Chapter 34 The Person Who Impressed Me the Most Li Dingguo led his team of fifteen young warriors forward and found that the number of people on the street was less than before the county was captured by the rebels. The ordinary people who hurried by along the way did not show any panic on their faces, but instead seemed much calmer. The biggest change in Dingbian City now is that there are no longer those rich young men in fancy clothes and riding horses on the streets, nor are there those overbearing officials and gangsters. This type of people has basically been cleared out by the rebels. Some people, seeing that the situation was not good, had already fled far away from the county, or stayed at home to avoid the limelight. Most of the shops along the street are closed. But there are still some shops open for business and many people go there to buy things. The shops with their doors tightly closed were basically those that had been confiscated by the rebel soldiers. Most of them were properties of local gentry and officials.
Those who are still open for business are basically outsiders who travel around the country to do business. Generally speaking, no rebel army would offend them easily, but would try their best to maintain good relations with them. The rebel army needed a large amount of various resources. They had no good channels to spend the huge amount of money obtained from house raids. Most of the supplies had to rely on merchants who traveled far and wide to buy them as quickly as possible. On the street, a small group of ordinary rebel soldiers walked by from time to time. When they saw Li Dingguo and other young men dressed in warrior costumes, they hurriedly made way for them. The Eighth King Zhang Xianzhong has made such a big move. He has recently spent countless resources and energy to train a beggar battalion. In the future, they will definitely be asked to take on important tasks and become the backbone of the rebel army. All the soldiers in the city who participated in the rebel army were already aware of these things, and they certainly would not rashly offend these young warriors. To put it bluntly, among the thousands of volunteer soldiers recruited by the eight kings, the vast majority of them are no match for this beggar camp of young men composed entirely of warriors. It’s not that Zhang Xianzhong doesn’t want to train more adult warriors, nor is it that he can’t recruit people, but that there are not enough resources for training. This problem not only troubled the rebel armies in various places, but also the officials, wealthy families, and even the imperial court. There is no other reason. The resources used by warriors for cultivation are too precious. Moreover, as the spiritual energy between heaven and earth decreases, the number of various natural treasures, spiritual herbs and roots in heaven and earth is becoming less and less. Even the sustainable artificial cultivation of various spiritual herbs and roots is becoming increasingly difficult. Under normal circumstances, it is difficult to train warriors in large numbers. Among all the armies of the imperial court, most of the military households and soldiers were ordinary people, and warriors accounted for less than 30%. This type of ordinary soldiers can only be used as logistics personnel and cannot actually go to the battlefield to fight against enemies, demons and monsters. The ratio of warriors to ordinary soldiers in Zhang Xianzhong's newly formed rebel army was even worse. Warriors and combat soldiers only accounted for about 10% of the rebel army, and the rest were made up of the rebel army's family members and logistics soldiers. The fighting power of this rebel army depends entirely on the support of these warriors. Those ordinary logistics soldiers are useless in battle and are not even qualified to be cannon fodder on the battlefield. This is the biggest difference between this vast world and the Ming Empire in Li Dingguo’s previous life. After walking quickly for about a quarter of an hour, we arrived at the market in Dongcheng District.
The streets on both sides are very wide, and the middle is a bit like the square in the previous life, about thirty or forty meters in radius. There is a cross road crisscrossing the middle of the square, the road surface is paved with bluestone slabs. On both sides of each road at the intersection, there are markets formed by people setting up stalls. At the market that Li Dingguo and his friends saw now, there were not many people setting up stalls. A large porridge stall has been set up in a large open space in the southeast of the market, where some logistics soldiers of the rebel army are responsible for providing porridge and disaster relief. In this regard, the ambitious Zhang Xianzhong did much better than the government. At least those refugees, beggars and other poor people who came to receive relief appeared to be in an orderly manner and lined up obediently under the guidance and command of dozens of volunteer army logistics officers. Li Dingguo had heard about this relief and porridge distribution a few days ago. This kind of relief and porridge distribution had started since the day after the Eighth King Zhang Xianzhong captured the county town. And it happens every day from morning to evening, without stopping for a moment. Having captured a county town and looted and confiscated all the rich families and officials there, Zhang Xianzhong now has no shortage of money, food and supplies. Anyway, most of the supplies and food cannot be taken away when the rebels evacuate, so it is better to use them to help the people and win their hearts. In fact, in the history of the late Ming Empire, Li Dingguo's previous life, Zhang Xianzhong was the rebel leader who was most fond of opening warehouses to release grain and provide relief to the broad masses of working people. Even in later generations, in many places where Zhang Xianzhong's army had been, there were still ancestral temples built for him spontaneously by the people of that time, and they are still worshipped. After the Later Jin Tartars took advantage of the situation and stole the land of China, they controlled the literati in the world and spared no effort to smear and slander Zhang Xianzhong, the Eighth King, and imposed brutal massacres on Zhang Xianzhong. The only thing that people criticize Zhang Xianzhong for is that he loved to kill all the enemies and then burn down their homes after winning countless wars, resulting in countless ancient buildings being destroyed in fires. But this is a common problem among rebel armies in all dynasties, and it is not just Zhang Xianzhong who does this. In other words, every rebel army committed to changing the dynasty has been doing so for thousands of years in Chinese civilization, without any exception. "Boss, look, that's Xiao Douya and the others!" "Those who were eliminated from the warrior selection earlier are also lining up in front of the porridge stall to get porridge." "Look at Xiao Douya and the others. They look much better than before!"... As soon as they looked in the direction of the porridge shed, the orphans around Li Dingguo immediately made a discovery and shouted in surprise. "Little bean sprouts?" Li Dingguo just saw the skinny little girl walking out of the crowd holding a bowl of porridge, and scenes of his daily life with her emerged involuntarily in his mind. The thing that impressed me most was: Once, Li Dingguo ate rotten food obtained by begging on the street, and suddenly he had a high fever all over his body. It was this thin figure who cried and took care of him day and night. At that time, he almost couldn't make it. Fortunately, he had good physical talents and strong recovery and resistance abilities, and he finally escaped danger without any danger and escaped death. This little girl, who had no name of her own and was called Xiao Douya by everyone, was one year older than Li Dingguo. Little Bean Sprout was not tall, dark and thin, and looked very fragile, as if a gust of wind could blow her away. "Little bean sprouts!"
The deepest memory left by his predecessor burst out involuntarily at this moment. Li Dingguo shouted the other person's name and strode towards her... (End of this chapter)
