The Legend of the Condor Heroes: From Being Expelled from Peach Blossom Island

Chapter 525 With numerous preparations, it was no longer possible to suppress the urge.

A year later, Bright Peak was not renamed, but the character "Ming" no longer represented the Ming Cult or the Ming Venerable. The two characters "Guangming" meant to restore the Han people's land, and "Ming" represented that all the places illuminated by the sun and moon belonged to the Han people.

This point was raised by Hong Niangzi. There were three or four thousand Ming Cult members and their families captured at the time. Killing all of them would be against the will of Heaven, since the righteous army was, after all, a benevolent and righteous force.

It's one thing during a major war, but after the war ends, they can't bring themselves to truly exterminate the enemy.

These people can be divided into three groups. One group consists of those who are stubborn and obsessed with the Great Ming Zun, who have been completely brainwashed by the Ming Cult's doctrines. These people have been members of the Ming Cult for generations and their loyalty to the Ming Cult is deeply rooted.

They were mostly wounded and captured, constantly clamoring for revenge for the Ming Cult, and secretly preparing to rebel at any time.

One group consisted of ordinary members of the Ming Cult. These people were not heavily brainwashed by the Ming Cult. Many of them were Han Chinese who had been bullied by foreign tribes in the Jin and Xia kingdoms. They were gradually recruited by the Ming Cult and brought to Bright Peak. After surrendering, they were relatively quiet and did not resist as strongly.

The third part is the most troublesome, which involves the families of Ming Cult members. Theoretically, they are also members of the Ming Cult, but the biggest problem is that many of their family members died during the army's attack on the mountain, thus becoming enemies with the rebel army.

Wu Chengyu became a hands-off manager, and all these troubles fell to Hong Niangzi, whose skills were indeed formidable.

Firstly, she did not show any mercy to the stubborn ones in the first part. These people were always a threat. As the saying goes, "A merciful general cannot command an army," and Hong Niangzi understood the meaning of this.

Her choice was to give these people a chance, deliberately revealing weaknesses while on guard, and waiting for them to think they had succeeded and try to counterattack and escape before her army surrounded them again and wiped them out in one fell swoop.

The reason for accepting the surrender when the army besieged Bright Peak was to stabilize the situation as soon as possible. After the overall situation was settled, these prisoners still tried to start a rebellion. At this time, we could take ruthless action, and no one could say anything. Moreover, we could make an example of them.

After all the stubborn Ming Cult members were wiped out, all the remaining Ming Cult prisoners were terrified and dared not cause any more trouble. At this point, Hong Niangzi divided the remaining people.

The decision not to change the name of Bright Peak was also based on this consideration. First, the new meaning of Bright Peak was explained, pointing out that the so-called Ming Cult doctrine was fundamentally wrong, and that the foreign barbarian religion had completely misinterpreted the meaning of light.

The so-called "brightness" refers to a world of great harmony where the Han people's land is forever secure and no longer oppressed by foreign races, not an eternal and inextinguishable sacred flame, because the sacred flame was completely extinguished when the righteous army occupied Bright Peak.

The true pursuit of light is the light that comes after the expulsion of foreign tribes and the restoration of the Han people's rule. There is no supreme being above light; light should reside in the heart of every individual.

After the rebels explained this to the remaining prisoners every day, whether they accepted it completely or just wanted to save face, they soon chose to completely submit to the rebels.

These people were completely disrupted and scattered into the rebel army. They continued to receive re-education, and even Wu Chengyu was brought in by Hong Niangzi to give them a soul-searching baptism.

Hong Niangzi didn't know that Wu Chengyu was skilled in verbal persuasion, but she knew that Wu Chengyu's speeches were always very effective, so it was necessary to make the best use of everyone's talents. As it turned out, Wu Chengyu's brainwashing was extremely successful, and these people quickly accepted the leadership of the rebel army.

The last group of Ming Cult family members—those who hadn't died, or hadn't perished during the rebel army's attack on the mountain—were quickly identified and integrated into the rebel army.

The remaining group of family members who harbored great hatred towards the rebels were indeed difficult to kill. The only option for now was to keep them under surveillance and let them fend for themselves. Fortunately, the remaining number was not large enough to form an effective force.

With the reunification of Mongolia imminent and the Mongol cavalry marching south to wage war against the Jin Dynasty, the time was running out. Keeping these families around was only to temporarily conceal the location of the rebel army's base. When the Mongol-Jin war broke out, the rebel army would seize the opportunity to rise up, and these families would no longer be of any importance.

For now, this is the only option. There is no perfect solution in the world, and with Hong Niangzi's abilities, she will surely be able to stabilize the situation. Once everything is resolved, the rest will require Hong Niangzi's own strategic planning. Over the course of a year, she brought all the families of the rebels from within the Jin Kingdom to the area, settling them in a few hundred square kilometers of land near Bright Peak.

At the same time, they cooperated with engineering units such as the Five Elements Camp to repair defensive fortifications, build houses, and reclaim wasteland in the river valley, making Bright Peak the largest base of the rebel army. This also allowed the rebel army within the Jin Kingdom to get rid of its burdens and streamline its administration.

The Jin Kingdom maintained a base of 50,000 elite troops, which could be fully accommodated at the original base. The remaining veterans were all moved to Bright Peak, forming 30,000 elite troops and 20,000 reserves. Within a few years, the rebel army completely broke through its bottleneck and its strength once again increased.

Meanwhile, in Jiangnan, within a year, all the troops in Pingjiang Prefecture, centered around Suzhou, that were operating under the name of the imperial court were not only filled with elite soldiers trained by Wu Chengyu, but also occupied a larger number of positions. In effect, the Song army in Pingjiang Prefecture had become Wu Chengyu's subordinate.

There are also Dongshan Island and Xishan Island in Taihu Lake, which currently house 20,000 elite soldiers and 5,000 naval troops. In Wu Chengyu's eyes, these elite soldiers are not comparable to ordinary troops.

At this time, both the rebel army and Jiangnan were fully prepared until the world's greatest upheaval began.

After his martial arts skills reached their limit, Wu Chengyu temporarily stopped and devoted all his energy to something he had always wanted to do but could not do on his own.

In a secluded mountain peak southeast of Bright Summit, explosions have been heard intermittently for the past six months, frightening the surrounding animals into fleeing.

This place was originally a secret base belonging to the Five Elements Camp, a small refuge secretly built to guard against the Ming Cult's high-ranking officials. Now it has become an experimental base for the Fiery Banner and Wu Chengyu.

With the experience of the Fiery Banner in researching gunpowder and firearms over the past century, coupled with Wu Chengyu's firearms concepts from later generations, and further verified by the external bamboo slips.

Within six months, in addition to traditional black powder, Liehuoqi developed yellow powder with higher explosive energy and more stable chemical properties.

In addition, landmines, grenades and explosive charges, which are relatively simple but extremely lethal in the era of cold weapons, can already be mass-produced. At present, the output is not high, but Wu Chengyu has put forward the concept of assembly line processing.

At this stage, it is not possible to manufacture cannons, but these explosives are sufficient. As for firearms, which require more modern processing technology, considering that the Song Dynasty already had the fire lance, Wu Chengyu took out the structural diagrams of the relatively simple revolver and AK through bamboo slips.

Firearms are very demanding; flintlock mechanisms, bullet loading, and so on cannot be completed in a short time. But if we give the Fiery Banner a few more years, and combine it with the smelting technology of the Sharp Gold Banner, even if we just make them by hand, we can probably create a hundred-man musket squad.

Of course, these are all things to be discussed later. At this point, Wu Chengyu no longer had time to continue their research.

From the moment he started impersonating Zhou Dao, Wu Chengyu had already been at Bright Peak for two years. Given his street urchin nature, how could he possibly stay there any longer?

Since mastering his martial arts, Wu Chengyu, who had no room for further improvement without a fortuitous opportunity to gain enlightenment, would occasionally look beyond the peaks of the Kunlun Mountains towards the Jiangnan region, a place near the East China Sea that held all the resentment of his former self.

After several years of transmigration, Wu Chengyu suddenly felt that he was ready and it was time to return to the place where his predecessor had died and where he had suffered as soon as he transmigrated.

On Peach Blossom Island in the East China Sea, it's time for Huang Yaoshi, the Eastern Heretic, to settle old scores and resolve past grievances.

(End of this chapter)