Section Twenty-Five

When Lin Feng slammed the doors shut on peace negotiations, the front line, which had been silent for several days, immediately erupted into fierce combat. The Han Army’s 1st Cavalry Division and 5th Infantry Division, which had been tailing the Dzungar Eastern Route Army, had faced little resistance. Moving south from Daizhou and Baode with the force of a bamboo being split, they had captured dozens of cities—including Suozhou, Ningwu, Xuangang, and Yuanping—without shedding a drop of blood. Along the way, Qing forces, newly surrendered Mongol troops, local bandits, peasant armies, landlord militias, and fortified mountain garrisons all yielded upon hearing of their approach. The tens of thousands of troops, pressing forward without rest, reached the gates of Xinzhou with a momentum that seemed capable of swallowing dragons and tigers. However, their good fortune ended there.

After receiving the report from Ilde, Galdan reacted swiftly. He dispatched a large number of elite cavalry from his own khanate guard, the Keshig, to Xinzhou. They joined the local garrison and the remnants of the Eastern Route Army’s Bachi units that had fled there. He conscripted a vast number of Xinzhou residents to work through the night building defensive fortifications. Meanwhile, roaming scouts clashed head-on with the Han Army’s vanguard cavalry. As the main force of the Han Army arrived, the scale of the fighting escalated from small skirmishes involving dozens of men to massive battles involving hundreds and thousands. The types of units involved expanded from pure cavalry to include musketeers and artillery. The battlefield, initially centered on the Xinzhou line, gradually expanded east and west. By the time Zhao Liangdong and Zhao Guangyuan led the main body of the central army to the front, the Xinzhou line had turned into a boiling cauldron. With a sprawling battlefield, the Mongol army, using Xinzhou as its hub, had completed a defensive system spanning nearly a hundred miles from Yijing to Sanjiao.

Battles were occurring at every moment. Facing the legions of Zhao Liangdong and Zhao Guangyuan now were over 26,000 enemy troops, all of whom were elite cavalry of the Dzungar Khanate, backed by orderly fortifications and tight security. What troubled the two generals even more was that these enemy forces were equipped with a large number of cannons; in many places, they had even established positions for heavy swivel guns and matchlocks. Conversely, because the Han Army had been pursuing with light cavalry, their heavy-caliber artillery had been left with Lin Feng’s central army. All they had at their disposal now were some small field guns that could be carried by pack horses, and the crudely made bamboo-tube guns and pine-wood cannons seized along the way.

In truth, there had been dissenting opinions within Lin Feng’s headquarters regarding this campaign. Most staff officers and civil officials disagreed with Lin Feng’s decision to reject Galdan’s truce proposal. When Lin Feng received the Dzungar envoy, his key strategist, Wang Shirong, had even pleaded with him face-to-face to accept the Dzungar Khanate’s terms and avoid a decisive battle with the Mongol army. From their perspective, Lin Feng’s decision was undoubtedly irrational. Although the Han Army had won repeated victories and possessed significant strength, Galdan’s army was equally powerful, well-equipped, and composed entirely of fierce cavalry. Just as the Han Army had conquered Liaodong, these Mongols had fought their way from Qinghai to Ordos and leveled all of Uliastai. It was foreseeable that such a decisive battle would be unimaginably brutal.

It was not that Lin Feng did not understand their reasoning. Since coming to this era, his mindset had undergone a great transformation, and he had gained a profound understanding of the contemporary Confucian literati. In his original time, people generally held these Confucian officials in low regard, viewing them as empty talkers who ruined the nation and feared enemies like tigers. But in reality, this was not the case; these men were highly rational politicians. So-called "Confucian loyalty and forgiveness" or "benevolence toward friendly nations" were merely slogans and pretexts. These scholars were by no means the pedantic fools that "angry youth" imagined them to be.

Most of them understood economics and had a deep grasp of the small-peasant economy under natural conditions. From high-ranking officials like Li Guangdi down to minor clerks, they were all quite adept at agriculture. What was admirable was that these men could often act like prophets, determining the state’s approximate income before the summer harvest and formulating national budget plans accordingly. Thus, whenever the country faced war, they would usually analyze the consumption and expenditure of military actions very rationally, viewing the problem of war through an economic lens.

The so-called "Heavenly Empire" and "Confucian benevolence" were, in the end, nothing more than a pathetic fig leaf. It was just like when Lin Feng used to go shopping; when he encountered an item he couldn't afford, he wouldn't say "I can't afford it," but rather "This item doesn't suit me." This was the mindset of the scholars under Lin Feng, epitomized by Wang Shirong. And who was Wang Shirong? When they conquered Liaodong and entered Shenyang, he had been so fanatical that he didn't even spare the tombs of Nurhaci and Huang Taiji. Even such a fervent firebrand was now opposed to a decisive battle with the Mongols.

What truly pushed Lin Feng to stake everything on this was the power of Galdan. In the history books he knew, Galdan was merely an ambitious chieftain of the northwest frontier. At the height of his power during the Kangxi era, he had only 30,000 to 50,000 cavalry, and his territory was limited to parts of Qinghai, Gansu, Xinjiang, and Tibet, with many pro-Qing tribes restraining him. But now, taking advantage of the Qing dynasty’s decline, he had swelled rapidly like rising dough. His territory now spanned the Altai Mountains, held Qinghai and Gansu, annexed Uliastai in Outer Mongolia, and encompassed Ordos—a domain of millions of square kilometers with nearly 100,000 to 200,000 iron-clad cavalry. His blade was pressing toward Shaanxi, Gansu, and Shanxi. How could he be allowed to continue this expansion?

Lin Feng had flapped his wings in Beijing, never expecting to trigger a storm in the northwest desert. Galdan was a catastrophe of his own making; if Lin Feng didn't settle it, who would? Previously, Lin Feng had dismissed "historical responsibility" as nonsense, but this time, he truly felt the weight of that pressure.

This provided great convenience for the Han Army to contact the defenders of Taiyuan. Originally, in Wang Shirong’s plan, it would have been very difficult for Lin Feng’s secret envoys to slip into the besieged city, so the military intelligence department had pre-emptively bribed several Han traitors and interpreters to act as internal agents. But now, with Galdan lifting the siege, that difficulty no longer existed. The Han envoy successfully made contact with the Qing forces at the south gate of Taiyuan. After repeated identity verification, the Taiyuan defenders lowered a basket and hoisted the envoy inside.

For months, Taiyuan had been under the desperate assault of the Mongol army, coming close to falling several times. The situation was critical. The envoy had been mentally prepared, but upon entering the city, he was still shocked by the miserable state of the soldiers and civilians. After meeting with Yu Chenglong, he learned that Taiyuan had run out of food half a month prior. Currently, only the garrison troops and officials of the seventh rank and above could drink a bowl of vegetable porridge a day to sustain their lives. Furthermore, because the soldiers and civilians were so weak, many corpses could not be disposed of, leading to a plague within the city. Hundreds of people died daily from starvation and disease, and this number was constantly rising. With hundreds of thousands of souls in the city, their lives hung by a thread.

Although Yu Chenglong was a famous official of the Qing court and enjoyed a reputation for integrity among the northern literati, discussing "integrity" in such circumstances was laughable. The only reason the people of the city had not all starved to death was that after the Han Army marched west, the Mongol army had relaxed the siege, allowing the defenders to let the people out into the fields for half an hour each day to forage for wild greens. Therefore, after meeting the envoy, before the lobbyist could even speak, Yu Chenglong immediately offered to surrender. His only condition was that the Han Army send a shipment of grain to provide relief as soon as possible.

This news quickly reached Lin Feng’s central army. By this time, his main force had passed through Xinkou and was nearing the battlefield. The Han King’s command tent was only a few dozen miles from the Xinzhou front line. Before his camp was even fully established, Lin Feng sent envoys in all directions to summon generals of all ranks for a council.

Hundreds of thousands of troops were gathering in Xinzhou, and a decisive battle was imminent.