In mid-May, Qingyunzi finally led 60,000 elite troops back to Baling.
Lu Yuan immediately ordered that the 60,000 people who had been on the expedition for half a year take turns to take vacations, and each was granted a month's leave to go home and reunite with their relatives.
After returning from vacation, he went to various places in Baling to garrison and joined the county's defense forces.
This unit has been out for a long time and belongs to the category of tired veterans. Lu Yuan does not intend to use them in this southern expedition.
After all, there are still ten remaining Imperial Guards in Dongting County, and it is too easy to select three of them.
There is no need to capture an army and use it to death.
Moreover, in Dongting County, the ten forbidden troops originally left behind were basically new recruits, and the oldest ones had only been trained for a year.
One year only allowed them to become proficient in flag arrays and understand military law and order, and they barely reached the qualification standards.
But just passing the test is just the standard of prefectural and county soldiers.
If you want to become an elite soldier and a brave member of the Forbidden Army, you have to hone yourself in the flames of war, go through a circle of life and death, survive this test, and see blood before you can undergo a qualitative transformation.
By then, if you strengthen your will and spend another two or three years honing your skills and mastering martial arts, you will be able to become an elite warrior.
Now these recruits have just completed the first step, from rookies to qualified soldiers. This is the time for them to go to the battlefield, experience the tempering of blood and fire, and complete the second step.
Just right.
Compared with the powerful elites of the Zhou Kingdom in the north, the standards of the Lingnan countries are actually very average.
Even among the small countries in the south, like the Soviet Union, which is known for being strong and belligerent, the level of soldiers and horses in the country is actually just like that.
Su State is just a small country.
There are only one million citizens, and the territory is less than ten thousand miles. No matter how warlike the people in the country are, how many elite soldiers can be trained with the basic resources?
Among the country's 50,000 soldiers and horses, it is estimated that there are only 10,000 to 20,000 veteran elites who can reach the level of the Chu State's standard forbidden army. Most of the remaining troops, which are qualified soldiers like local prefecture and county soldiers, are of no use at all.
If you want to wipe out the opponent, dispatch two or three forbidden troops, coupled with an innate grandmaster, you can basically destroy the Su Kingdom.
As for the Nanhai Kingdom, let alone that.
Wen Tian, Wu Xi, and Yan Wangqiu have been dead for five or six years. In such a long time, Nanhai Kingdom has not yet cultivated an innate grandmaster?
Even if we count from the time of the Yue Kingdom's Northern Expedition, the Nanhai Kingdom was still in the period of the Nanhai Sect, and the sect was faced with a lack of successors.
If we select a descendant from now on and start training again, we will be able to select a qualified heir in more than ten years, right?
But the fact is that from the six years of Yue Hongdao to the ten years of Shenwu in Chu Kingdom, for a full fourteen years, Nanhai Kingdom still has not cultivated an innate grandmaster.
You must know that Lu Yuan only spent five or six years training Sun Siwen.
It can be seen that as long as there is a foundation and the resources are tilted, it is not that difficult to cultivate an innate grandmaster.
But it’s such a not-so-difficult thing that Nanhai Country just can’t do.
The reason for this was that Lu Yuan had learned something about it through various investigations by the Imperial City Division over the years.
The reason why Nanhai State cannot cultivate innate talents is nothing more than a structural problem.
When it was originally the Nanhai Sect, the Ju Sect was a sect. Even though Yan Wangqiu was the leader, he was essentially just a disciple of the sect and had to be subordinate to the sect.
In this case, the Nanhai Sect belongs to everyone in the Nanhai Sect, and the leader is just the manager elected by everyone.
This public recommendation system allows the Nanhai Sect to put aside selfish motives, select qualified disciples from the sect without any scruples, and cultivate innate successors.
This ensures the inheritance of the sect.
But this public recommendation system had problems in Yan Wangqiu's later years as the leader.
Because at that time, when Yan Wangqiu, who was the head of the sect at that time, wanted to train a successor, he looked around the sect and found that none of his disciples had become successful.
Everyone picked and picked, but couldn't find a single innate seed that met the conditions.
Of course, the scope of this selection is limited to Yan Wanqiu's disciples and his blood family.
As for the entire sect, the Nanhai Sect's 100,000 people can certainly find qualified innate seeds.
But Yan Wangqiu is undoubtedly a very selfish person compared to previous leaders.
Compared with choosing an heir from another branch of the sect, and then taking away the rights of his own lineage.
Even because of their own favoritism, the clan disciples have become like parasites, lying on the trunk of the Nanhai Sect, devouring too much of the interests and power that originally belonged to everyone, and it has formed a situation where the tail is too big to lose.
When the new leader takes office, faced with the entangled interests of the old leader's lineage, there are certainly not many choices he can make.
When I think about it, in the future, the next leader may launch a purge against his disciples and descendants, destroying his own inheritance and family.
Yan Wangqiu would rather have no innate heir in his sect than choose an executioner who would kill his descendants in the future.
This was the reason why the Nanhai Sect, which clearly controlled Lingnan and had hundreds of thousands of disciples, and whose strength was several times that of the Jiuchuan Sword Sect, could not find a single successor.
It's all just selfishness.
This was true during the Nanhai Sect period, not to mention the Nanhai Kingdom period.
When the original sect was established, it belonged to the public world.
Although this so-called public world, in Yan Wangqiu's understanding, is only public ownership among his own disciples and clansmen, not the public ownership of all branches of the entire sect.
But even this narrow public ownership is actually considered advanced and selfless compared to later times.
Because in the later period of the Nanhai Kingdom, after becoming the king of the country, looking at the country's thousands of miles of country, millions of people, listening to everyone bowing their heads, listening to the people saying long live, Yan Wangqiu, who originally still had a sense of communalism, thought It completely changed.
Just like in ancient times, Zen gave way to the family and the world.
Yan Wangqiu, like Dayu, wanted to pass the entire world to his son, and then let his blood descendants rule the South China Sea for tens of millions of years and be the lord of the country forever.
In a sense, this idea is indeed good and advanced.
After all, the country is different from the sect. The sect can play the game of promotion without any scruples, and whoever is stronger can be promoted.
But in addition to being strong, the country also needs to be stable.
Therefore, the strongest power is in the hands of the royal family, which can naturally be used as a deterrent, and coupled with the righteousness, it can be used to stabilize the country.
Otherwise, the leader of the country is from the Yan clan, but the innate master is someone else.
One holds the highest status, and the other holds the strongest power. The most important names and tools of the country are respectively held by two forces. In the end, it will inevitably lead to a situation where the government has multiple branches and complements each other.
What awaits the Nanhai Kingdom will only be war and destruction.
Either the name and the weapon are unified, the Yan clan is destroyed, and the innate master who has the strongest power can reorganize his own political power.
Either an external force invades and takes advantage of the civil strife in the South China Sea to destroy the country, and the fate of the Yan family will not be much better.
No matter which one of the above, Nanhai Kingdom and the Yan family will not end well.
Don't feel alarmist.
When Yu the Great was originally located in Xia Qi, after Xia Qi ascended the throne, the Youhu family opposed the rebellion, and Qi eventually led an army to bring peace.
Later, when his son Taikang succeeded to the throne, Dongyi Houyi took the opportunity to seize the kingship and destroyed the Xia Dynasty's Guo Zuo.
Even for a virtuous man like Dayu, who had great achievements in controlling floods, some people stood up to oppose his son's desire to transform the public world into a family world, and eventually even lost the country for a time.
How can you be so virtuous and capable of looking closely at autumn?
Is it to revitalize the sect and carry it forward?
Or does it save the sect from fire and water and have the power to rebuild its survival?
None of the above two points.
On the contrary, he was selfish and failed to cultivate a qualified successor for the sect and maintain the status of the Nanhai Sect as the innate sect.
Er failed to save the sect from the fire and water, but instead let his disciples lie on the sect and suck blood. In the end, in order to escape the blame, he destroyed the sect with his own hands.
He exchanged the bones of the Nanhai Sect for his own Nanhai Kingdom.
With the above-mentioned misdeeds, and the usurper Yan Wangqiu personally setting an example, how can he rest assured that the innate master he trained after his death will not usurp his family's inheritance?
This is of course impossible to rest assured.
Not only Yan Wangqiu, but also the Yan family can't rest assured.
Therefore, in the original Nanhai Sect, Yan Wangqiu still had his own disciples who could be used as innate candidates.
But during the Nanhai Kingdom period, he only had members of his own family, or even his direct descendants, as alternatives.
Because the Nanhai Sect turned the sect into a country, it also usurped the interests of Yan Wangqiu's disciples.
His former disciples may still inherit the position of master and become innate masters.
But after the emergence of the Nanhai Kingdom, the death of a father and the succession of sons became inevitable. Except for Yan Wangqiu's descendants, no one else had the qualifications to inherit the throne.
Do you think those disciples who have been deprived of opportunities can be willing to do so?
This naturally deprives a group of people from selecting innate seeds.
After the direct bloodline of Yan Wangqiu is left, how difficult is it to select a qualified innate seed from among the dozens of people?
Not to mention, the descendants of Yan Wangqiu had actually been screened out during the Nanhai Sect period.
Those who failed were simply not qualified.
After the old man became the king of the country, he played songs every night. Before his death, he gave birth to more than a dozen children in a year. Not all of them were due to lust for beauty.
Give birth to more children and find more heirs so that you can select the innate seeds. This is probably Yan Wangqiu's inner thought.
But he is not Lu Yuan after all.
There is no way to directly cleanse the body and soul of one's children with magical spiritual energy. Relying on this method of broadcasting to select an heir is ultimately too inefficient.
And the time is too short.
Therefore, in the more than ten years since the old man founded the country, the Nanhai Kingdom has not been able to select a qualified innate heir from the Yan family's bloodline.
In other words, there may indeed be a qualified candidate in the Yan clan, but this person does not meet the interests of those in power in the Yan clan, so even though he knew that the other person was suitable, he did not train him.
Once the signs of internal strife and suspicion start, it is like the whisper of the devil, which is difficult to cut off.
In the Nanhai Kingdom, the Yan clan was not righteous in their founding of the country, and the rise of the clan was accompanied by shameless conspiracy. From the day it was established, it had already revealed its fate of downfall in the future.
Just like after Sima usurped the Wei Dynasty, Fu Weisheng's sentence of "ruling the world with filial piety" fell into the embarrassment and ugliness of the Western Jin Dynasty.
You know, before the Jin Dynasty, all dynasties governed the country with loyalty and filial piety, even Cao Wei.
Yan Wangqiu, who stole the ancestral lineage and established the country, established the Nanhai Kingdom, just like the Western Jin Dynasty. Naturally, it lacked a layer of righteousness and legal principles, had no justice, was ridiculed by the people of the world, and could not gain the true recognition of the people at all.
The same is true for the political structure of South China Sea.
Officials are corrupt, their administration is rotten, and the people at the bottom are worse than pigs and dogs.
In order to maintain their rule, the Yan family, which lacked justice and legal principles, had to sell off a large amount of interests in order to please the powerful elites in the country in exchange for their support.
In today's Nanhai Kingdom, the Yan family is more like the puppets and nominal representatives promoted by the powerful families in the country.
On the surface, you call him the king of the country, but in private, you may not know how to laugh at him!
The king's name is incorrect and his words are inconsistent.
Not to mention the officials, nobles, and aristocratic families below.
In the entire Nanhai Kingdom, no one from the top to the lowest officials truly regards the Nanhai Kingdom as their own.
They all regard the entire country as a vessel for sucking blood, and they desperately lie on this vessel, absorbing blood and nutrients to strengthen themselves.
This scene is very similar to the time when Yan Wangqiu and a group of people were lying on the Nanhai sect desperately sucking blood.
Now the old scene has reappeared, the only difference is that the Nanhai Sect has been replaced by the Nanhai Kingdom.
The people who were sucked by blood have also changed from the public world to the family world now.
I think Yan Wangqiu must have felt desolate and helpless in his heart when he brought about this scene.
In such a country, in such a world where everyone is selfish, the underlying foundation has long been rotten to the limit.
To destroy the Nanhai Kingdom, Lu Yuan didn't even need to dispatch the Innate Grand Master. He might only have to send out a forbidden army, a mere 20,000 people, and cooperate with him to win over the attack, which might directly harm this country that has a fundamental problem.
This country is the most vulnerable to destruction among the three Lingnan countries.
The reason why it has survived until now is only because Chu Ning checks and balances each other and allows it to exist in order to preserve the buffer zone.
At this time, Lu Yuan was ready to break the balance and start an eastward expedition to unify Yangzhou.
There is naturally no need for such a buffer zone to continue to exist.
Let him completely destroy this decadent country.
It is not very difficult for the Soviet Union and the South China Sea to seek peace.
If one of them is weak and the other is inherently evil, their demise will be easy.
But the Song Dynasty, the last remaining country in Lingnan, is a bit difficult to defeat.
The Song Dynasty was founded by Xie Ning, who came from a Linhai family.
According to the Linhai family's tradition of giving in to each other and taking turns to be emperor, theoretically speaking, Xie Ning was born with the legal principle of becoming king and emperor.
This is also true.
Faced with Xie Ning's independence, given that Song State was thousands of miles away and separated from Ning State by many mountains and rivers, Emperor Jianwu of Jinling finally sent an envoy to recognize Song State's independence and granted him a title.
Therefore, from the perspective of orthodox status, the Song Dynasty did not have any shortcomings.
And in terms of national heritage.
After a series of conquests and more than twenty years of recuperation, Jiuzhen County, which was once dilapidated, has long since regained its vitality and begun to prosper again.
Including the newly developed Yinsheng County, the population of the entire Song Kingdom has reached 2 million, and the number of troops has also expanded to 100,000.
These 100,000 soldiers and horses are all elite soldiers according to the standards of a big country. They are completely comparable to Lu Yuan's Chu State Forbidden Army. They are truly the most powerful force in the world.
In addition to these 100,000 soldiers, there are about 50,000 county soldiers in the Yinsheng and Jiuzhen counties of Song State. These soldiers and horses are not weak in combat power and can also stand up to a battle.
With a total of 150,000 soldiers and horses, plus Xie Ning, the innate master, the entire Song Dynasty, just like the original Changsha Kingdom, can be said to be a hard bone with thorns all over its body, and its martial arts are extremely powerful.
By building a small, remote southern barbarian country into the powerful military power it is today with a prosperous people, a strong country, and outstanding martial arts, Xie Ning has fully demonstrated to the world what it means to have a noble family heritage, and what it means to be both civil and military.
compare to.
Su Xuange, who had also blindly expanded the army in the past, had made the entire Su country miserable, with rebellions everywhere, and finally reduced to the dilapidated situation it is today. He could simply kill himself in shame to apologize.
To be honest, even Lu Yuan couldn't help but be shocked by the statistics of the Song Dynasty that Lu Yuan had calculated after receiving the comprehensive information from all parties.
Perhaps it was because the Song State had always kept a low profile, or perhaps because the Song State was located too far south, at the southernmost tip of Kyushu, which was even more remote than the Yi states in the southwest.
Therefore, news from the Song Dynasty rarely reaches the Central Plains of Kyushu.
Even the few small countries adjacent to it were all staring at Chu State, and few of them looked south.
Due to many factors, the Song Kingdom was blocked from information, miraculously "hidden" in the eyes of other countries, and no one cared about it.
If it weren't for Lu Yuan's preparation for the southern expedition in the past two years to unify the three Lingnan countries, he specially strengthened his intelligence collection on the three countries of Su, Song, and Nanhai, and sent more people to investigate.
Otherwise, he would have been deceived by the silent Song State.
And the Song Dynasty secretly accumulated so many strong soldiers and kept such a low profile, it seemed that it had a big plan.
There are 150,000 troops and horses, one-fifth of the Chu State.
This kind of strength is enough to sweep through the small countries in the south.
The reason why Song State was silent at this time was probably because it was afraid of Chu State and had been secretly waiting for the opportunity.
Facing such an enemy with strength, patience, and planning, anyone would feel a headache.
Lu Yuan is no exception.
In this southern expedition, the two countries of Su and Nanhai have nothing to worry about.
The only one worthy of being an enemy is the Song Dynasty.
To deal with the Song Dynasty, he planned to use all his energy and all the power he could mobilize to attack and destroy the country.
This is Lu Yuan's greatest respect for the Song Dynasty.
You are powerful, so I will deal with you twice as hard, at all costs.
