The Huai Army swept across the manors of all the gentry and local sages and landlords in the Longchuan area. The gentry classes in several counties were almost completely captured in one net. The gentry villages were vulnerable to the cannons of the Huai Army. Whenever the Huai Army went there, they set up a few cannons and hit a few rounds, and the village was broken. When they encountered some relatively strong villages, they built several shoddy shield cars, followed by the Eight Banners captive archers, followed by the musketeers, and finally the cannons and scattered soldiers pressed the formation. The shield cars approached, put down the boxes filled with gunpowder, and exploded the walls of the village.

The Huai Army rushed into the village, and the Jinyiwei behind rushed in immediately, and then happily fought the local tyrants and divided the land.

There are no large households like Jiangnan who often cost hundreds of thousands of taels of silver. Every time they break through a place, the gentry who can confiscate 100,000 taels of silver was considered a lot. In ordinary villages, they only copied between 30,000 taels of silver. However, they accumulated a lot. After a lot of money, they even copied one million taels of silver, more than 80,000 taels of gold, countless jewelry and other valuable items.

The Huai Army swept across the road, and in addition to pulling out more than 30 villages in succession, it also led the way to capture Xingning, Changle (not Fuzhou Changle, but now Wuhua County), Chengxiang (now Meizhou), Pingyuan, Zhenping (now Jiaoling), and other counties.

These county towns were also vulnerable under the powerful offensive of the Huai Army. In addition to the Changle County Magistrate who directly opened the city to surrender and was not punished, after the counties such as Xingning, Chengxiang, Pingyuan, and Zhenping were all handed over to the Jinyiwei for investigation. What awaited them would be the fate of the Jiuli clan. In fact, Li Guodong's Jiuli clan was the same as before, trying to kill as few as possible, focusing on raiding homes and confiscating property.

The surrounding county towns were taken down. Where should the Huai Army fight next?

Li Guodong made a suggestion: "We should first capture Chaozhou, where the rebels have weak forces. After all, Chaozhou is a prefecture. After we have broken through so many county towns, many gentry still ran away. Except for some running to Guangzhou and some running to Huizhou, the rest of the gentry all went to Chaozhou. If we don't destroy Chaozhou first, we will attack westward directly. Will those gentry who ran away be willing to fail? The answer is definitely not! They will inevitably form a return group with the cooperation of the Chaozhou general chariot, and fight back! If our army has advanced westward, then once the return group comes, all our previous efforts will be in vain!"

"Returning to the Hometown Group?" The generals looked at each other, "What is this?"

"Even after the gentry and the local tyrants were beaten and divided into the land by us, they would definitely not be willing to fail. Once the reactionary armed forces were beaten back by them, the newly recruited local Jinyiwei and Dongchang men from the Dongchang were definitely killed by them. The most active people in the land of fighting and splitting the land by the local tyrants were also killed by them. The people who were liberated not long ago will return to the original dilemma." Li Guodong explained.

Although the generals didn't know what new terms were such as returning home groups, reactionary armed forces, and liberating the people, after hearing what Li Guodong said, he roughly understood what was going on.

The return group is the armed forces formed by the landlords and gentry in order to regain their vested interests. The reactionary armed forces are the armed forces of the landlords and gentry, and liberating the people is to divide the land for the people and let the people live a good life.

Some people may think that the so-called landlord class is the property accumulated by the ancestors' hard work and wealth from generation to generation. After purchasing land, they became landlords. In every dynasty change, a large number of landlords were killed. In the early days of the dynasty, there was also the law of equalizing landlords. Every farmer was assigned to the landlords. In the early Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang also killed many landlords. But why did landlords appear later? It was because everyone's degree of hard work was different, and the farmers who were willing to endure hardships became landlords.

However, in the late Ming Dynasty, the above view was definitely wrong, because those landlords who became rich by relying solely on hard work would have gone bankrupt as long as no one in their family passed the imperial examination.

The Ming Dynasty's system of exempting taxes and labor from fame and fortune in taxes led to simple landlords without fame and fortune who could not compete with those scholars with fame. If you have no fame, the more land you have more taxes, the heavier the taxes. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, landlords without fame could not afford such heavy taxes and went bankrupt one after another.

The scholars with fame and fortune are exempted from the increasingly heavy taxes from the court by relying on their fame and fortune, so they have a very easy life no matter what they are outside.

The landlords who had land at home but had no fame were forced to devote their land to scholars. In the end, the land was also taken away by scholars with fame.

According to a saying by Chongzhen, civil officials in the world can be killed, so even generals like Cao Bianjiao who came from the Ming Dynasty had no guilt for killing those gentry. Not to mention the military generals who were once overwhelmed by civil officials, even Sun Chuanting, who was also a civil official, had no objection to killing the gentry at this time.

Wang Quan asked: "Dude, we can leave a small number of troops to stay in Longchuan and block the rebels' road to enter eastern Guangdong. But after we took Chaozhou Prefecture, we would eventually go west to Guangzhou. At that time, we left. If the return group you mentioned came, what should those ordinary people do?"

"It's easy to deal with. What you need now is to give the people some time! When we go to Chaozhou, we give the people time to train. We can train the people in the imperial field into militias. As long as the militia is trained well, the return group dares to come and attack them!" Li Guodong replied.

The Huai Army was preparing to march into Chaozhou, and Li Guodong left 5,000 people to guard Longchuan to prevent Huizhou rebels from counterattacking. In addition to being responsible for defending the city, these 5,000 people also had to train militias.

"Dangdang" A newly recruited Jinyiwei Lishi walked into Shangmakeng Village and beat drums: "Recruit militias and defend their homes!"

"Minister? What is this for?" the villagers surrounded.

Now the villagers of Shangmakeng Village are no longer afraid of the Jinyiwei, because the Jinyiwei overthrew the local sage riding on their heads to snore and urinate, turned the land into imperial fields, and then rented it to them for farming at an extremely low proportion of tenant rent. In the eyes of the villagers, the Jinyiwei is like a relative.

"There is an announcement on the wall, you can go and see it yourself." The Jinyiwei Lisz said, pointing to a wall.

Next to the wall, two Jinyiwei Lisses were posting an announcement. At the end of the announcement were the seal of Duke of Chu, the official seal of Dongchang and Jinyiwei.

"But we can't read," said a villager.

"We have to post somewhere else, and you can find someone who can read it to you." Jinyiwei said.

At this time, a villager walked to the announcement and shouted: "I know how to read, I will read it for you."

The content of the announcement was that the Duke of Chu's army was about to advance eastward. The landlords and gentry who were defeated were unwilling to accept their failure, so they would definitely bring armed servants to counterattack. In order to deal with the counterattack of the landlords and to protect the land of the peasants, the factory guards hoped that the local people could form a militia. The so-called militia was the farmers who farmed on weekdays. When fighting, they were soldiers who picked up weapons. As for the weapons of the militia, the Huai Army provided them with the training of militia, and the veterans of the Huai Army helped them train.

"Those local sages, they want us to go back to the past. Do you agree?" Ye Chunsheng suddenly stood up and shouted loudly.

"Don't agree!" the villagers shouted in unison.

"Then we will respond to the Jinyiwei. The brothers will collect weapons and become militias! Defend our own land!" Ye Chunsheng shouted in his voice.
Chapter completed!