Chapter 1077 - The Subtle Situation of Kong Youde
Zhu Mingxia positioned the baggage train along with the elderly, wounded, and infirm at the center of the column. Huang Xiong commanded a company to guard the rear while Zhu Mingxia himself led the vanguard. Cavalry squads patrolled ceaselessly between front and back. He had prepared dozens of large banners beforehand, and now ordered them raised high. With so many flags snapping in the wind above the neat ranks, the column appeared from a distance like an army of thousands on the march—an imposing sight, so long as no one drew close enough to see the truth. This was Zhu Mingxia's stratagem of "scattering beans to conjure soldiers." He intended to masquerade as a force formidable enough to dissuade the Huang County rebels from any rash actions. Should the rebels attack regardless, the refugees—their movements already constrained—would not obstruct military operations. They could be driven forward as cannon fodder or simply abandoned without risk of triggering a catastrophic rout.
"Pay attention to recovering stragglers!" Zhu Mingxia issued the order, and the entire column began its slow crawl across the frozen, snow-covered earth.
Their first objective was to reach the relay point before nightfall and shelter within the village stockade overnight.
Zhu Mingxia mounted a captured warhorse. During his time in Lingao, he had trained weekly at the Cavalry Training Unit in the Gaoshanling area. While he might not yet wield a saber from horseback with any proficiency, commanding a battle from atop a horse posed no difficulty.
The wind cut sharply against his face, stinging his skin raw. Yet surveying the rolling current of humanity and horses beside him, he could not suppress a swell of pride. They were haggard now, these refugees—gaunt and hollow-eyed. But in a few years' time, they would forge into an army of tigers and wolves.
The column advanced slowly, managing perhaps three or four kilometers per hour. Zhu Mingxia judged that reaching the relay station before dark should present no great difficulty.
Along the way they encountered scattered refugees and roving rebel cavalry—the latter in considerable numbers, ranging widely across the territory. Kong Youde clearly attached great importance to Huang County and had deployed extensive scout patrols to monitor the region.
Zhu Mingxia understood the strategic calculus. Southwest of Huang County lay Laizhou. If the rebels wished to expand their reach, they must first seize Laizhou and break free of their constraints; otherwise, they would find themselves trapped between the mountains and the sea in Dengzhou, slowly strangled. History—both his original timeline and the reality of this one—confirmed that the rebels' dispatch of troops to attack Huang County in the first lunar month followed an invariable pattern. No matter the timeline, an enemy's fundamental behavior would not diverge too far from expectation.
Since the fall of Dengzhou, the initial chaos had given way to a semblance of order. Rebel troops gathered in vast numbers, their vigilance exceeding anything the city had known before. The traces of the native massacre had been scrubbed away, leaving only blackened bloodstains dried upon the streets and splashed along the walls.
After Li Jiucheng, Kong Youde, and the other rebel leaders had inventoried the warehouses and reorganized the scattered soldiers and surrendered troops, they had locked down the entire city. Each gate was personally commanded by a Thousand-man Commander leading substantial garrisons—all Liaodong men of Dongjiang origin. Beyond the walls, every strategic point, including Mishen Mountain, bristled with infantry and cavalry. Not only was every household billeted with soldiers, but tent encampments lined the four suburbs, horses corralled in great herds. Once night descended, drums and horns sounded in mutual response, the constant neighing of horses punctuating the darkness. No one could say with certainty how many rebels there truly were. Any traveler moving north or south faced layers of interrogation.
Because the slaughter during the city's fall had been so savage, Li, Kong, and the others feared that surrendered troops and civilians who were not Old Dongjiang men might harbor resentment and serve as inside agents for government forces. Control within Dengzhou had therefore grown extreme. Locals and Southerners were forbidden from walking the main thoroughfares; anyone discovered doing so was beheaded on the spot.
Recently, internal defenses had tightened further still. Sentries multiplied during the nightly curfew, and even during daylight, people required road passes to move about the city. On the walls themselves, vigilance had intensified to the point where arrows were passed day and night as warning signals. Anyone who failed to respond to the passing of an arrow was executed without inquiry. The whole of Dengzhou had become a fortress of suspicion.
A few days prior, the rebel leaders had privately cast the seal of "Grand Marshal," electing Li Jiucheng to that title, Kong Youde as Vice Grand Marshal, and Geng Zhongming as Commander-in-Chief.
The rebel "Marshal's Mansion"—which also served as the operational nerve center for the entire army—now occupied what had once been the Dengzhou Governor's Yamen of Sun Yuanhua.
Most of the rebel generals were men long experienced in military affairs. Li Jiucheng himself had served as Vice Regional Commander of Dongjiang. He possessed his own methods for managing an army and preparing for war, and affairs proceeded in orderly fashion under his direction.
At that moment, Kong Youde stood with hands clasped behind his back in one of the Marshal's Mansion halls, contemplating two great trees in the courtyard. He was not old—only thirty—but his origins as a miner combined with long years of military service had forged a robust and powerful frame.
On the surface, his expression remained calm, betraying neither tension nor worry. But deep within, his thoughts circled endlessly around his own fate and the future of Dongjiang.
The rebellion had never been Kong Youde's original intention; it was more Li Jiucheng's vision. Yet once the banner of revolt was truly raised, Kong Youde had resolved to see it through to whatever dark end awaited.
Neither Kong Youde nor Li Jiucheng harbored ambitions of becoming Emperor themselves. The Great Ming Dynasty, for all its signs of terminal decay, remained a behemoth. Rebellion carried perhaps a thirty percent chance of success against a ninety percent probability of death. Though they had schemed to draw Sun Yuanhua into their faction, this was merely to amplify their momentum. As for how far the rebellion should ultimately extend, the rebel high command had reached no unified understanding.
The door to appeasement remained open. Li, Kong, and Geng all recognized that the court was presently in desperate straits. Any mutiny or civil unrest that achieved sufficient scale almost invariably saw the court inclined toward appeasement. Looking no further than the recent past, the string of mutinies at the end of the Tianqi era and the beginning of Chongzhen's reign had almost all concluded with "appeasement." When Huang Long was beaten by rioting soldiers on Pi Island—beaten so severely they broke his leg—even that had ended in appeasement.
So in general terms, they intended to leverage the rebellion to extract the most favorable appeasement conditions possible. From the outset, they had continuously expressed their willingness to accept such terms through every available means. Initially, this served as a delaying tactic—a way to postpone the arrival of government suppression forces while they expanded their territory and consolidated their strength.
With sufficient power established, they could dictate terms to the court. And those terms would be what many Dongjiang generals had long sought to achieve.
That was to transform Dongjiang Town into a third force—nominally belonging to the Great Ming, yet in practice able to maneuver between the Ming and the Later Jin as circumstances required.
Such a pattern had already begun to emerge faintly in Guanning Town, where military families commanding troops were transforming into warlords. Not only did they receive enormous sums in military pay while sitting idle, but the court was increasingly failing to command their obedience.
Compared to Guanning Town, Dongjiang Town occupied the Liao Sea. Advancing, it could contain any Later Jin attempt to enter the pass; retreating, it could threaten the Great Ming's capital and the Shandong coast. To counter the Later Jin and secure its flank, the court would have no choice but to continuously funnel military pay and grain to them, allowing the formation of a military group that was, in practical terms, an independent regime. This was the old scheme of "Allying with the Manchus and Leveraging Korea" that Dongjiang soldiers had long plotted—establishing themselves as a third force in the space between the two great powers of Ming and Qing.
The Liu Xingzuo brothers, who had wielded influence over Dongjiang Town after Mao Wenlong's death, had harbored precisely such a plan. But the Liu brothers were not Dongjiang veterans who had followed Mao Wenlong from the beginning; their limited appeal had ultimately doomed their ambitions.
By contrast, men like Li Jiucheng and Kong Youde were almost all old subordinates who had followed Mao Wenlong in raising the original army, men who had built Dongjiang from nothing with their own hands. Li Jiucheng had also served as Vice Regional Commander of Dongjiang and commanded high prestige among the Dongjiang veterans.
If only the court would agree to appeasement and appoint Li Jiucheng as Regional Commander of Dongjiang, the old Dongjiang subordinates could finally rid themselves of Huang Long—that "outsider"—and move freely with their hands unbound.
The calculation seemed sound. But Kong Youde knew well that matters would not prove so simple—particularly after what had happened a few days prior, when Sun Yuanhua had inexplicably and bizarrely vanished from the Surveillance Commissioner's Yamen where he'd been held under house arrest, disappearing without a trace.
The guards watching him had either died or professed complete ignorance. Though the garrison guards at the Surveillance Commissioner's Yamen were all Liaodong men, their interrogation under torture had yielded nothing. They had either been asleep or claimed to have heard and seen nothing.
Losing Sun Yuanhua meant losing their greatest bargaining chip. Of all the officials captured, Sun Yuanhua held the highest rank, maintained the widest connections within the court, and served as the supreme authority over the Dengzhou-Laizhou region. His every word carried immense influence. Li Jiucheng and the others had originally planned to use him as their spokesman in negotiating appeasement with the court.
Sun Yuanhua's bizarre disappearance also brought with it a far more terrible potential threat: Who on earth possessed the capability to spirit him away unnoticed from within the heavily guarded confines of Dengzhou City?
The next day, it was discovered that all the guards on a certain watchtower had been killed, suggesting the infiltrators had entered by scaling the walls. Yet neither Li nor Kong—nor virtually anyone else—believed that any human being truly possessed such ability. Even if figures like the legendary Hongxian existed in the world, what she had stolen was merely a small box. Sun Yuanhua was a living man of considerable bulk.
And it was not only Sun Yuanhua who had vanished. Two servant boys and a family guard who attended him had also disappeared. No one could bring themselves to believe that four grown men had been spirited out of Dengzhou City by way of the city walls in the dead of night.
Orders forbidding the spread of any information about the incident were issued that very day. Every surviving guard who had been present at the Surveillance Commissioner's Yamen that night was silenced—permanently. But the affair bred suspicion within the rebel high command. Many believed the abduction to be the work of some high-ranking general within the city, who had hidden Sun Yuanhua away as capital for a future defection to the Ming loyalists.
And Kong Youde was the man under deepest suspicion. Nearly everyone agreed: if anyone would do such a thing, Kong Youde was the most likely candidate.
First, he had received tremendous favor from Sun Yuanhua—and more than that. The relationship between Sun Yuanhua and Kong Youde was not as simple as mere patronage. Many had heard rumors that Sun Yuanhua's appointment as Governor of Dengzhou and Laizhou was connected to Kong Youde's secret bribing of powerful figures at court. And after Sun Yuanhua assumed the governorship, he had indeed treated Kong Youde with marked generosity.
Second, Kong Youde's authority and influence within the rebel high command were second only to Li Jiucheng's. If he intended to defect, he occupied the most advantageous position of anyone—if he could eliminate Li Jiucheng, the "chief evil," he would not merely escape punishment but might even earn merit.
These factors combined to place Kong Youde in an exceedingly precarious situation.
(End of Chapter)