Entrepreneurship in the Late Tang Dynasty

Chapter 106 Anger

After determining the direction of Gao Pian's camp, Zhao Huai'an and his men set off overnight.

Although they had prepared spare horses in advance, they were still exhausted by the middle of the night and had to find a place to spend the night before continuing their journey in the early hours of the next day.

By daylight, Zhao Huai'an and the others had finally confirmed that they had run in the right direction.

They soon spotted dense ruts on the dirt road, the tracks left by a large army of supplies, and realized they had found the right place.

As they traveled along the mountain path, Zhao Huai'an and his companions suddenly spotted a village hidden behind the mountain, which appeared to be abandoned from a distance.

Since there wasn't much water left in their water bags, Zhao Huai'an and his group decided to head towards the ruins, because even the most abandoned village would have a well.

Humans have always lived near water.

Once inside the village, Zhao Huai'an and his group realized that it was much larger than it had appeared.

Unlike most rural villages, this village has a very flat drying ground. Judging from the lingering aroma of tea, this place was used for drying tea.

This place must have been a wealthy village before, but now only ruins remain.

As they approached, Zhao Da, on horseback, glanced at the scene and saw rows of shacks against the earthen wall. It seemed that although the area had been abandoned, there were still refugees living there.

After thinking it over, Zhao Huai'an decided to give up fetching water. He didn't want to disturb the refugees; it was better to avoid trouble.

Just as Zhao Huai'an was preparing to leave with his cavalry.

Suddenly, he wrinkled his nose, but before he could speak, Liu Zhijun drew his bow and shielded Zhao Huai'an behind him, saying warily:
"They will all smell of blood!"

At this moment, Zhao Huai'an also pulled a short axe from his warhorse's saddlebag and shielded the chief secretary Zhang Guinian behind him.

Liu Xin, accompanied by four valiant knights, dismounted, took off his iron armor from the spare warhorse, put it on with the help of his comrades, and then remounted with the assistance of his attendants.

The remaining cavalry had already scattered, darting around the fortified walls like birds.

With each whistle, the cavalrymen reported "safety" from various locations before returning to Zhao Huai'an's side. One of the cavalrymen galloped up and shouted:

"There's no one in the fortified village, that means..."

"Just what?"

"There's just a pile of corpses."

Zhao Huai'an frowned, then led Zhang Guinian and the others into the ruins of the fortified village.

Upon entering, Zhao Huai'an saw several decapitated corpses piled on top of the shacks. Inside the fortified wall, among the tall weeds, decapitated bodies could be seen everywhere.

Because Liu Xin was already wearing iron armor, Liu Zhijun took the initiative to go down and check the condition of the corpses.

He randomly flipped over a body. Although it was headless and could not be identified, Liu Zhijun could tell from the calluses on the corpse's hands that the man was a farmer, or at least used to be a farmer.

Liu Zhijun flipped through a few more, all of them were men, but he didn't see any children. For some reason, he unconsciously breathed a sigh of relief.

After searching through the ruins for a while, Liu Zhijun observed their layout and roughly reconstructed the scene. He then ran back to report to Zhao Da:
"It must be that this place has been occupied by a group of refugees. It must have been last night when a group of soldiers stormed into the village through the breach and killed all the refugees in the shacks."

Zhao Huai'an nodded, but Wang Jin, standing beside him, added to Liu Zhijun's statement:
"These refugees were all beheaded. Only soldiers would do this, because heads can be counted as merit."

After hearing Wang Jin's explanation, several young warriors in Beiwei suddenly realized what was going on.

After hearing this, Zhao Huai'an frowned and asked:
"Can you determine whether the Nanzhao people or our Tang army did the killings?"

Liu Zhijun shook his head; this was indeed difficult to judge.

Zhao sighed. That's just how the world is. He wasn't someone who was easily swayed by emotions, but seeing these people lying dead in the wilderness still made him feel uncomfortable.

So he said to Wang Jin and Guo Congyun:
"Let's rest here for a while. I see a well over there. Have the brothers fill their water bags, and then we'll run all the way to the camp."

Upon receiving the order, Wang Jin and his men dismounted to fetch water. Even so, several cavalrymen rode to nearby high ground, cautiously keeping watch.

Although Bao Yidu's cavalry consisted of only seventy or eighty riders, they were either elite knights from the Nanzhao army or cavalry seeds from various vassal states in the Central Plains, all of them elite elites.

So even though Zhao Huai'an was single-mindedly focused on expanding the cavalry force, he didn't just go to Chengdu to recruit a bunch of knights. At most, he entrusted the big merchant Du Zonghan to search for some people.

Why?

Zhao Huai'an didn't have much faith in the fighting ability of the Chengdu Knights. The capable ones had already been recruited into the Chengdu Cavalry four years ago, and Zhao Huai'an didn't think much of the rest.

So Zhao Huai'an is now in a dilemma, namely that there is a real lack of brave warriors in Xichuan. He himself is taking the route of elite troops, since each person is paid two strings of cash every month.

All this money was earned by him and his brothers risking their lives. How could he let a scoundrel steal his wages?

Therefore, although Zhao Da was very anxious, he still did not consider recruiting cavalry on a large scale in western Sichuan.

At this moment, Zhao Huai'an's desire to seek a post in the Central Plains or Huaixi grew stronger.

He used to drink with Li Shitai of the Zhongwu Army and heard him talk about the large horse farm in Huaixi, which never lacked fine horses and riders.

Zhang Guinian had told him about the situation in Xuzhou before, and he had once thought about going to Xuzhou to seek a position as an envoy.

However, given his status, no matter how great his achievements, he could never become the defense commissioner of Xuzhou, a key city on the Grand Canal. Therefore, Zhao Huai'an set his sights on the Huaihe River region as a second choice.

The term "Huaixi" narrowly refers to the three places of Shen, Guang, and Cai, while in a broader sense it encompasses many places including Bian, Hua, Zheng, Cai, An, Guang, Xu, and Shen.

When Zhao Da and Li Shitai were drinking together before, they took the opportunity to ask each other why, out of so many warlords in the Central Plains, your Zhongwu Army was the strongest. Was it really that powerful?

Li Shitai got carried away with his drinking and directly criticized Zhao Da, saying that this country bumpkin was a shame to be from Shouzhou and didn't know how powerful Huaixi was!

You could say that the only places in the world known for their elite troops were Qi, Cai, Yan, Zhao, and Wei.

Among them, Yan, Zhao and Wei are the three towns in present-day Hebei. The strength of these three is self-evident. The current situation of numerous warlords is entirely due to the military resistance of these three against Chang'an.

As for Qi, there's not much to say, because Qingzhou is a place that produces heroes. Not to mention the Pinglu Army led by the current Ziqing Jiedushi, whose original base was the Pinglu Army of Yingzhou in Liaodong.

These Yingzhou soldiers were elite troops under An Lushan's command. Later, the rebel army broke through Tongguan and captured the two capitals, largely thanks to the bravery of this force.

Some soldiers from Yingzhou were unwilling to follow An Lushan, so they sailed south to Qingzhou and surrendered to the imperial court there. Therefore, the Qingzi area was later known as the Pinglu Army.

However, these people later defected to An Lushan's faction and then ruled Qingzhou for more than 50 years, during which time the position was passed down from father to son, almost on par with the princes.

The reason why the Pinglu Army was able to return to the embrace of the imperial court was more than fifty years ago during the reign of Emperor Xianzong.

In other words, the Pinglu Army in the Zibo-Qingzhou area resisted the imperial court for more than fifty years. How could its troops not be fierce?
However, almost all of these regions were inhabited by northern troops, except for Caizhou, where the troops were genuine southern troops, and their military achievements were the most outstanding.

At the beginning, the Huaixi Army was relatively weak, just like the armies in the Central Plains. It was inconspicuous during the An Lushan Rebellion and was only responsible for guarding the Grand Canal.

However, during the reigns of Li Zhongchen, Li Xilie, Wu Shaocheng, and Wu Shaoyang, the strength of the Huaixi Army increased rapidly, reaching a peak strength of 30,000 elite troops and 70,000 guerrilla troops.

Subsequently, under the leadership of several military governors, the Huaixi Army resisted the whole country with just one town. For example, during the Yuanhe era of Emperor Xianzong, the imperial court gathered troops from sixteen provinces to besiege Huaixi, but was eventually defeated and routed.

From then on, Cai Bing's bravery was unparalleled in the Central Plains.

Li Shitai told Zhao Huai'an that their Zhongwu Army was rebuilt mainly from the elite troops of the former Huaixi Garrison. It possessed the strengths of the northern cavalry and the resilience of the southern infantry. After decades of continuous fighting, it was an iron army forged in the crucible of war. Furthermore, the current Zhongwu Army inherited its basic skills and tactics from those elite Huaixi warriors of yesteryear, continuing to this day. It could be said that there were countless elite soldiers and fierce generals among them.

Li Shitai pointed to himself more than once and said:
"Zhao Da, don't be fooled by your martial prowess. What good is it on the battlefield? The true art of war lies in archery, horsemanship, and horsemanship. I, Li Shitai, am not boasting, but when I wear three layers of armor and ride a thousand-pound horse, a thousand soldiers will flee in terror. And in my Zhongwu Army, are there any like me, Li Shitai? They're as numerous as cartloads!"

It must be said that Li Shitai's words that day had a great impact on Zhao Huai'an.

Before going to the battlefield, leading troops personally, or fighting against elite warriors, Zhao Huai'an always believed that elite soldiers could be trained, just like Qi Jiguang later trained elite soldiers from scratch.
But after traversing the battlefield several times, he realized that this idea was completely wrong.

In some places, the soldiers are simply not good enough. It's not that they lack brave men, but rather that these people lack a tradition of martial arts training. Martial arts with swords and spears require the most time and practice; you can't master them without years of honing your skills.

At first, Zhao Huai'an had also thought that, based on what he had seen on the internet before, he could gather a group of farmers to practice with spears every day and then they could become an elite army.

But when Zhao Huai'an came to our Great Tang Dynasty, he experienced real warfare and realized how ridiculous this kind of military training in the eyes of scholars was.

Among the various military branches, the training period for infantrymen is indeed the shortest, but they are also the least useful.

Because he can only be used as a consumable for carrying out the line, a lance infantry unit that can only fight in formation has almost zero survivability on the battlefield once it leaves the formation.

However, most of the time, dense formations only appear at the beginning of the battle, because once the two infantry formations begin to clash, the real elites of each army, namely swordsmen and armored soldiers, will be sent out to fight.

Sword and shield bearers, primarily armed with shields and iron armor, could charge into the square formation while enduring the blows of infantry spears.

Thus, infantrymen lacking close-quarters combat skills could only collapse.

Therefore, a force capable of surviving on the battlefield must be a multi-service force, a mix of spearmen, archers, swordsmen and shieldmen, and cavalry.

That's how my Tang Dynasty organized its army, which is what's known as the "Flower Team".

However, when it comes to forming multi-service units, infantrymen are never the problem; rather, it's the other service branches that need to be addressed.

Among archers, crossbowmen have the shortest training period, but they are slow at reloading and generally only fire three rounds in battle.

However, a skilled archer can shoot ten arrows per minute, and the firepower density of the two is incomparable.

However, it takes about two years or more to train a skilled archer. If the army were to train them on its own, no army could afford such a training period.

Therefore, the archers in the army were already skilled archers before they joined the army!
How much time would a farmer have to practice archery when he spends most of his time tending to his crops?
Before the collapse of the Tang Dynasty's army, the Yingyang Prefecture organized farmers to practice and train during their off-season. But now? These peasant soldiers can only serve as cannon fodder!
Furthermore, shield bearers and knights were the same; these were typical soldiers of the feudal lords, receiving money and rations from the feudal lords' shogunates, and spending their days honing their martial arts skills.

But it was precisely those ten years of arduous training, enduring the coldest days of winter and the hottest days of summer, that enabled him to kill people like mowing grass in a mere quarter of an hour on the battlefield.

Those sword and shield warriors who have only trained for a year or two, would surely die if they faced these elite warriors!
So it was from that time that Zhao Huai'an understood that elite soldiers and warriors were always a scarce resource, not like crops on the ground that could be harvested again and again.

Originally, Zhao Huai'an knew this, but he didn't feel any urgency. After all, no matter how chaotic the world was, with Baoyidu under his control, he could make a living anywhere.

But he never expected that this was the end of the Tang Dynasty, and that it was the time when Wang Xianzhi and Huang Chao were rising to power. Moreover, there were the warlords of the late Tang Dynasty who would later create the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Bao Yidu's small force was not enough.

However, if he wanted to expand his army, recruiting in Xichuan would only be a waste of money and food. Moreover, once he actually settled down here, Zhao Huai'an would be beaten up by the rising warlords in the Central Plains sooner or later.

Sichuan is a strategically important and dangerous region, yet it has never been able to protect any local power throughout the centuries, without exception.

Therefore, he must venture out, and he must venture to a place where elite troops can be produced, so that he can accumulate enough military strength to contend with the heroes of the world in the future.

The places where elite troops were stationed were mostly in the north, except for Huaixi.

Zhao Huai'an and his Baoyidu were mostly military men from the Jianghuai and Central Plains regions, and they would have no chance of gaining a foothold in the north.

Therefore, Zhao Huai'an set his sights on the Huaixi region. It had elite troops, warriors, warhorses, and the advantage of the Huai River for supplying materials, making it an ideal place to start a business.

Not to mention that Zhao Huai'an was from Shouzhou, which was next to Guangzhou in Huaixi, and nearby were places like Haozhou and Luzhou, which produced many heroes.

Countless entrepreneurial groups have emerged from here throughout history. Regardless of how many have successfully gone public, they have all earned the name "Huaihai Entrepreneurial Group".

Moreover, this place is close to Yang, Wu and Yue, which are important centers of wealth and resources. Once he can sweep away the elite troops of Huaixi and seize the wealth and resources of Wu and Yue, he will have both a sword and a money bag.

I wouldn't dare say I'd have the whole country in my hands, but I'd still have half of it firmly under my control.

Therefore, the Huaihe River region was Zhao Da's chosen land, where he was destined to start his business and make his fortune. This battlefield of Nanzhao was just the place where he earned his first pot of gold.

He had already decided that once the war against Nanzhao was over, he would use his connections—whether it was Old Song, Old Yang, or even Gao Pian—to try to get him a position as the defense commissioner of a prefecture in Huaixi.

Zhao Huai'an never told anyone about these thoughts.

The saying goes, "If a ruler is not discreet, he will lose his ministers; if a minister is not discreet, he will lose his life; if important matters are not kept secret, they will lead to disaster."

These words are somewhat mysterious; Zhao Huai'an learned this lesson the hard way in his previous life.

Before achieving something, he always likes to tell others about it, to gain a sense of satisfaction first, but in the end, due to one or another change, he always fails.

Having learned many lessons, Zhao Huai'an began to keep secrets.

Then something amazing happened: he worked quietly and diligently from then on, and eventually, every task he undertook was accomplished.

You can't tell if this is human nature or some mysterious secret.

Perhaps it's true what they say: once you say it, it stops working.

……

Just as Zhao Da was preoccupied with how to get to Huaixi, Wang Jin and others who were drawing water from the well ahead started cursing angrily, and one of them even vomited.

Zhao Huai'an frowned and walked over to the group, asking them:

"What's wrong? A well of water has terrified you like this?"

But Wang Jin, already enraged, slammed his fist on the well and then spoke indignantly to Zhao Huai'an:
"Dudu, those murderers are truly beasts! They actually killed children and threw them into the well! They must be the treacherous dogs of Nanzhao, trying to destroy the people of Shu!"

Wang Jin could not help but be furious. The children represented the future of the Shu people, and the well was related to the survival of this settlement. Who else but the treacherous Nanzhao would be so vicious as to ruin the future of my western Sichuan?
At this moment, Zhao Huai'an looked down into the well and saw seven or eight half-grown children, their bodies swollen, filling the well.
These children drowned in the well. Before they died, they clung to the edge of the well, trying to climb out, but they had blocked the passage themselves. How could they possibly climb out?
For some reason, looking at this scene reminded Zhao Huai'an of the tragic scene after Qiongzhou was captured, and an emotion began to brew in his chest.

By this time, Wang Jin and his men had already pulled the children's bodies out of the water. Because they had been soaking for so long, they were unrecognizable. Two of them were even cut in half when they were pulled out, a truly gruesome sight.

The emotions in Zhao Huai'an's chest gradually turned into anger, and he remained expressionless.

While Wang Jin and the others were packing up, Liu Zhijun and his group began to pile up earth and stones to seal the well, as the water had been contaminated and was no longer safe to drink.

Zhao Huai'an's anger grew stronger and stronger. He felt a little short of breath and very agitated. Why was the neck brace so tight?

Suddenly, Guo Congyun ran out from the sheltered side of a pile of ruins, shouting:

"There's a campfire and horse manure behind us, it's still warm, the enemy hasn't gone far!"

At this moment, his anger finally exploded. Without saying a word, Zhao Huai'an mounted his horse and galloped wildly along the dirt road.

For some reason, Zhao Huai'an subconsciously chose the direction of the Tang army camp.

At this moment, Guo Congyun, Wang Jin, and other cavalrymen mounted their horses, protected Zhang Guinian in the middle, and rode off to chase after Zhao Huai'an.

Everyone's heart was filled with murderous intent!
Only Zhang Guinian in the middle glanced worriedly at Zhao Huai'an in front of him:
"My lord, you must not act rashly!"

(End of this chapter)