One month later, Jiangxia City.
On this day, Lu Yuan climbed up the cliff, facing the morning sun and admiring the beautiful sunrise.
The river breeze is cold and cold. Although spring has been here for quite some time, there is still a lot of chill left in the world, which makes people feel a bit unbearable.
Fortunately, Lu Yuan was already gifted in martial arts, and his energy and blood were like an oven, immune to heat and cold. His own cultivation and magic power are also extremely profound, so he is naturally not taken seriously even though he is just cold and miserable.
In contrast, it was the beautiful scenery in the early morning that cultivated sentiments, made people feel relaxed and happy, and made him yearn for it even more.
Looking at the rising sun, Lu Yuan narrowed his eyes slightly. The golden sunlight shone across the sky and earth, bringing a vitality to the recovery of all things.
It is really hard to believe that the world with such a rising sun will face a catastrophe in the near future.
The fate of the entire world will also be uncertain in this disaster, and the future is unpredictable.
'I wonder if fellow Taoist Mo Li and the others have arrived in the Northern Underworld Capital at this time? How is the ascension going? Is it going smoothly? '
Suddenly, Lu Yuan thought of the fellow Taoist he had discussed with several times last winter, and his mind couldn't help but drift away.
It has been more than half a year since last September, when Feishuang Dao and the entire Nine Provinces Immortal Sect crossed the sea and left, and it is now early April.
The sea was wandering and the Northern Underworld Capital was a long way away, but those Nine Provinces Immortal Sects also arrived successfully.
I don't think so.
After all, when the cold wave came, Jiuzhou Immortal Sect speculated that there was something wrong with Beimingyou, and sent people to investigate.
At that time, it took three years to go back and forth.
In other words, a trip to the Northern Underworld Capital, if everything goes well, will take a year and a half.
It's only been half a year now. Maybe these people, let alone heading to the North Sea, are still drifting in the East China Sea, struggling to move forward, accompanied by the wind and waves.
"The coming cold wave will affect the entire northern part of Kyushu. Fellow Taoist Mo Li and others, even if they are in the East China Sea, they should not be immune to the cold wave.
And the further north you go, the colder the wave becomes, and the world becomes colder.
When we get close to the Northern Underworld Capital, I am afraid that the entire Beiming Sea has now turned into a glacier.
Although fellow Taoist Mo Li and others are monks, even immortal and martial cultivators like me cannot be completely immune to the extremely cold environment. We need to constantly circulate the internal energy of Qi, blood, warm the body, or use magic power to resolve it. chill.
Their long-term fight against the cold wave may not be that simple and easy.
Perhaps on the way to Beiming Youdu, some people with insufficient magic power and insufficient strength will be eliminated first. "
Lu Yuan thought of the chill last winter, his eyes couldn't help but look dark.
The winter that just passed was a bit colder than previous years, and it had already begun to threaten ordinary warriors with internal power.
Under this cold erosion, unless they have internal strength, ordinary people will not be able to go out and move around under the wind and snow.
If you force it out, I'm afraid it will freeze into ice and wither within a few moments.
And this is just winter in the land of Jiangnan.
If we were in the north, or in an environment like snowfields, the cold wave would probably be even more severe.
"Not long ago, the people of Xueyuan sent a messenger to invite me again to Da Chu to jointly send troops to the Zhou Dynasty.
But the number of troops they promised to dispatch this time was only 300,000, which was only 60-70% of the scale of previous spring raids.
Moreover, they had been negotiating with the Tibetan people before, exchanging food supplies for the female population in the snowy fields. The Tibetan people, who had been unwilling to agree, finally relented.
Agree to provide 100,000 snowy women of the right age this year, and to sell the captured Zhou captives to my country of Chu.
The scale of the troop dispatch has become smaller, and they have agreed to this condition again. It seems that the losses suffered by the Xueyuan people this winter may be greater than imagined. "
Lu Yuan looked thoughtful as he thought about the information that Huang Xuan personally transmitted through his spiritual thoughts from Hanzhong in the northwest two days ago.
Ever since the Xueyuan Tibetan people chose to migrate to the Zhou people's Helong County in order to survive due to the cold wave, huge wars would break out between the two countries every spring and autumn.
In order to plunder enough food and supplies, the Tibetan people mobilized herdsmen from various tribes basically every spring and dispatched as many as four to five million herdsmen cavalry to attack the two counties of Helong and plunder.
At its largest scale, more than 700,000 herdsmen and Tibetan soldiers were mobilized in the spring, which was almost as much as the total population of some small countries.
However, this spring, the Tibetan people changed their past generosity and only used 300,000 cavalry. It was really not like their style.
A small cavalry raiding group of 300,000 people, basically composed of militia-type herdsmen. With this small number of people, it is not as many as the regular army of Helong County of Zhou State?
What effect would sending them on a spring raid have?
I'm afraid they weren't there to rob, but to deliver food to people.
But the Tibetan people knew this, but still did it. The meaning of it is thought-provoking.
"It seems that the Tibetan people, after fighting for so many years, can no longer hold on!"
Lu Yuan couldn't help but feel a little emotional.
A careful calculation shows that six years have passed since the summer of the sixth year of Shenwu, when the Xueyuan people took the initiative to go to war with the Zhou people due to a major flood, to the spring of the eleventh year of Shenwu.
After fighting for six full years, no matter how many Tibetan herdsmen there were and no matter how worthless the cannon fodder cavalry on the grassland was, the losses accumulated time after time would be extremely horrific.
It is conservatively estimated that over the past six years, the number of herders killed by the Tibetan people on various battlefields has exceeded 1.5 million.
The population loss caused by cold disasters, hunger, war and other reasons is estimated to have exceeded five million.
Added together, the total population loss is more than 6.5 million. Compared with the 16 million people at the peak of the Tibetan people, the reduction has exceeded one-third.
The losses were so serious, especially the lost population and so many young and strong elites, that the Tibetan people could almost be said to be on the verge of annihilation.
Based on this inference, how optimistic is Lu Yuan about the future of the Tibetan people?
In fact, the actual situation of the Fan people was worse than he expected.
Lu Yuan wanted to collect information about the Tibetan people, but in the end he could only use the Helong battlefield channels and some blood relationship details mentioned by his concubine.
Although these two channels are good, compared with collecting directly on the snowfield, it will take a lot of time and the details are much worse.
In fact, the situation facing the Xueyuan people was much more serious than Lu Yuan had imagined.
The losses of the Snowfield tribes in the past years are not much different from the many intelligence inferences collected by Chu State in the past.
But last winter, due to the sudden intensification of the cold wave, many unprepared tribes in the snowfield were severely hit.
Just one winter later, more than a million people in all parts of the snowfield were directly frozen to death, and there were even some young and strong people who had received supplies.
Such a big cold wave directly took away one-tenth of the Xueyuan Tibetan population.
Now, after the cold wave attrition, the total population of the Tibetan people in the entire snowfield has dropped to less than nine million.
Among the remaining nine million people, many have suffered from a large number of chilblains, frostbite, and even missing toes and fingers due to last winter, and are no longer able to become a qualified labor force and combat unit.
It is precisely because of these large-scale reductions in population and the emergence of a large number of lightly and seriously injured people that it is actually difficult for the Snowy People to organize large-scale troops anymore.
At this time, we can gather 300,000 riders from the remaining 9 million people, which can be said to be rare and miraculous.
If it weren't for the life-and-death crisis of the entire tribe and the entire ethnic group, the entire social order would have collapsed long ago after suffering such a catastrophe based on the organizational strength and productivity of the snowfield.
How can we still spare 300,000 cavalry and launch a spring raid invasion against the Zhou people like now?
However, a mere 300,000 riders were indeed what Lu Yuan thought.
It was already difficult to do anything. The Zhou people stationed 300,000 soldiers in Helong County and a militia of almost the same size.
On the frontal battlefield, the Zhou people's military strength and strength had officially surpassed that of the Xueyuan Fan people, and even achieved a crushing advantage.
From now on, unless outside forces intervene, once all the Tibetan people in the snowy fields are dead, Helong County will not be able to defeat them.
It is precisely because he understands the decline of his own strength and the difficulty of his situation that he can obtain more supplies in order to reduce the food shortage caused by population pressure.
Only the Xueyuan people would agree to trade young women from their own tribe with the Chu State in exchange for precious food and various supplies.
It's not that they don't know that losing those precious women of childbearing age will definitely affect the long-term development of the tribe in the future, and even lead to destruction step by step.
But they know that if they don't do this, not only will these women be unable to survive, they will starve to death, and even their tribe will suffer more losses or even die directly if they freeze to death.
The two powers harm each other, whichever is the lesser. Trading the long-term future for the short-term future is like drinking poison to quench thirst. It has to be done.
Maybe if they do this and get enough support, they can regenerate their strength, fight the Zhou people, and fight to the death to seize the place where they can join together?
This hope may be slim, but there is always a glimmer of hope.
Compared with other futures that are already doomed to be gloomy and impossible, this is acceptable enough.
Of course, the above is limited to the shortage of information, and Lu Yuan is not clear about it.
Otherwise, given the current predicament of the Tibetan people, the Chu State could put forward more conditions to extract more benefits.
The Tibetan people, who have been forced into a desperate situation, have lost all their bargaining chips. Faced with no matter how extreme the conditions are, as long as they do not want to exterminate the clan, they will eventually have no choice but to accept it.
Of course, these modest benefits are actually nothing to the Chu State, which is now about to unify Jiangnan.
Lu Yuan didn't attach much importance to it.
Compared with this, he values the friendship with the Fan people more.
After all, among the Tibetan people, apart from the ordinary herdsmen, there are still more than ten innate masters left.
If the Xueyuan Fan people are destroyed in the future, the Chu State may be able to rely on its past relationship with Xueyuan and the identity of the spirit girl to recruit a group of people from the innate talents of the Xueyuan people to obtain the opponent's greatest heritage.
In the future, the spiritual energy will become less and less. When those Jiuzhou monks arrive in the Northern Netherworld and extract the last active spiritual energy between heaven and earth, those divine blood mutants that were still able to survive in the Cave Heaven Paradise will slowly disappear due to the lack of spiritual energy. Die of old age and illness.
By then, without the help of the Divine Blood Spirit Pill, it will be difficult for Jiuzhou to give birth to innates.
In today's world, it is basically the last time for all martial arts people to aspire to be innate.
From now on, for at most a hundred years, it will be difficult for an innate person to be born in the world.
In two hundred years at most, all the innate masters may become extinct and become a legend like the current great master.
Therefore, if we can win over more at this time, the last afterglow of the innate master, then Chu State will naturally have a greater advantage in the future battles with other countries in terms of high-end combat power.
therefore.
Compared to ordinary people who can recover in just a few decades. In the next two hundred years, every one who dies will lose one, and the innate master who cannot be born again will undoubtedly be more important.
If the Chu State can obtain the innate loyalty of all the Tibetan people in the snowy plains, then in addition to the innates it already possesses, there will also be a group of innates that may be surrendered after the Ningguo Lingnan is conquered.
The number of innate masters possessed by Chu State may directly exceed thirty.
Thirty innates.
If they really have such strength, let alone break into Jiangbei and gain a foothold in Zhongzhou in the future.
Even if he directly attacked Liang, Lu Yuan had some confidence.
Therefore, compared with such a long-term future, he certainly does not pay attention to the mere interests at this time.
Even if possible, Lu Yuan would be more willing to help the Tibetan people a little more when they are in trouble.
Anyway, there is a high probability that these Tibetan people will not be able to stand up.
In this case, it is better to invest more in the future and use today's good feelings in exchange for future gains.
Of course, this is long-term work and there is no need to rush.
Now all you need is a steady stream of water to moisten things silently, and you can wait for the fruits to mature in the next few years or even ten years before picking them.
Lu Yuan has this patience.
"But those Tibetan people are having a hard time, and the situation of the Zhou people is not much better either."
He was thinking about the information from Zhou State in his mind.
Last winter, the Tibetan people had a hard time, and the Zhou Kingdom suffered heavy losses.
At that time, under the joint efforts of the Tibetan people, the Chu state, and the Wei people, the Zhou state, led by He Basheng, a famous general in the world, relied on its strong strength to repulse the Chu state and the Tibetan people, but still controlled the river. The Long Er County Sheriff's barrel was like an iron bucket, with no gaps exposed.
But on the northern battlefield of Zhou State, the 300,000 troops of Zhou people who had hurriedly escaped were defeated again by the famous Wei general Xiao Wudi.
Wei's 400,000-strong army fought against the Zhou's 300,000 soldiers and horses. As a result, the Zhou people were defeated again, losing more than 100,000 troops.
Even if the Zhou army had strong cities and dangerous passes to defend them, it would be difficult for them to withstand the Wei army.
The remaining half of Shuofang County controlled by the Zhou Kingdom was completely lost in just three months.
Finally, in early October last year, more than ten days after the first snow fell in the North, the entire Shuofang County was controlled by the Wei State, and the Zhou State completely lost its gateway to the North.
If it hadn't been for the deep winter and the continuous heavy snow, it would be difficult to use troops.
Fearing that they would take advantage of this opportunity, the Wei people continued to send their troops southward, invaded Guannei County, and reached Chang'an, the capital of the Zhou Kingdom.
But even so.
The loss of Shuofang County and the threat to the capital area still caused fear to everyone in the Zhou Kingdom.
In order to resist Wei, Emperor Zhou even transferred He Basheng, the only famous general in the country, from Helong and ordered him to return to northern Xinjiang and set up defenses at the dangerous pass in the northern part of Guannei County to deal with the attack of his old enemy Xiao Wudi.
But now in Guannei County, even if Zhou State consolidates the remaining soldiers, and including the 50,000 soldiers and horses guarding the capital, the total strength is only about 200,000.
In order to quickly break through the Zhou defense line, the Wei people had previously adopted a heavy-casualty offensive such as storming the city checkpoints, but the losses of soldiers and horses were also heavy. It is said that there were more than 200,000 casualties.
But in Wei State, except for those tribesmen who need to guard against the grasslands in the north and go south, there are no enemies in other directions, and they don't need much force to garrison.
Therefore, more than 200,000 soldiers and horses were killed and injured at one time. Although it was a huge loss for Wei, it was not unbearable.
With a size comparable to that of Wei and Zhou, while maintaining sufficient defense in the north, it can still easily recruit and mobilize troops at home to supplement the losses on the southern front.
At this time, the Wei army in Shuofang County had returned to 400,000 soldiers and horses after a winter and half a spring of reinforcements.
Moreover, among the 400,000 troops, the number of Wei's innate masters is even greater. It is said that they are the same size as the soldiers and horses, almost twice the size of Zhou's northern army.
Although this kind of strength cannot directly crush Zhou State, it is still a gap that is enough to make people despair.
With He Basheng's ability, it would be difficult to stop the Wei army.
"So in the end, Zhou State either believed in He Basheng's ability, fought with twice the military strength gap, and fought with Wei State in northern Xinjiang, gambling on a slim chance of victory.
Either give up the two counties of Helong and move all the remaining troops and people to Guannei County. By concentrating military and horse resources in this way, the strength of Guannei County will undoubtedly be greatly increased, and it will naturally be able to resist Wei.
It was a chance of winning at the risk of losing all three counties.
It is better to abandon the dilapidated Helong County and protect the core Guannai County where the capital is located.
How should Zhou Guo choose?
This should be the last cautious chance for the Tibetan people, right?
As long as Zhou State gives up the two counties of Helong, the Tibetan people, who are already on the verge of collapse, can take over the two counties of Helong and survive for the time being.
This may have a big impact on my plan to annex the Tibetan people, so it should be considered a variable..."
Lu Yuan couldn't help but think about his future plans, and finally shook his head: "It shouldn't be the case. I heard that the Xiliang Kingdom in the northwest of Yongzhou has gradually become starved of food due to the influence of the cold wave in recent years.
Now the Xiliang army has begun to test and infiltrate into Helong County, hoping to obtain new sources of money and grain to survive the disaster.
and the Wei State in the north.
Now we have acquired Shuofang County and are bordering Helong County.
Wei State was more affected by the cold wave, faced more food difficulties, and had greater demand for land capable of producing grain.
Under such circumstances, if Guanzhong County turns into an iron bucket and becomes difficult to eat, who knows what Wei Guoguo will have in mind for the neighboring Helong County.
There is also Zhou State, which will probably not be reconciled to losing its western barrier all of a sudden.
After calming down, he may try to return again and try to recapture Helong County.
With so many packs of wolves looking around, it would be better if the Tibetan people did not take advantage of Helong County.
If we really capture it, we will take the current position of Zhou State, which is besieged by three parties and besieged from left to right.
Perhaps by then, the Tibetan people will be defeated faster than normal, and I will be able to accept their legacy faster. "
Lu Yuan made an inference and felt relieved.
Then he looked at the rising sun on the river, and felt a sense of urgency in his heart.
The situation in the north is changing so fast that the Zhou Kingdom is even in danger of subjugation, and Yongzhou may be about to change hands.
As the cold wave gradually intensifies, the turmoil in the world situation becomes more and more obvious.
The Chu State where he is located must also step up his pace and gain more advantages in this chess game of world competition.
Otherwise, if the northern land is gradually unified and the resources of each state are integrated, those top empires that connect counties across states will appear, which is far superior to the hegemony of one state.
Then even Lu Yuan would be powerless and unable to do anything before he could survive those innate masters.
“So, if you don’t want to fall behind, you have to speed up your pace.”
Looking in the distance to the east and in the direction of Ning Guo, Lu Yuan's eyes were deep and he had already made up his mind.
