Warring States Survival Guide

Chapter 128: Start by snatching his uncle!
"Only three at most?"

Haraye held a three-and-a-half-gam spear using the spear-holding technique he had learned during his last "advanced training". He first tried holding the spear in the middle of standing upright, and then tried lifting the spear in the back of a bow stance. He indeed felt that his center of gravity was leaning forward greatly, and his feet were not very stable. Perhaps Oda Nobunaga was not messing around. A spear longer than three gams was very uncomfortable to use. No wonder Oda Nobunaga did not continue to lengthen the spear.

This project was in charge of Aqing. He took the experimental spear from Yuanye and nodded slightly, saying, "It's better to set the length at three rooms. Some people can't use three and a half rooms. They haven't performed well in the past two days."

Yuanye glanced at the spearmen who were sweating profusely under the scorching sun not far away. There were indeed too many short men among them. At present, he could not require height for his soldiers, so he could only nod helplessly: "Then let's unify the standard and start with three rooms!"

The Japanese look like this, 1.45 meters tall. There was nothing he could do. He wanted to make his spear longer than Oda Nobunaga's, but it was not easy, so everyone had to use the same one.

In the future, when the scope of recruitment is expanded, the weight and height standards can be raised, perhaps by one or two feet. But this is all we can do for now.

Ah Qing responded softly, turned around and continued to direct the five-gun assassination training and four-way sword training.

These are the battle techniques that Yuanye copied and asked Aqing to improve. They are simple and practical, and their overall nature is similar to the "Three Iron Stick Styles" that he has been practicing hard. They pursue the goal of "I stab and chop the enemy to death before the enemy stabs and chops me to death", and they focus on various fast and fierce ways of exerting force. There is no other technical content.

Yuanye stood there, watching the ten teams with small flags repeatedly practicing the sideways arm thrust movement to the harsh and rhythmic sound of bamboo whistles. After watching for a while and finding he could not help, he turned around and went back to the shooting range.

After more than a month of beatings, his first batch of soldiers had a deep "understanding" of what discipline was. They then began queue training, marching training, carpentry training, and personal technical and tactical training, while also continuing to work on their physical fitness every day and night.

We practiced in this area for more than a month, and everything went smoothly. After all, these guys had all been in the workshop for at least half a year and had been screened. They could all tell left from right and could barely line up before entering the barracks. Moreover, they all came from poor backgrounds and were not afraid of hard work. It's just that some of them had a lot of bad habits. It's not easy to get a group of civilians here these days and teach them to tell left from right, to have a sense of time and queueing, and to not huddle together when doing things.

He watched the training all the way to the shooting range and watched the iron cannon training for a while, but the situation here was a bit worse. Nowadays, it takes more than a dozen steps to fire an iron cannon, which is much more technical than stabbing someone with a spear. In addition, Aman has a worse temper than Aqing, so from time to time someone makes a mistake and is dragged out and beaten until they scream, and then they are kicked and rolled back to the queue to continue practicing, until it becomes muscle memory.

As for archer training...

He temporarily cancelled this type of soldier because he was short of soldiers and the Japanese bows were too weak. On the battlefield, strange sights like "standing rebirth" were common - people were shot like hedgehogs, but they could still chop and chop all the way until they were bled dry and then died. This shows the lethality of Japanese bows and arrows in the Middle Ages.

Therefore, he planned to mainly use spears + heavy cannons, and only the "Military Police" would continue to train archery in case of emergency, and let's forget about the archers for the time being!

Yuanye watched at the shooting range for a while but couldn't help much. Although screams were heard from time to time, the overall situation was going smoothly. He didn't want to go over and give orders and waste time.

What he is currently in charge of is actually the "battalion school", which is where Yuan Datou selects and trains middle and lower-level officers.

At present, based on the training performance, he has filled all the junior officers and selected more than a dozen non-commissioned officers as the junior officer reserves. In the future, he will continue to look at the training performance and actual combat performance, and the capable ones will be promoted and the incapable ones will be demoted.

However, he has not selected any of the staff officers he wanted very much, and he has not yet found anyone with military talent, or strong organizational skills, or a keen military sense. He can only wait and see in the future after fighting in the war to see if some "military talents" can emerge after experiencing the trials of war.

There was nothing that could be done about it. Strictly speaking, all the people in the barracks, including him, were a group of recruits. They could only lament that everything was difficult at the beginning and it was impossible to achieve everything in one go.

He stood there and watched for a while, and when Ah-man was a little free, he quickly beckoned her to come over. Ah-man then gave a few instructions to several military policemen, asking them to keep a close eye on these idiots. If all the staff did not meet the standard today, they would be sunburned to death. Then he trotted over, wiped the sweat from his head, and said with an unhappy face: "What's the matter? I'm busy here. They are all a bunch of idiots. Even dung beetles should have learned this, and yet there are still people making mistakes!"

Yuan Ye pretended not to hear her complaints and led her to the shade, asking as they walked: "How are you doing with the things I asked you to do before? Have you investigated the situation over there?"

"Are you talking about the matter in Zhiduo County?" Ah Man recalled his identity as the "East Factory Director" and immediately took out a booklet from his arms, flipped through it quickly and said, "A small number of people haven't returned yet. We have to wait a few more days."

"Don't be in a hurry." Yuanye led her under a tree, poured her a glass of light salt water and handed it to her, "Now that you have figured out the number, tell me first so that I can have an idea." He has been training the new army for more than three months. From the initial number of more than 130 (he cut more than ten), he added new soldiers every now and then. Now there are more than 170 people (he cut a few more in the middle to improve military discipline, but not as many as at the beginning).

This already accounts for one-third of the population of his territory, which can be described as warmongering. Moreover, with so many full-time soldiers, even if he is good at making money, the financial pressure is still very great, and the labor force is in serious shortage. Endo Chiyo has been complaining in various ways, saying that he really can't support it anymore and the finances are going to go into deficit, so he must go out to make up for it and grab some people to come back as "workers."

As for the enemies, they are easy to find and are ready-made.

Chita County, that is, the powerful families on the Chita Peninsula have collectively turned to the Imagawa family. The Imagawa family and Owari have been fighting intermittently for more than 40 years. The two sides have a blood feud. Attacking the forces belonging to the Imagawa family is absolutely politically correct in Owari, and even Oda Nobunaga cannot say anything about it.

Moreover, these are weak targets, whose strength is usually neither too high nor too low. It is just right for him to train through fighting. Let the soldiers fight at a low intensity first to feel the atmosphere of the battlefield. This is to avoid the tragedy that happened to Oda Nobunaga last year, where he picked an equally matched opponent in the first battle, failed to rush forward in one go, and collapsed directly.

Of course, in addition to recovering health first, what is more important is to lay a solid foundation for the real territory in the future.

He is now staying in Wanjin and is still not free. Even though we are all good friends now, when his power really expands, there is a 99% chance that Oda Nobunaga will deal with him, or at least force him to behave himself and stop expanding his power. It is even possible that Oda Nobunaga will go crazy one day and use his crooked mind to make him hand over the saltpeter business.

Therefore, staying in Owari for a long time would definitely be a dead end. He must go out and at least get a new territory outside of Oda Nobunaga's sphere of influence, a territory that truly belongs to him, so that he can have the capital to preserve himself.

There is no place more suitable than the Chita Peninsula. It is very close to Wanjin, but Oda Nobunaga cannot reach it. The sea route can connect the two places, allowing them to attack or defend. At least they will not be wiped out by others.

However, this would inevitably require a fierce fight with the Imagawa family, but fighting with the Imagawa family would be much better than fighting with Oda Nobunaga - the Imagawa family's headquarters is in Suruga, and the power projected across the Mikawa River is relatively limited, but if he fought with Oda Nobunaga, it would be nine out of ten that the four lower counties of Owari would come together to attack him, and he certainly could not resist now.

Moreover, as long as he didn't completely fall out with Oda Nobunaga, if he couldn't stand on the Chita Peninsula, he could retreat to Wanjin and go there again after a month. If he repeated this three or five times, the Imagawa family would probably go crazy and would only surround him with rock fortresses and would no longer think about recovering the lost territory. Then the new territory would be in his hands.

This was a plan he made after being beaten up by Lin Xiuzhen in Zhunei Village and having his ribs broken. He wanted to truly own a piece of land, but he had never been able to execute it. Now that the new army was just being established and he finally had some capital, he felt that it was time to start trying. The first step was to grab some people and fatten himself up.

Aman had been ordered to make preliminary preparations. Seeing that he was anxious, he handed him a half-drawn map and said, "It's really not done yet. According to your request, the focus is on the coastal area on the west side of Chita County. At present, we have roughly figured out the situation of the Takeda family, the Ebina family, and the Miya family, but we haven't touched the other families yet."

Yuanye didn't care about all this. He took the map and looked at it carefully. He also asked about the strength of the three families and found that they were not as good as the Arako-Maeda family. They were probably a combination of five or six samurai and seventy or eighty men. Even if they pulled out the farmers to serve as foot soldiers, they could only get three to five hundred people at most, and their combat effectiveness was just so-so.

It is true that they are a soft persimmon. He had previously considered the combat effectiveness of the Araki Maeda family, but now it seems that he was overthinking it. The Araki Maeda family should be considered upper-middle level in Owari.

He carefully read the current, still very crude, map several times, pondered the terrain, and asked with concern: "Are these three families related to the Lin family by marriage?"

Ah Man was also very concerned about the Lin family. She also hated Lin Xiuzhen. She flipped through the booklet and said, "It's a little bit. The Lin family is a large and powerful family at the junction of Owari and Mikawa. Many powerful families in Chita County have married into the Lin family, but the one that is closest to the Lin family this generation should be the Takeda family. The head of the Takeda family, Takeda Heiemon, is Lin Xiuzhen's uncle, a real uncle!"

Yuanye nodded slowly. He hoped that the Ebina family and the Hayashi family had a close relationship. After all, the land of the Ebina family looked better. There seemed to be a large tidal flat where the salt industry could be developed. But this time they were just out to rob labor. With their current strength, it would be unlikely for them to stay there. So, it would be okay to rob the Takeda family first - it doesn't matter who they rob, but of course they have to rob those who have a grudge against them first. If the Takeda family wants to blame someone, they should blame Hayashi Hidezhen for being too greedy and bringing disaster to her relatives for no reason.

Anyway, he didn't offend Lin Xiuzhen, but Lin Xiuzhen came to rob him, broke his ribs, shot Aman with several arrows, and dared to secretly hate him, so it was reasonable for him to rob Lin Xiuzhen's relatives. This is the way the world is. There is no future in being a coward, and we must take action!

This was what Lin Xiuzhen taught him. Now he would slowly start to repay this "favor", starting with snatching his uncle away.

(End of this chapter)