge as a pretext to consolidate his existing power.

On the steppe, one great defeat breaks sinew and bone; a child needs twenty years to grow into a bowstring warrior, and twenty years only made the Oirat stronger and stronger.

Every crushing defeat had been sealed the moment he inherited the tribe — this was his fate.

It was not that he accepted his fate; he truly had no moves left.

And it was precisely at this time that Liu Chengzong's name reached his ears.

That Han villain who drove him mad with envy was, in Erdeni's heart, the absolute ideal, the very image of his superego.

Ligdan Khan's western campaign that swept across Mobei ended there; he effortlessly routed the Four Oirat allied forces, and with a single silk scroll he covered the sky with one hand — from U-Tsang to the Khingan Range, he pressed down on the necks of every taiji and noyan and made them acknowledge him as the one true khan above and below heaven.

The steppe had not seen such a thug who didn't even bother pretending and just flipped the table in many years.

Erdeni hated it.

He deeply loathed that fake khan at the height of his glory — why could it not be him?

Under the disgust bred from Erdeni's jealousy, the nobles of the Khotogoid tribe all harbored immense hostility toward Liu Chengzong.

Yet, at Subadi's invitation, Erdeni happened by circumstance to take part in the Lingdong campaign.

To be precise, it should be called watching the battle.

The entire campaign transformed his view of Liu Chengzong, the Marshal's Office, and even the whole world.

From start to finish, Liu Chengzong only looked him squarely in the eye once — when he appointed him as Canjiang during the division of spoils after victory.

That single glance, and all jealousy vanished like smoke.

In Liu Chengzong's eyes, which held a trace of warm amusement, Erdeni saw the monster within his own heart — the great momentum of the world was rolling toward him, and his ambition and mission to strengthen his tribe could be fulfilled through this man.

Never mind the mission for now.

Just one thing: with the three Mobei tribes joining the Dunta Khanate, Erdeni suddenly discovered that his Khotogoid tribe had gone from being a frontier region of the Mobei Khalkha to the interior of the Dunta Khanate.

Of course, the Sayan Mountains might not be as "interior" as the Helan Mountains, but the nearest front line, Taimeng Garrison, was fifteen hundred li away — no matter how you put it, it could hardly be called a frontier anymore.

The peace he had dreamed of had suddenly arrived.

But to be honest, Liu Chengzong's Golden Lotus Plain Canjiang appointment was, for Erdeni... a painful blow to the purse.

To Liu Shizi, three thousand troops was nothing more than expanding a battalion.

In the vast Marshal's headquarters, there were barely a hundred generals of Colonel rank and above — giving E'erdene a unit designation was just doing Subadi a favor.

But for E'erdene, this favor was far too heavy.

Three thousand troops — where was he supposed to find Liu Chengzong three thousand battle-ready soldiers?

It wasn't that the northern desert tribes were too weak, but rather that Liu Chengzong's army had an extremely high proportion of mobile forces.

To put it bluntly, the line from the Khingan Mountains to Liaodong was a frontline of war whose intensity ranked among the highest in the world, and every nation drawn into the conflict was a hegemonic power.

Even the weakened Northern Yuan of Ligdan Khan's era — a defeated army that fled in panic, abandoned its lands, and rolled westward — was still an infantry and cavalry corps capable of crushing countless small states.

In fact, Ligdan Khan did indeed crush countless small states — take the once-powerful Tumed, for example: after Ligdan Khan passed through, they declined into a minor tribe that struggled to scrape together even three thousand elite troops.

A front like this was far too much for E'erdene.

Never mind asking him to bring three thousand herder-soldiers over — in the Lingdong campaign, Subadi's seven-thousand-man corps was considered elite in the northern desert, the kind of force that should have been able to swagger anywhere.

Yet on the Lingdong battlefield where Liu Chengzong and Hong Taiji clashed, Subadi's men could only skulk along the edges, not even daring to touch Hong Taiji's Han army formations — the moment the Bayara charged out, they were sent running in all directions.

In fact, from start to finish they never dared to meet them head-on even once. Post-battle tallies showed they had suffered the heaviest casualties the three northern desert tribes had seen in decades.

Even now, back at Uvs Lake Basin in Khotogoid territory, E'erdene still shuddered at the memory of that campaign.

He looked at the sorry lot in his own tribe and calculated that even if he threw every elite soldier he had into the field, he still couldn't scrape together three thousand armored cavalry — and besides, if those men left, his tribe wouldn't be far from falling apart.

They had lost an entire generation in the war against the Four Oirat Tribes, and their military strength was already thin to begin with.

If he were only asked to lead troops alongside Liu Chengzong, that would be one thing — he could pull together a half-equipped makeshift force and follow the Grand Marshal around, eating and drinking off his provisions. From what he'd seen of Khan Liu's extravagant wealth, it wouldn't be long before that half-equipped battalion became a fully armored elite cavalry unit.

But the trouble was, Golden Lotus Plain was hardly a rear area — it was very close to the Khingan Mountains, and the Later Jin army might break through from Songmo Prefecture as early as next year.

Liu Chengzong's troops were strong, but Hong Taiji's troops were no weaker.

That was also a well-equipped, fiercely courageous army. If E'erdene showed up with an under-equipped nomadic force, he feared they'd be devoured whole in a single battle.

So as for troops — after much deliberation, he figured he could only contribute a thousand elite soldiers of his own. No — three hundred elite riders, six hundred support cavalry.

The remaining two thousand men would have to come from outside.

The Tuba tribes of Uriankhai would need to be conscripted.

And of course, there were E'erdene's old friends — the Oros.

Along the great rivers in the forest, the Khotogoid people knew the locations of over a dozen Oros winter camps and wooden stockades.

In E'erdene's eyes, the Oros who had settled in Siberia were a very strange thing.

They wore chainmail, carried firearms at their waists, could ride horses and also sail boats — yet they never stirred in E'erdene's heart the kind of envy he felt when looking at Liu Chengzong's people, that deep, genuine desire to join them.

Instead, it stirred a kind of… pride, like "my animal friends are really something."

Up there north of the northern desert, a place where cattle, horses, and livestock couldn't even survive, every year Oros people who seemed not to know what they were living for would come swarming in droves.

It was foreseeable that with the Temur Khanate cutting off the sea routes in the west, they would have a very hard time coming again before Fort Taimeng was taken.

Naturally, E'erdene set his sights on the Oros people who had stayed behind here.

But controlling them wouldn't be easy — fortunately, E'erdene had a special method of manipulation.

Thanks to persistent deception, the Oros' intelligence on Khitan had always been wildly off the mark.

Because E'erdene had always been describing Guihua City to the Oros as Khitan.

So there were all sorts of absurd tales — one moment Khitan was a great city by a river, the next it was an impregnable fortress, then later it had been sacked by Ligdan Khan.

As long as he sent someone to tell the Oros to organize an army and go with him to Khitan, those people would organize a battle-ready force on their own and march with him.

This naturally brought a major hidden danger — for instance, they wouldn't truly obey his command.

But out here, it didn't matter if they didn't obey E'erdene. Once they reached Golden Lotus Plain on the western road of the Khingan Mountains, with Khan Liu's army of over ten thousand stationed there — and with their several hundred or thousand-plus men who looked different from everyone else —

they'd have no choice but to fall under control.

E'erdene communicated the news that he would soon lead a force to Khitan to Yakov, the Oros envoy who had accepted his enfeoffment. The two scoundrels hit it off immediately.

A feudal aristocratic system makes it very difficult to form a national consciousness — once that consciousness forms, it transforms into a centralized state with a bureaucratic system.

Relatively speaking, although the Oros were a complete mess in science and technology, they were actually more advanced than Western Europe in this regard.

Because they had truly been ruled by the Mongols.

This consciousness would slowly fade in the greenhouse of peacetime, but in times of war, it came back on its own.

It was all forged in bloodshed.

Take, for example, the Central Plains, where everyone was baring fangs and claws.

The Book of Rites strictly defined: Northern Di, Eastern Yi, Western Rong, Southern Man.

The Ming dynasty went even further, explicitly stipulating in its legal code exactly how much silver a Northern Caitiff head was worth, and how much an Eastern Caitiff head was worth; correspondingly, if a Han person didn't know they were Han, Nurhaci's blade could help them find their ancestors and return to the fold.

Yakov was a noble — moreover, a noble who first and foremost belonged jointly to the Oros and the Khotogoid Khanate. He cared nothing at all for the Oros soldiers and hunters scraping out a living in Siberia.

On the contrary, persuading the Oros soldiers to follow the campaign, and then finding a way to establish trade ties with Khitan — the credit on both sides would be his.

So he accepted the mission to conscript troops at Yeniseysk Fort without the slightest hesitation.

And he carried out the mission splendidly. Barely ten days after he arrived, before E'erdene had even finished recruiting the Tuba tribes of Uriankhai and before the army had assembled, word came back from Yeniseysk Fort.

The commandant of Yeniseysk, Pyotr, was exceptionally stirred by this news. He immediately mustered two hundred soldiers and issued conscription orders to the surrounding forts and winter camps, estimating that within two months he could organize a force of thirteen hundred men to march southeast in the wake of the Golden Khan.

This news overjoyed E'erdene.

He immediately changed his recruitment plan.

Not only did he expand the plan to send nine hundred riders from his own tribe into the Golden Stream Battalion, he spared no expense and increased the number to twelve hundred men.

He also issued orders to the Tuba tribes nomadizing north and south of the Sayan Mountains: the soldiers following the campaign could be fewer — just five hundred cavalry would do — but they were to draw an additional five hundred hunters, so that they could nomadize, hunt, and fish at the Khingan Mountains for the long term.

They were even to transfer a batch of women and children from the tribe to occupy the land there and form a new nomadic tribe.

However, Yakov, deeply worried, warned E'erdene: "Great Khan, Commandant Pyotr is recruiting troops because he believes we are taking them southeast to raid and wage war, for the sake of wealth. When the time comes to organize them into an army, I fear they will cause trouble."

"It is going over to raid and wage war. Ha — they don't even know what Khitan looks like anyway. A great city beside a great river, the city full of silver… isn't that Shengjing?"

E'erdene spoke with great conviction: "Whoever you rob, it's still robbing. Besides, once we get there and go into battle, Khan Liu's rewards — those are famously generous!"

?? Good evening!