Red Mansion: Seizing Jiangdong, starting with pirates

Chapter 29, Heading for the County

Little Rock Town!
One of the larger villages and towns around Hongze.

There are several thousand households and tens of thousands of residents in the town, and most of the residents are surnamed Liu or Li.

Li Sheng took two hundred people on a boat, went ashore, and headed straight for Mr. Liu's mansion in the town.

Mr. Liu was a juren (a scholar) and once served as a county magistrate. After retirement, he returned to his hometown. Relying on his connections in the officialdom, he ran rampant in the village, making the people miserable.

Li Sheng's father was severely beaten by Mr. Liu's servants, and his land was taken away. He had nowhere to turn to, so he was forced to join the pirates with his family. He died of his injuries a few years later.

Now that Li Sheng is back, he naturally wants revenge!
It is said that cause and effect will always come true.

Because of the oppression of government corvée labor, the young and strong people in Xiaoshi Town were either captured and sent to the county town to work, or fled into the mountains. The town was deserted. When Li Sheng came in with more than 200 people, no one notified Master Liu.

This resulted in Mr. Liu being completely unprepared.

kill!

Li Sheng led his men to break into the house, and his hard-trained swordsmanship finally came in handy at this moment...

The Hongze water area covers an area of 200 miles in radius, and there are about hundreds of thousands of people living in the surrounding area. It has abundant water resources, fertile land, and a pleasant climate. It is a truly fertile land.

But now, these hundreds of thousands of people have no land, no property, no money, and no money at home.

Instead, it enriched the thirty-two large families in the surrounding area. Mr. Fang from Fangjiazhuang, where Fang Yong used to live, was just a small landlord in front of these large families.

Fang Yong had already sent people to investigate the information of these 32 big families. It can be said that without exception, they all grew up by feeding on the blood of the villagers.

These people all deserve to die.

But Fang Yong couldn't kill all these people.

Although doing so may feel good at first, it will cause endless troubles.

Fang Yong selected the twenty largest companies among them and wiped them out without hesitation.

The reason was that these wealthy families resisted the rule of the Huaiyin Army.

After this, the remaining twelve large families were so frightened that they dared not resist and obediently donated their money and land to Fang Yong free of charge.

Afterwards, Fang Yong concentrated all the land of these large households and quickly established military settlements for the Huaiyin Army.

These lands will not be distributed to the people for free. If the people want to obtain these lands, they must choose someone from each household to join the Huaiyin Army.

Only after his family joined the Huaiyin Army would Fang Yong send people to regularly provide them with food for the winter and allocate land to them for farming.

However, the final ownership of the land still belongs to the Huaiyin Army. After the people have cultivated the land, they need to hand over 70% of the harvest.

This was a very harsh condition. The people worked hard in the fields, but most of the harvest they obtained had to be handed over to the government.

However, with the excellent matching mechanism of the Daxi court, this condition can be regarded as a miracle!

To put it simply, the people at this time could no longer survive and could starve to death or freeze to death at any time.

So forget about the 70-30 split. As long as they are not starving to death, even if they hand over all the grain they grow, there will still be countless people scrambling to get in.

Fang Yong did not treat those twelve large families who passively came to him unfairly.

Although they deserve to die, they are now Fang Yong's signature brand. Fang Yong must let them live temporarily, and let them live a comfortable life. Only in this way can the resistance of other big households be reduced.

To this end, Jia Yucun specially offered Fang Yong a sinister plan.

Jia Yucun asked Fang Yong to divide the current land into twelve villages. Then he spread the news that these twelve big families took the initiative to surrender to the Huaiyin Army. Because of their active surrender, the heads of these twelve families were rewarded as village chiefs and were responsible for managing these lands.

Since twenty large families had died before, the land of the twelve villages now was more than twice as large as the land originally owned by the twelve families, so in the eyes of outsiders, these twelve families had gotten a great bargain.

But in fact, this so-called village chief was just a nominal position without any real power. The real management rights of the land were all directly assigned by Fang Yong who was sent directly from the army.

I have to say that scholars are insidious.

An honest man like Fang Yong would never be able to think of such a sinister plan.

Relying on the implementation of this policy, Fang Yong's Huaiyin Army quickly expanded to 27,000 people.

There were not many of these people, mainly because a large number of men in the surrounding towns and villages were captured and sent to the county town or provincial capital to work.

Fang Yong also has a solution for this.

He sent people to count the families whose male members were captured for labor service, register their names, and then lend them food and land to farm.

After he captures the county town in the future, he will let the families of those forced laborers join the army. With the other party's family in hand, Fang Yong will not be afraid of the other party breaching the contract.

In addition, Xue Dacuizi has stockpiled 50,000 brand new weapons, all of which have just been produced by the factory, and even the word "Xi" on the blades is extremely bright.

It is said that these weapons were smuggled in from an old relative of Xue Dacuizi named Jia. The price is very cheap, and as long as there is demand, they will continue to be smuggled in.

In this way, Fang Yong quickly took control of a large area of fertile land in the towns and villages near Hongze Lake.

Fang Yong claimed to be a general and claimed to have an army of 100,000. He raised the slogan "Eliminate evil officials and distribute good land!" and responded to the uprising troops of King Nan Feng Tai and quickly marched towards the county town.

At this time, the nearest county to Fang Yong was Sanhe County.

The magistrate of Sanhe County and Fang Yong were old friends. When Fang Yong killed an official and defected to the bandits, the magistrate of Sanhe County was the first person to deal with him.

Upon learning that Fang Yong led an army of 100,000 in uprising, the magistrate of Sanhe was scared out of his wits.

That was an army of one hundred thousand strong. How could those dozens of yamen runners in his county government resist them?

The magistrate of Sanhe quickly sent a call for help to Huaizhou Prefecture.

However, Huaizhou Prefecture could not muster many troops to quell the rebellion. The Daxi Dynasty had been at peace for so long that the emperor had long since abandoned his troops and let his horses go to waste. His swords had become rusty, and the imperial court had not even sent new swords. Therefore, the prefecture could not muster many combat-ready troops.

The helpless Huaizhou Prefecture had no choice but to ask for help from the Governor of Suzhou.

At this time, the Governor of Suzhou was on the way to escape...

The magistrate of Sanhe County was waiting for reinforcements, but they came in vain. Seeing that the surrounding towns had been completely swallowed up by the bandits, at this critical moment of life and death, the magistrate of Sanhe County decisively chose to abandon the city and flee.

He is just a small county magistrate, and he only earns 100,000 taels of silver by working so hard all year round. What is he doing?
If you really risk your life, wouldn't the 100,000 taels of silver be wasted?

The magistrate of Sanhe was a foreigner who was appointed to be an official in Sanhe County, so he ran the job very efficiently.

But other officials in Sanhe County are different. The county magistrate is an outsider and can run away, but they are all locals. Their family businesses have been here for generations, so they cannot run away.

Fang Yong’s army is about to attack, how can they resist?

At this time, an official asked: How about surrendering?
Some of them got the news that Fang Yong's group of rebels did not hate the rich as much as other rebels.

Although Fang Yong also killed many people, they were those who resisted. As for those who voluntarily surrendered, Fang Yong not only did not harm them, but also gave them great preferential treatment.

(End of this chapter)