choke element

Chapter 1012 Destruction (Part )

Luo Yingkui is not dead.

After his arm was broken, he fainted among the dead bodies. The Mongolian army was in a hurry to get on with their journey, and did not search the battlefield as carefully as usual to find the wounded and finish them off. So he was able to escape alive.

But he had lost half of his life after all. In the intervals between running around these few days, he fell into a daze from time to time, and his thoughts could not be restrained, always thinking about his experiences in the past half of his life.

For an ordinary Song Dynasty citizen living in Sichuan, life is actually quite hard.

Although Shu was rich, it had to shoulder heavy military tasks and had worked hard to extract money and grain from the people over the years. Also, due to geographical barriers, the cost of mobilizing money and grain was extremely high.

During the Chunxi reign, Wu Ting was appointed as the commander of the Xingzhou army. He was responsible for transporting 150,000 hu of rice from the two Sichuan provinces to supplement military supplies. However, due to an earthquake the year before, the roads were severely damaged. In the end, the 150,000 hu of rice were transported to Xingzhou at a rate of more than 10,000 coins per hu. The civilians in charge of the transportation said that many of them died and some of their homes were ruined.

Luo Yingkui was not yet an adult at that time. He only vaguely remembered the appearance of his family, the thatched cottage and the stream outside the house.

It would be fine if they just exploited people, but they also had to fight a war. There is nothing good in fighting a war.

After Luo Yingkui enlisted as a starving man, he spent most of his time as a slave for his superiors. In the first year of the Kaixi reign, the Jin army invaded, and Luo Yingkui followed the army in fighting and retreating, retreating from Xihe to Heigu, setting fire to Hechi, and retreating to Qingyeyuan. He watched countless of his companions die, and then received news that the commander-in-chief Wu Xi surrendered to the Jin army and asked the soldiers in front to lay down their weapons.

In fact, surrendering was fine. Han Yanmo didn't care if he could get rich. He didn't expect that Marshal Wu was a waste. He was killed by his trusted subordinates halfway through the surrender. As a result, Luo Yingkui and others became rebels again. Every now and then, they were picked out by the officers and soldiers above and some were killed.

Being a soldier, there is no need to ask for anything extravagant, it is nothing more than suffering and dying. But dying like this is too depressing.

Luo Yingkui couldn't stand it anymore, so he turned to be a bandit, but then he encountered the decline of Sichuan's business.

For some reason, the Song Dynasty no longer needed horses from Sichuan, which led to the suspension of many chain businesses such as the exchange of tea and medicine. Merchants from Lizhou East Road to Jingxi Road are now rarer than mice on the street in broad daylight. Wild cats that want to catch mice are so hungry that their eyes are glowing.

Luo Yingkui found that even if he was a bandit, he still had to farm, but the mountain was barren and it was difficult to support himself anyway. He saw old people in the mountain village jump off the cliff in order not to drag down the young people; he also saw many children who could not survive the winter and died of hunger and cold.

He really couldn't stand such absurd and hard life, so he took a few old brothers to join the army again.

The result is what it is now.

It was clearly in the heart of Lizhou Road of the Song Dynasty, and yet, the Mongols appeared!
In that one battle, all the old brothers died, and the new comrades were bleeding. Luo Yingkui lost his arm, suffered serious injuries that would kill ordinary people, and his cheek was almost cracked by a careless kick from Tolui. He squeezed out all his potential and tried to get ahead of the Mongolian army.

When he was a bandit, he was famous for his mastery of roads and geography, and his skills in running and riding.

He wanted to make the most of his strengths and thus inform the villages, towns and military camps along the route, telling them that everyone had been sold out by Song Dynasty officials again and that another wave of tragedy of ruining families was about to befall everyone, destroying the humble life they had fought so hard to gain.

But he soon discovered in despair that he couldn't do it.

How could the Mongolian army move so quickly and so violently?

In the past ten days alone, he had seen the Mongols ruthlessly kill wounded horses, drink their blood, cut up their flesh, and continue on their way.

He had seen Mongolians with their legs glued to their horses, eating, drinking, defecating and urinating on the horses. As long as the horses still had some strength left, they didn't need to rest.

He once saw thousands of Mongolian cavalrymen passing through a mountain pass at high speed, but because the road was too narrow and the soil was soft, some knights were a little unlucky and rolled into the abyss with their horses, making a terrible roar.

Such falls from the cliff happened more than once, almost every moment on a narrow road, and the number of deaths added up to hundreds. But no one in the Mongolian cavalry hesitated. These terrifyingly tenacious beasts would only urge their horses to fill the gaps left by the fallers and continue to march quickly.

He even tried several times to take advantage of the Mongols' opportunity to cross the river and get ahead of them. After all, the canyons and basins on both sides of the Han River were constantly crisscrossed, and the Han River meandered through them. The hydrological conditions and geographical environment were so complex that it was difficult for outsiders to imagine.

But the Mongolian army had many guides who could always provide boats to the Mongolians at critical moments. The Mongolians were so eager to get on the boats that they seemed to be eager to die. At some beaches, some knights would even jump into the water and let the turbulent water carry them to a slightly flatter place.

When the bodies of the drowned in front piled up to form a slope, the knights behind them rode ashore and continued to gallop. The entire army was like black iron water rushing through a river, without any mixture.

There is such an army in this world!
Luo Yingkui was almost exhausted, his forehead was getting hotter and his face was getting paler. But the strength he had gained from decades of hard life supported him to chase like a madman. The connections he had accumulated over decades also allowed him to occasionally take a detour and borrow horses from some scattered outlaws in the mountains.

Still he couldn't catch up. Along the way, he saw only traces of carnage and destruction.

This road connecting Xingyuan Prefecture and the prosperous Jinghu area was very familiar to him. But as he traveled along, everything he saw had changed.

He was horrified to see that the farmhouses where he had eaten and rested were now piles of rubble. Many shops were trampled to a white ground by thousands of horses, and it was difficult to find the body fragments that had been trampled into mud.

When passing by some military camps, Luo Yingkui also noticed the remains of the burned defense facilities. In a small area of ​​the remains, there were traces of countless arrows shooting. There was no doubt that no one could resist such intensive shooting.

What was even more terrifying was that he only found traces of shooting and occasionally found broken arrow feathers, but never an arrowhead.

Even the arrows that were deeply embedded in the wall were carefully pulled out by the Mongols for use in the next battle.

Luo Yingkui searched around the ruins, but only found a few broken weapons and irreparable armor, and the bodies of horses that had not yet been frozen stiff. Apart from these, there were no other military supplies, no food or fodder left, and everything had been carefully looted.

This meant that the Mongolian army was not the barbarian army he had imagined. Even in the most intense continuous battles and marches, the Mongolians were well-organized. They sent special personnel to clean up the battlefield and collect supplies, not missing anything that could improve their combat effectiveness, and not giving up anything that could help them continue to fight.

They have refined warfare into a refined craft, and passed that craft on to every soldier, so that everyone from bottom to top is united as one, without any omissions.

Luo Yingkui had never imagined that an army could plunder and destroy so thoroughly!
This discovery drained away his last bit of strength. He almost gave up, thinking that no one could stop the Mongolian army from doing anything.

In fact, there was nothing to stop them. The purpose of the Mongolian army's invasion of Shukou was to pass through the border of the Song Dynasty and go to the heartland of the Central Plains of the Zhou Dynasty along the Han River. If this army fought with the Zhou Dynasty, it would not do anything wrong in the Song Dynasty.

But the end of this road does not directly connect to Kaifeng Prefecture, Nanjing of the Zhou Dynasty.

At the end of the road, after the fall of the Jin Dynasty, the Song Dynasty's Jinghu system made Zhao actively expand, so the borders of the two countries were intertwined. Han Yanmo felt vaguely that he should work harder, and perhaps he could remind the Song army in this area to voluntarily withdraw and not confront the Mongols head-on.

This idea supported him. After he woke up this morning, he urged his horse to rush for more than 30 miles in the woods and almost got close to the Mongolian rear guard.

Finally, he saw that there were no less than two or three hundred vehicles parked beside the road where the Mongolian army was traveling. The drivers and servants were nowhere to be found, but the vehicles themselves were deliberately arranged in order. On the front vehicle, there was a haystack more than one person high, followed by bags of dry food, and at the back were bundles of arrows.

Such a convoy filled with military supplies is enough to support tens of thousands of people to fight a major battle, and only a powerful border town can provide it all at once.

Was all this arranged long ago?
While the Mongols were slaughtering people wantonly and causing terrible casualties, the Song Dynasty was fearing that the Mongolian army was not strong enough and was providing emergency material support here!

What kind of logic is this? How can such a practice be possible in the world? What kind of absurd world is this?
Luo Yingkui only felt his chest churning, as if there was an evil fire burning.

The fire made it impossible for him to spur his horse, or think, or even breathe. He fell forward and threw his remaining arm around the horse's neck.

The horse was startled, jumped a few times, and then started running. After running for a while, the flying horse mane was flowed by the steaming liquid, and the knight on the horse's back, who was originally hot, gradually became cool, as cool as ice.

A elk was startled by the galloping horses and ran out of the woods.

The fields were very sparse in winter, and most of the bushes that could be used for hiding had fallen. The elk looked around in confusion, turned around, crossed the woods diagonally, and fled towards the stream in the distance.

A few miles away, there was a small hill, not very high, but very conspicuous in the flat wilderness. On the hill, Zhao Fang leaned against a crooked old tree, staring at the jumping elk, and coughed a few times.

Just in the first half of this year, Zhao Fang still had the energy to go deep into the Great Zhou territory and negotiate with the head of the Great Zhou military in Kaifeng Prefecture. But now, he seemed to be under some kind of evil spell and aged rapidly. His already thin body seemed to have collapsed, supported only by his jagged bones, and his face looked like a rotten wood.

He said in a hoarse voice: "Go and report to the Prime Minister..."

He had only said half a sentence when he showed a painful expression and gasped repeatedly. After a long time, he continued: "Tell the minister that the road has been cleared! The treasures have been taken out!"

Xuan Zhuang, who was exhausted, bowed solemnly: "Mr. Zhao Kui and Mr. Zhao Fan are in Lin'an, and Uncle Zheng Wen will take care of them. When Uncle Zheng Wen was a professor in Xiazhou and was preparing to send them to Huguang, he was very familiar with the two young masters and will not treat them with disrespect..."

Seeing Zhao Fang's increasingly miserable expression, Xuan Zeng continued, "Zheng Wenshu has just been promoted to the Imperial College. The two young masters can study with him and get to know the young talents in the court. This will be of great benefit to your future. It will be no problem for you to become a general or a prime minister in the future."

Zhao Fang pretended not to hear and turned away.

Ahem, there were too many extras who died as soon as they appeared. I made a mistake and just corrected it. I bow and apologize.

(End of this chapter)