After crossing a mountain ridge in the northern foothills of Maoshan, there was a compound of over twenty stone houses hidden among dense forests in the valley. Riding closer, they could see the stone walls were covered with moss and vines, bearing obvious marks of age and weathering.
This had once been where the Feng family secretly stored their wealth. After the valuables had been removed, the deaf and mute elderly guards of the vault had long since relocated to Xuzhou along with the Feng family’s servants and maids, and the compound had been abandoned, becoming a resting place for hunters, herb gatherers, or wandering vagrants in the mountains.
Remnants of a campfire could still be seen in front of the residence.
Currently, the main force of the remnants of Taowu Ji’s military households had already moved into the mountain hollow in the northern foothills. Working until late into the night, after all the soldiers had made camp, Han Qian and Yuan Guowei finally arrived at this compound with a squad of personal guards.
Marquis Xinchang Li Pu and Chen Mingsheng, accompanied by several escorts and riding several lame horses like flies, had followed all the way here, full of doubts about what Han Qian was doing running to this place in the middle of the night for no reason.
Regardless, the true elite troops of Taowu Ji’s military households still remained in the Longque Army. As long as Han Qian still served Yueyang as his lord, Marquis Xinchang Li Pu, as Right Vice Administrator of the Hunan Administrative Court and father-in-law of Prince Tan, especially since Li Pu had already yielded, Han Qian truly couldn’t do much to him.
Moreover, keeping Li Pu by his side was better than letting him hide in the background and scheme.
Upon arriving at the compound, Li Pu saw Guo Nu’er, who came from the Han family’s household troops, had already brought a squad of men to a stone house in the compound and was digging out baskets of earth from the stone house, piling it in the empty space in the courtyard.
“Damn, did you not take all my uncle’s treasure from here back then, and secretly hide a portion in this estate?” Kong Xirong dismounted and limped over. Seeing the scene before him, he couldn’t help but give Han Qian a look.
Hearing Kong Xirong say this, Li Pu also stared at Han Qian with suspicion.
After the Feng family was convicted of high treason, in addition to the Court of Judicial Review and Censorate jointly confiscating the Feng family’s clan property with the Ministry of Justice, Prince Tan’s Mansion had also secretly seized large amounts of the Feng family’s jewels and treasures, totaling over a million strings of cash.
Prince Tan’s Mansion had mainly used this wealth to manage Ezhou and prepare for the vassal reduction war against the Ma family.
Marquis Xinchang Li Pu naturally knew about these matters, and also knew that the Feng family’s most important treasure vault was in the mountains of Maoshan’s northern foothills. However, when Prince Tan’s Mansion had secretly confiscated the Feng family’s hidden wealth, Han Qian, Jiang Huo, Yuan Guowei and others had handled it, and no one from Marquis Xinchang’s Mansion had directly participated.
Seeing this scene, Li Pu couldn’t help but think that Han Qian very likely had concealed large amounts of wealth from Jiang Huo and Yuan Guowei, as at that time everyone in Jinyun Tower from top to bottom had been direct subordinates cultivated by Han Qian.
As they say, people don’t get rich without windfalls, just as horses don’t get fat without night grass. If not for this, Li Pu found it hard to imagine how Xuzhou’s rise could possibly have been so rapid.
Kong Xirong was close with Han Qian and bluntly asked directly. Li Pu didn’t want to provoke this killer right now and thought to mentally note this account for now, to see how Han Qian would explain it when he returned to Yueyang later.
Han Qian glanced at Li Pu, guessing what this fellow was thinking, and said coldly, “If Lord Li wants to report Han Qian to His Highness in the future, it would perhaps be better to personally enter the stone house and clearly see what wealth is stored in the secret vault.”
“Hmph!” Li Pu snorted coldly through his nose. He didn’t want Han Qian to look down on him either, so he stood there proudly without moving. Watching the surrounding torches crackle and sway restlessly in the mountain wind, he said, “What you need most right now is weapons, armor, and provisions. Even if you’ve privately hidden countless wealth, what use is it? Could any neighboring power dare to sell you weapons, armor, and provisions?”
In the battle at Jingshan Nunnery, Taowu Ji’s military households had been routed by Xu Zhu. Besides casualties exceeding half their forces, when the troops fled in disarray to save their lives, they had to abandon large amounts of cumbersome armor and weapons.
When Han Qian took over the three thousand remnant troops, there were barely two thousand sets of armor remaining. Even though they had captured a batch of armor and weapons in this raid on Danyang, they had only barely scraped together just over three thousand sets of armor.
Moreover, Han Qian now needed to establish women’s battalions and youth battalions to supplement the insufficient defensive forces, and armor and weapons were desperately lacking.
More critically, the Chuzhou Army would soon react. Even if they didn’t launch a strong attack on Maoshan, they would send troops to watch the flanks and prevent Han Qian from sending troops out of the mountains to requisition grain—perhaps in just ten days, when their grain supplies were exhausted, feeding everyone would become a major problem.
Maoshan did have many Daoist temples and nunneries of various sizes, as well as a dozen or so villages of different sizes, but the total population was only about a thousand. Stored grain was extremely limited. Even though they had looted over a hundred carts of grain from Danyang City during the day, seemingly two to three hundred thousand catties—quite a substantial amount—when divided among fifty thousand elderly, weak, women and children, each person would only have five or six catties of rations. Even though it was spring turning to summer when they could dig wild vegetables and catch fish and crabs to satisfy hunger, how many days could this last?
Furthermore, Han Qian had captured over a thousand warhorses when he seized Danyang.
Warhorses eating raw grass directly would easily get diarrhea and disease. Without supplementing their feed with large amounts of bean fodder, they would have no strength when running. But for over a thousand warhorses, how much bean fodder would they consume daily?
Therefore, in Li Pu’s view, Han Qian’s surprise attack on Danyang and complete break with Chuzhou would only make his situation ten times more difficult than before, not better.
Li Pu was still hanging around here, simply wanting to see Han Qian’s appearance when he was forced to abandon these elderly, weak, women and children because he couldn’t control the situation.
The incompetent always liked to see others’ incompetence.
Facing Li Pu’s provocative questioning, Han Qian didn’t make a sound, as if speaking one more word to Li Pu would be a waste of air.
Seeing Han Qian like this, Li Pu snorted twice, stroking his salt-and-pepper beard, also holding his breath as he stood to the side.
Soon Guo Nu’er cleared away the soil that had refilled the secret vault. Only then did he lead men to carry out piles of packages wrapped in oilcloth from the stone house, pile them in the courtyard and unwrap them, revealing piles of precision iron components soaked in oil.
Though Marquis Xinchang Li Pu was incompetent, among the generals of the current era he was still slightly above average level, just not worthy of his current high position.
“Bed crossbows!” Li Pu immediately recognized that these iron components wrapped in oilcloth were all key parts for bed crossbows or whirlwind crossbows. He stood stunned for a long while, not knowing what to say. He had thought Han Qian had privately hidden the Feng family’s wealth during the confiscation, but hadn’t expected what was brought out to be entirely war machine components—and precisely the offensive and defensive war machines that the remnants of Taowu Ji’s military households urgently lacked.
Chen Mingsheng could no longer restrain himself. Following the soldiers carrying oil packages, he walked into the spacious stone house and saw that a large opening had been newly excavated in the side of the stone house, exposing the underground secret vault the Feng family had once used to privately store wealth. It was pitch black until illuminated by torches.
As Guo Nu’er led men to carry out the war machine components wrapped in oilcloth along with a batch of excellent armor and weapons, Li Pu discovered that this estate’s secret vault actually contained precision iron components for assembling thirty bed crossbows, thirty scorpion catapults, and three hundred arm-drawn crossbows, as well as five hundred horse-cleaving sabers, three hundred sets of fine steel scale armor, several hundred large shields, and over a thousand bundles of iron-ridged sharp arrows.
Today’s capture of Danyang City by three thousand remnant troops was purely through risky strategy, using speed to create chaos, driving the defenders out of the city at maximum speed. If the defender’s commander Qin Ran had dared to lead three to five hundred elite troops to hold key positions, the situation would have been extremely dangerous. Even if they could eventually gnaw through the defenses, casualties would have been difficult to control.
In the end, the three thousand remnant troops only had morale to rely on. If they truly set up their forces openly and arrayed for battle, their combat power would be a notch below the Chuzhou Army’s elite.
With this batch of armor and war machines supplementing them, the three thousand remnant troops could truly be said to possess the strength to face the Chuzhou Army in direct combat.
Li Pu stood there stunned. He never imagined that what was hidden in the Feng family’s treasure vault was all these things, nor was he clear when Han Qian had hidden these items here.
After the Feng family’s property was confiscated, hadn’t Han Qian quickly gone to Xuzhou? Before that he was busy with the vassal reduction war, and after the vassal reduction war ended, wasn’t he quickly dispatched as a wedding envoy to the Kingdom of Shu?
Seeing Yuan Guowei’s shocked expression, Li Pu knew that Han Qian’s private storage of these armor and war machines hadn’t utilized Jinyun Tower’s resources. Otherwise, even if he hadn’t detected any traces, as one of the two chief administrators of Jinyun Tower, Yuan Guowei couldn’t possibly be unaware.
“Inside there are also several thousand sacks of grain! Used sparingly, it can probably feed forty to fifty thousand women and children for a month!” Chen Mingsheng leaned close to Li Pu’s ear and said, though his face showed no excitement whatsoever. With this stored grain, Han Qian could at least drag things out in Maoshan for a month and a half. Could they stay in Maoshan for a month and a half watching Han Qian’s joke or his downfall?
“Does Lord Li now know how poorly you’ve played this game?” Yuan Guowei originally didn’t want to antagonize Li Pu, but at this moment he couldn’t help but mock him.
Li Pu stood there, not knowing what to say.
Truth be told, Qiuhu Mountain served as the main base to guard against changes in Jinling City and for Prince Tan to withdraw and hold position. The grain stores there were several times more than here. There were also complete workshops in operation.
If from the beginning Li Pu had been unable to understand the essence of Han Qian’s mountain-as-fortress strategy—Han Qian’s full mobilization of the women and children, the main tactics and combat methods he would adopt had been propagated since the afternoon, and Li Pu and his men could easily learn of them—by now, no matter how stupid he was, he could more or less see clearly what Han Qian’s initial strategy had been.
If he could have led seven thousand elite troops to hold Qiuhu Mountain and properly protected the fifty thousand-plus women and children in the southern foothills of Baohua Mountain, Yueyang would only need to dispatch an elite force to infiltrate lightly to the Maoshan area south of Jinling City. Using this batch of armor and provisions hidden in advance in Maoshan, whether defending Maoshan or operating around Maoshan, they could have enabled Yueyang to occupy considerable initiative in this three-way struggle.
They might not even have needed to cooperate with Wang Wenqian initially. As long as they could establish a firm foothold on the Jinling side, they would be qualified to negotiate with Anning Palace and force Anning Palace to yield, thus making Xu Mingzhen and the Chuzhou Army first compete for supremacy in the Jianghuai region—in that case, there truly wouldn’t have been such an urgent need to cut off Han Daoxun’s way of survival!
Han Qian turned away, unwilling to look at Li Pu any longer.
This made Li Pu’s feelings even more complicated, but he felt no guilt in his heart—only more wariness of Han Qian, more wariness of Han Qian’s resentment toward him.
At this moment, Shi Ji led over a dozen riders up the mountain. Dismounting excitedly, he said, “My lord, you said that Yinyun Nunnery on Damao Peak was a den of Chuzhou spies planted outside Jinling City. I led men to sneak over there—my lord, guess what big fish we caught this time?”