choke element

Chapter 990 Iron Fire (Part )

Wu Xian rubbed his eyes hard, trying to see more clearly, but the blood and dust on his hands made his vision blurry.

He hurriedly tried harder, and only after tears streamed down his face could he see clearly.

The Mongolian soldiers who attacked the mountain shouted loudly, raised their long swords, spears and halberds, and surged up the mountain road like a tide. Whenever the mountain road was narrow and blocked by fences, strong warriors would rush forward and throw black objects at the place where the defenders gathered.

After the objects fell into the crowd, some of them immediately made a loud noise and a flash of fire, shaking the crowd and the fences all over the place; some of them were not very loud, but emitted a large amount of black smoke. Regardless of whether they made a sound or not, they would ignite a fire wherever they went, which immediately caused great panic among the bandits.

It really looks like an iron cannon!

When Wu Xian was a soldier in his early years, he was stationed at the West Mountain of Weizhou. He opened the state's treasury to distribute swords, guns and arrows in preparation for fighting the Mongolian army. There was this kind of thing in the treasury. According to the records in the book, when this thing was fired, the sound was like thunder, which could be heard a hundred miles away. The area around it was more than half an acre, and the fire could penetrate armor and iron. So Wu Xian was very happy at the time, but he found that it had not been maintained for decades and it was just a rusty iron lump that could only be used as a rolling log or stone.

Even so, he never forgot the record and the joy he felt when he saw it. Later, he heard that the Zhou army fought against the Mongols with the advantage of firearms, which was obviously the successful use of iron cannon.

The cannons thrown by the Mongols in front of us were different in shape from those used by the Jin army, much smaller, and not as powerful as the legendary Zhou army's invincible power. But small cannons have their own uses, and they are still iron cannons!
Wu Xian suddenly remembered that he had seen traces of fireworks when he passed by several mountain strongholds that were breached by the Mongolian army. He originally thought that the Mongolians had set fire to the strongholds after they broke into them. Now it seemed that it was clearly the work of the iron cannon! Even the smell of sulfur was so familiar.

Such a powerful weapon that could destroy an army and kill a general should have been an overwhelming advantage over the barbaric peoples on the grasslands. No matter how fierce the Mongols were, no matter how skilled they were at riding, even if a hundred cavalrymen could defeat tens of thousands, they were still mortals after all, and were killed in an instant.

But when did the Mongols learn this trick and use it so skillfully? This is too ridiculous!
For decades, the regimes of the grassland and the Central Plains have been rivals, and they have never stopped spying on each other. After the establishment of the Great Zhou, they relied on their huge advantage in trade to continuously suck blood, and the personnel exchanges between the two sides were extremely busy. Wu Xian was in a jagged area on the border, and he always had the intention of wavering between the two sides, so he was even more alert.

So he clearly remembered that the Mongols had not made much progress in the past few years. After the Mongol Khan launched the Western Expedition, there were very few craftsmen left in the grasslands, and the Zhou army that the tribes faced was increasingly armed to the teeth. In order to fight against it, they continued to consume various materials looted from the Central Plains.

The small-scale fighting between the two sides never stopped, and the number of Mongolian cavalry capable of engaging in field battles with the elite Zhou army continued to decrease. Wu Xian saw this with his own eyes.

It was not because there were not enough people or horses. The Mongols who could fight on horseback would grow like leeks on the grasslands, one crop after another. There were also endless horses.

The problem was that the weapons and armor that could be used kept breaking down, but no one was making or repairing them. The goods that the Han merchants from the Central Plains sold to the grasslands were all silks and precious treasures, none of which could be used in war. Due to the shortage of iron materials, even the famous snake bone arrows and lanceolate arrows were no longer in supply.

That's why earlier, a thousand Mongolian households tried to cheer up and mobilized the tribes of the forest people to form an infantry, trying to use the Han army formation to fight against the Han people, and use worthless lives to fight the Han army.

That battle, of course, was a loss. The horse emperor Guo Ning of the Great Zhou personally led his men deep into the grasslands and crushed the troops of the forest people in front of many tribes in the eastern part of the grasslands.

Many people laughed and said that using the strengths of the Han people to fight against the Han people, how could they not lose. But that was enough to show that it was really difficult for the Mongols to maintain their military strength, and it was difficult for them to gain the upper hand in the field battle with the Great Zhou relying on their original cavalry tactics. Therefore, there would be such a seemingly stupid move, just a desperate attempt.

In such a desperate situation, even if the Mongolian Khan returned from the Western Regions, it would not change anything. It was nothing more than that he could mobilize 100,000 cavalry before, but now with the surrender of many big countries in the Western Regions, he could mobilize 200,000 or more.

What does the expansion of military power mean to the Central Plains regime? Wu Xian estimated that there are at least tens of millions of Han people in the Central Plains.
The only thing to worry about is the iron cannon in front of us!

The Mongols had been defeated on the battlefield in recent years because their cavalry, which was good at long-distance raids, could not defeat the Zhou army's iron cavalry and strong formations in direct confrontation. But if the Mongols had the means to destroy any military formation, what would the Zhou army use to fight them?

Not to mention the fighting on the battlefield, even the fortresses built by the Zhou army could not stop it! The mountain stronghold where Wu Xian originally hid had an outer wall made of bricks and stones. Wu Xian had seen it with his own eyes, but it was useless and could not withstand it!
After running in the mountains for a few days, Wu Xian realized that the Mongolian cavalry that infiltrated the mountains were not actually the Mongolians, but mainly the so-called Khwarezmians. These people were just hunting dogs raised by the Mongols, and they were not yet tamed.

If even they can use iron cannons unscrupulously when attacking mountain strongholds, how many troops can the Mongolian headquarters mobilize?
Right in front of Wu Xian, the Mongolian army had already rushed into the village like a whirlwind and began to kill anyone they saw. The cries and screams in the village drifted into Wu Xian's ears from time to time, but Wu Xian seemed to ignore them and was concentrating on his calculations.

The mountainous area where the bandits appeared was very large, but it was not important. In the south, the Zhou army had many strong passes on both sides of Yanshan Mountain to guard it, and in the north, there were military farms and fortresses that were slowly recovering with the support of the Jin Dynasty's boundary trench defense line. The sparsely populated areas in between had long been ignored.

It is said that this situation is mainly because many of the generals of the Great Zhou Dynasty have similar origins to the mountain bandits, and some of them are so close that they always show mercy when pacifying the mountainous areas. It is also related to many civil officials in the court, who seem to intend to achieve the result of "cultivating culture and virtue to win over distant people if they are not convinced" through political and economic influence.

Of course, the power of the bandits themselves could not affect the two giants of the Great Zhou and Mongolia. To be frank, the disease of mustard moss is not to be feared. Wu Xian boasted all day that he had been the governor of Weizhou in the Great Jin Kingdom, but in fact, he had no one under his command now, and he was just a cilia on the mustard moss.

In recent years, they even dared not to block several roads through the mountains, and started selling food and clean water along the way.

How could such a worthless area and so many villages that could be easily destroyed attract the attention of the Mongols and cause them to send their troops south to launch a massive attack here?
Even if they destroyed many mountain strongholds, what good would it bring to the Mongols? They had too many soldiers and horses, did they have to use them in such a meaningless place?
Wu Xian was busy escaping the past two days and had no time to think about this question. Now he thought about it and immediately had the answer.

The reason why the Mongols attacked the mountain stronghold so quickly and slaughtered almost everyone they saw was because they did not intend to control this place for a long time. They only wanted to create an uninhabited area and cut off the connection between the Great Zhou's boundary trench and the Yanshan defense line in a short period of time.

Under this circumstance, the garrisons at the passes and prefectures along the Yanshan Mountains were temporarily unaware of the movements of the front line. However, in their view, there were tens of thousands of garrisons along the boundary trenches, and there were a large number of strong garrisons to stand on. The Mongols, who only had the advantage of cavalry and lacked offensive means, could not shake them at all. Therefore, the various tribes would naturally be a little cautious and not rush to provide support.

This slight delay cost the lives of everyone along the trench.

The number of iron cannons in the hands of the Mongolian army headquarters must be greater than that of the Khwarezmian vassal army, and they are more powerful. With the speed of the Mongolian cavalry, coupled with this indestructible weapon, if the border trench defense line does not receive full support, the end is no different from meat on the chopping block!
(End of this chapter)