December 23, the eighth year of Hongdao's reign.
On this day, the entire city of Changsha was dyed red.
Big red ribbons were floating in the streets and alleys, and the gorgeous red carpet was paved for ten miles.
Lan Cai'er rode on a distinguished carriage specially given to her from outside the city. Fengju, who was the Queen's natal family, was welcomed out. Protected by thousands of mighty palace guards, she passed through the city from outside the city.
Near the red carpet and at the entrances of streets and houses, all the residents of the city came out, holding streamers in both hands, cheering and congratulating from the bottom of their hearts.
Since Lu Yuan took control of Changsha, he has subdued the Five Poison Sect internally and suppressed rebellions in various places.
The people of Dongting, who had been in turmoil for several years and suffered from war, were able to restore a rare peace in the troubled times and regain stability.
Externally, since the Northern Expedition, they have defeated the Zhou people in succession, killed two of the opponent's pillar states, and destroyed a hundred thousand troops. Then he established three counties in succession and expanded eight prefectures. His prestige was enjoyed among other countries and was simply unparalleled.
He can calm the people internally and enhance the country's prestige externally. For such a king, how can any common people not love him?
The stronger Lu Yuan is, the greater his external victory will be, and these Changsha people will also be able to enjoy greater benefits.
The simplest.
The imperial examinations that have just ended these days have gathered here thousands of scholars from all over the world seeking official positions.
They have lived here for more than a year, and their daily consumption, even just the rent, has made the merchants in the city a lot of money.
From this point of view, the people of Changsha have benefited greatly.
Not to mention, Lu Yuan had already ordered the wedding today, and the whole country was happy.
Not only did he pardon some prisoners with minor crimes, but he also distributed some wine, food and meat to all registered people in the country, so that they could enjoy themselves with the king.
This work has been prepared for a year and has been perfected for a long time.
Lu Yuan didn't know what happened to other places.
But the people in Changsha City did go from house to house yesterday, and each household presented a reward of one catty of meat, ten catties of rice, and one jug of wine.
After today's wedding reception, there will be a large number of running water mats in Changsha City, which will be placed for three days, and anyone in the city can come and enjoy them.
Eaters are soft-mouthed, but takers are short-handed.
In addition to the many benefits mentioned above, do you think the people in Changsha City can't express their heartfelt gratitude to Lu Yuan who brought all this?
And now the great sage in their eyes is getting married. Although the marriage partner's identity is a bit unpleasant, she is a witch from the Five Poison Sect.
But everyone understands.
Just like what the storyteller said, the king married the demon girl from the Five Poison Sect in order to appease the Miao people and stop them from causing trouble again.
As long as those fierce Miao people can be appeased and don't let them run out to rebel, then this big guy will not be so resistant to the queen.
There is even some support.
After all, the common people's wishes are very simple: don't go into trouble and don't go to war, the country can collect less taxes, officials should be less greedy, and don't do so many bad things like robbing civilian girls.
For the common people, it is already a rare good day.
In the history books, it was a prosperous era that was enough to be talked about.
So it’s not just Changsha.
On the wedding day, under Lu Yuan's rule, seventeen prefectures, one hundred and seventy counties, and even some more important towns, under the supervision of local officials, also set up banquets and held celebrations to celebrate the king's marriage.
joke.
The king is getting married, and he has even issued an edict in advance to celebrate it with the country.
Do your local officials dare not try their best to let people everywhere rejoice together?
And honestly.
Although it is said to mobilize the people, the entire celebration expenditure does not actually require a penny from the local government.
For this wedding, Lu Yuan spent more than four million taels of silver, nearly the military expenditure of a hundred thousand troops for a year.
Spending so much is just a matter of grandeur and having fun with the people of the world.
Now that the money has been distributed, all localities only need to make their own preparations in accordance with the rules and allocated funds. There is no need to waste local treasury money, waste people and money.
Of course, rules are rules, and systems are systems.
Is there anyone so bold that they even dare to use the wedding funds given by the king, and even the originally scheduled celebrations to celebrate the country, to fish and meat the common people? This is not safe.
Lu Yuan could only send more people to supervise and inspect the area afterwards to clean up more pests.
But this is a distant story, a matter for the future.
At least in Changsha City at this time, the people are truly living in harmony and celebrating together.
The wedding team followed the Shili Red Road from outside the city into the city, enjoying the blessings and cheers of the people along the way, and then passed from the inside to the outside of the city and entered the temporary Changsha Palace.
When we arrived at the palace, the same big red carpet was paved, and the various decorations along the way became more luxurious and magnificent.
Even the people watching the ceremony on both sides were changed from ordinary people to officials of all sizes in the city and envoys from various countries.
The wedding car quickly arrived at its destination, and only a few maids and palace attendants were left on both sides of the car.
Lu Yuan stood on the high platform, watching the arrival of the red vehicle in the distance, his eyes deep and his thoughts far away.
Unknowingly, I have traveled through seventeen years, and my body is now thirty-three or almost thirty-four years old.
After such a long time and continuous struggle, he finally had a career as a king and realized his original dream of becoming king and emperor. At this time, he wanted to marry the saint of the Five Poison Sect and achieve the achievement of finding a witch wife.
Time flies, it’s like a dream!
In Lu Yuan's mind, he recalled everything that happened over the years, and it felt like a lifetime ago.
In just seventeen years, he has accomplished all these great things. Is this true?
He asked himself in his mind, but in the end he had no answer.
In the end, he could only take a deep breath, put a smile on his face, then took steps and walked down slowly to greet his queen.
Whether this is true or not, a dream or reality.
At least for this moment, let's just pretend that this is all true.
Carpe diem and live in the moment.
In front of the wedding car, Lu Yuan held his queen's hand, feeling her trembling slightly, and held her firmly, stepping onto the stairs step by step, heading towards the main wedding venue ahead.
"There are locust trees in the south, and the kudzu and weeds are tired of them. Only a gentleman is happy, and he is lucky to walk in Sui.
In the south there are locust trees and kudzu trees. A gentleman is only happy, and he will be blessed with good fortune. …”
The ceremony official was reading the wedding words in his ears, but Lu Yuan's mind was no longer there.
Following the steps of the wedding, completing each process one by one, and praying to God, hoping that God would bless the newlyweds, the whole wedding has finally come to an end.
After saluting and thanking his ministers and envoys from various countries at the banquet, Lu Yuan did not stay at the banquet, affecting the performance of his subordinates.
Instead, he walked alone through the deep palace city and came to his wedding room.
The red candle shadow swayed, covered by the thin gauze curtain. Lu Yuan entered the room and looked at the queen who was sitting quietly by the bed with a slightly weak voice. He smiled at the corner of his mouth and walked to the side.
He said softly: "Cai'er, today you and I are officially husband and wife."
As soon as he finished speaking, people came up to him.
This is bound to be an unforgettable night.
…
The taste between husband and wife is indeed unforgettable.
Since their wedding to Lan Cai'er, the newlyweds have been immersed in it for more than ten days.
It just so happens that they are all innate masters, they are full of energy and powerful, so as long as they don't want to, they can do it easily even for an hour or two.
So ordinary, when doing things, there is even less control.
Indulging in it day by day, endlessly every night, it's so ridiculous, it's this couple.
Fortunately, Lu Yuan was already the king of a country, and he had made great achievements, both in internal affairs and in martial arts.
There is only one shortcoming, and that is that he has no heirs.
For a dynasty, this is simply a fatal weakness and threat.
Without heirs, how can we ensure that the dynasty can be passed on for a long time?
Without enough sons to guard the four sides, how can we ensure the consolidation of the dynasty's foundation?
If many ministers didn't know that their king was an innate master and could live for one hundred and fifty years, he would only be in his thirties now. He could live for nearly one hundred and twenty years in the future, and his years would last forever.
Such a long life is enough to maintain the dynasty.
I'm afraid that early on, before the founding of the country, Sun Siwen and the others would have warned Lu Yuan to give birth to an heir.
But even so, Lu Yuan had no one on his knees. In this era of many children and many blessings, people still felt uneasy.
So for his ministers, the king is now ridiculous day and night, so ridiculous!
If it's not ridiculous, how can you be an heir?
If it’s not ridiculous, how can we stabilize the country’s foundation?
It's not ridiculous, this country and the country will have no inheritance.
They are not afraid of Lu Yuan's absurdity, because in this world where personal force is the center of gravity, as long as the monarch has strong force, it is okay to be absurd. This is the right of the strong.
What they were afraid of was that Lu Yuan was the kind of saintly king with a pure heart and few desires. He was not close to women and only thought about military and national affairs. That would be life-threatening.
Therefore, ministers such as Cui Changqing and Sun Siwen turned a blind eye to Lu Yuan's ridiculous behavior and did not say anything.
Anyway, now domestic government affairs are always handled by them.
Other military affairs, now that the war has stopped, are just cultivation. The military affairs of each team are also handled by each staff and can be run independently.
Moreover, although Zhou Qing is located in Xiangyang, northern Xinjiang, he is still a general in the country, and he has to help handle some important military tasks.
With the help of all parties, as long as there is no major event that affects the fate of the country, it actually doesn't matter whether Lu Yuan is there or not.
Or in fact, as long as an effective, feasible and normally functioning system is established, the meaning of the king is really only a symbol.
However, for many kings, this means that they are being ignored and their power is being taken away, which few people can accept.
Therefore, in the end, the struggle between the king's power and the prime minister's power will often become fierce and ultimately lead to the decline of the country.
Fortunately, these are all things that successors should consider.
As the founder of the country, Lu Yuan had great prestige with his words.
Not to mention being ignored.
It is prime ministers like Cui Changqing and Sun Siwen who should be thinking about how their power will not be completely eroded too much.
certainly.
The trust and respect between the two of them and Lu Yuan are naturally not comparable to that of an ordinary king and prime minister.
This kind of power struggle will basically never happen to a few people.
However, although no one would care about Lu Yuan's absurdity and even support him, Lu Yuan's state of mind is not that of someone who has always indulged in pleasure.
After spending a month happily with Lan Cai'er, he got up from the gentle village and finally found time to deal with government affairs.
And the first thing is the military affairs that he has always been in charge of.
"Your Majesty, ever since your Majesty defeated the Zhou people in the north and sent prisoners to the south of the Yangtze River, I have been ordered to rectify the various war and Miao soldiers and surrender the soldiers and the people bravely. I dare not sleep peacefully day and night.
The rest of this year has passed, and now all departments have been reorganized.
Among them, there are more than 78,000 soldiers who returned to join the army after the Northern Expedition. There were 60,000 Miao soldiers, and in the end there were more than 23,000 people left.
In accordance with the king's order, these remaining soldiers and Miao soldiers were eliminated from the old and weak, and the strong and capable officers were reorganized and organized into the domestic forbidden army, which eventually numbered 90,000 troops.
The more than 10,000 old and weak people who were eliminated were organized into prefecture and county soldiers and distributed to each prefecture and county.
The 110,000 soldiers who were reduced to the rank of soldiers were also eliminated, and the old and weak were also eliminated, and the able ones were retained. 90,000 soldiers were also retained and collected as the Forbidden Army.
In this way, the forbidden army has a total of 180,000 people, divided into nine armies, each with 20,000 people, which are the nine armies of the king.
The remaining 20,000 soldiers were picked to be surrendered and organized into Xiangyang and Xichuan counties, each with 10,000 soldiers.
The king also kept some of the 60,000 warriors he brought back from Xichuan County. He also left 5,000 to serve as local and county soldiers.
According to such statistics, our state in Changsha has 180,000 imperial troops, 20,000 county soldiers, and 34,000 prefecture and county soldiers, totaling 234,000 soldiers and horses.
If you include the palace guards in Changsha City and the soldiers and horses of various government agencies in the city, there are even 240,000 people.
The military power is so great that there are dozens of surrounding countries. Except for Zhou, Liang, and Yue, there are few that can match it! "
In the political hall, Lu Yuan was sitting at the top, listening to the report from his disciple Li Liang below, he nodded slightly and couldn't help but feel very excited.
In fact, Lu Yuan originally had a rough idea of the number of troops under his command, but he never had a specific number.
Now after continuous rectification, eliminating the old and weak, and taking in the elite, we finally know a specific situation.
There are a total of 240,000 troops in the country, including 180,000 elite soldiers. If the whole country is mobilized, the people and the local soldiers are greatly mobilized, and even an army of 500,000 people is not a problem.
This kind of strength, to be honest, is enough to stand out among the heroes in the whole world.
What?
The Three Kingdoms of Zhou, Liang and Yue?
Didn't you see what Li Liang said, apart from these three countries, there is no one like him in the world?
The three kingdoms of Zhou, Liang, and Yue were originally the overlords of one state. Its strength and status cannot be compared with other small countries.
To put it simply.
For example, the Zhou and Liang kingdoms each occupied seven or ten counties, with a territory of thousands of miles and tens of millions of household registrations. With all his strength, he can send out millions of troops and throw a whip to cut off the flow, which will scare everyone in the world.
It was the Yue Kingdom that had been continuously weakened and only had four counties left. The two counties of Linhai and Yuzhang alone have a household registration of one million or five to six million, and together they have tens of millions of people.
If we include the three counties of Guangling, Jian'an, and Jiuzhen, as well as the three southern prefectures of Xiangyang controlled by the imperial court, there are 16 to 7 million people under the rule.
Not to mention that these sites are all rich places. They are not only important places for grain production, but also prosperous with business and travel, which can provide a lot of money and food.
With the population of this territory, it is not difficult for the Yue Kingdom to support three to five million soldiers.
This kind of strength is still two or three times that of Lu Yuan's Changsha Kingdom, and the two are not of the same magnitude.
'Even though the national strength of our country in Changsha has doubled now, it is still far behind compared to the imperial court of Yue. '
Lu Yuan couldn't help but sigh after making such calculations and comparisons.
No wonder the Yue State court was coerced by him, Yan Wangqiu, and Su Xuange, and finally happily agreed to cede the land of the three counties.
It is true that the territory occupied by the imperial court is too wealthy.
Before the Northern Expedition, the combined population of Lu Yuan, Changsha, Ninghai, and Nanhai was only half of the four imperial counties.
The same goes for territory.
When it comes to wealth, it's even worse.
As for the Xiantian Grandmaster level, there are six directly under the imperial court. If you include Ji Hui and Qiao Kangquan, there are eight people.
On Lu Yuan's side, there are only four people from the three countries combined.
The same difference is twice as big.
Even these gaps are only temporary, waiting for the implementation of the imperial court's policy of self-cultivation and recuperation.
When the local government catches its breath, in ten or twenty years, these gaps will be even greater, three to four times.
With such advantages, the court will certainly not be in a hurry.
Not to mention the imperial court, even Lu Yuan would not be in a hurry if he had such strength.
Because time is on their side.
"I understand. You have worked hard these days, so go down first. In due course, the court will reward you."
After calculating clearly, Lu Yuan came to his senses, looked at Li Liang, and waved.
"yes."
Li Liang heard the order, bowed, and then slowly retreated.
As the sound of gentle footsteps gradually faded away, Lu Yuan was once again the only one left in the hall.
The hall was empty and silent, and the sound of breathing could be heard clearly.
There was no one else on either side except the two lamp servants huddled in a corner of the hall.
Lu Yuan didn't pay attention to these waiters, but dropped his hands on the eucalyptus, supported his chin, and thought alone.
"The imperial court of Yue Kingdom wants to waste time on me, hoping that in ten or twenty years, after I have completed my cultivation, I will come back to reclaim the mountains and rivers.
But on my side, it also takes time.
The millions of newly relocated immigrants need to be resettled and recuperated. The newly formed army of more than 200,000 people needs to be adjusted and rested. The newly developed land of eight prefectures in Jiangbei also needs stability.
Even in terms of Xiantian Grandmaster, Xiaoqing's side will still take several years to achieve a breakthrough. "
Lu Yuan murmured to himself while stroking his thoughts, and then a smile slowly appeared on his lips: "Of course, there is the most important thing. With these twenty years of buffering, with the progress of my Taiping Daoshu cultivation, I have broken through to The cultivation of condensing Qi should be a piece of cake.
Even breaking through the second qi is not impossible.
And as long as I can condense one Qi, my cultivation will be equivalent to that of a Taoist master of the six great channels.
Until then.
Not to mention the current three counties, even if the territory is doubled, I can still protect it with my strength.
And in ten or twenty years, this is a long time, if possible, in addition to Xiao Qing, I might not be able to use the spirit of the immortal spirit to cultivate one or two more innate masters.
If this is really possible, there are four or five innate masters in the country, and I am a master of the six great channels, who in the world dares to look down upon me? "
The Yue court believed that time was on their side.
But in fact, it’s really hard to tell which side time is on...
Lu Yuan was looking forward to seeing the imperial court turn against his side in ten or twenty years, and then be shocked by the strength here.
In this way, Shangguan Ming, these people's faces must be very good-looking.
