The days when I pretended to be a cat in the Forbidden City[Comprehensive]

It may be that even the heavens did not show mercy to the Xiongnu. The wars of the various ministries in the third year of the Zhongyuan Period had just ended, and when the various ministries were recovering, they encountered the once-in-a-decade drought.

The autumn climate of that year was extremely dry. It was sunny every day for two or three months without rainfall, and it was the hottest season. Withered, the most beautiful season of the year, at this time it is all withered and yellow.

It is fatal for livestock to suddenly cut off their food source at the most critical time of autumn fatting. The situation of small tribes is not bad, the number of cattle and sheep is not large, and the pasture can still be supplied, but for some tribes that obtain a large number of herds through plunder, The base of herds has become larger, but the grassland area cannot provide sufficient food. How to feed the herds has become a top priority.

For the current plan, we can only try our best to expand the scope of grazing, and even the entire tribe moved early. For the sake of the rich pastures, the tribes fought frequently, and the friction almost never stopped. Saw the edges back and forth.

The calf born this year has not yet been weaned, but the mother animal has not produced any milk.They repeatedly searched for edible forage in the withered grass, but they could only flick their tails helplessly.

What is even more frightening is that the locust plague that always accompanies drought has not been absent this time.

Locusts are very vigorous animals. As long as they are not attacked by bacteria, their eggs can survive for nearly ten years in an unsuitable climate, and then wait for the collective hatching in the dry season when there are few bacteria, and then collectively lay eggs. Two generations can be reproduced within a year, and the number will increase for the first time. In the coming year, there will be a plague of locusts, and so on.

And this year is a very good breeding year.

In the past few years, the rabbits have been active underground. The abundant pastures and scarce natural enemies on the prairie have given them space and time to gain a foothold. They almost wantonly destroy the roots of vegetation.Even in order to prevent the tunnel from being trampled by herbivores, the local vegetation will be destroyed consciously. 0

The Xiongnu tribe has been generally rich in recent years, and the natural increase in population and the number of livestock has also increased the pressure on grassland vegetation. The combination of the two has formed a large area of ​​degraded vegetation and bare areas. These places are most suitable for locust production. egg.

It is not without chances of redemption. Locusts contain extremely high protein content, and during the hatching and growth period of summer and autumn larvae, they will also be precious rations for many mammals who are just in the lactation or reproductive period. But at that time, the Huns were in a passionate civil war. Human activities have also affected the reproduction of herbivores, increasing their vigilance. Last year, many herbivores and small animals did not carry out breeding work.

Summer and autumn are also the seasons for carnivores to give birth to cubs. In order to feed their children, many small animals that are not counted in the scope of hunting on weekdays are also hard to escape. The newborn locust cubs that lost their predators grew up wantonly last summer , and adults lay eggs in autumn.

So in May of the second year after the beast tide, the vast prairie seemed to hatch a large number of locusts overnight. The density of these migratory locusts was too high, and they spread their wings for food.

Once the locusts appear on a large scale in the form of migratory locusts, it will be difficult to contain them. Even the ferocious wolves do not dare to rob them at this time and can only avoid them in a hurry, not to mention herbivores.

Livestock dislike the bad taste of withered grass, but they don't dislike it. As long as it is edible and undead, locusts will kill it. There will not be even a little green in the environment they pass, except for tree trunks that can't be eaten. Locusts are not disgusted at all.

The prairie is a place with extremely fragile ecology. Its entire balance is like being built on dominoes. Any slight movement will cause quantitative changes. Quantity imbalance, drought, these are all variables, and all kinds of variables have accumulated together, resulting in qualitative changes.

The Huns never imagined that one day they would be chased by little bugs.These migratory locusts are really scary. Although they don't actively attack humans, they hurt very much when they hit the body, just like hitting the body with arrows without arrows. What's more frightening is that the pain is still continuous.And when they are really hungry, they will open their mouths and bite.

Even if humans can endure it, livestock cannot. The cattle and sheep are frightened by the overwhelming swarm of insects and run around, completely refusing to obey orders. The dogs that can usually help herd herds are useless, and they may even be attacked by panicked animals.

In China, the locust plague is one of the three natural disasters alongside floods and droughts. It is called locusts, which means the emperor of insects. Of course, it has its own fears, and it is also related to their ability to cause dynasty changes.

This is because of its incomparable destructiveness in farming civilization and its difficulty in rebuilding later.

Now, the Xiongnu herdsmen can only stare blankly at a black cloud flying past them. When they landed and took off again, the land that was still a little green had completely turned black and yellow.

Black and yellow are the colors of the soil layers.

Neither the way they came nor the way they left left a speck of green, not even a leaf on the thorny bushes in the grass.

For a moment, everyone was speechless.

Suddenly, an old man suddenly knelt down, "It's over...it's all over."

In the central area of ​​the prairie, the bonfire was full of ashes and smoke, and a mysterious wizard painted on his face was chanting prayers by the fire, and all the soldiers of the king's camp were kneeling behind him.

When the Great Witch communicates with the heavens, no one is qualified to stand.

The sorcerer danced and muttered around the fire, then cut his own wrist with a bone knife, and dripped blood into the bowl. The bowl was turned around in the crowd, and every Hun warrior dripped his own blood into it. .

Then the wizard's voice suddenly became high-pitched. He fetched the gemstone and threw it into the fire, then prostrated himself on the ground, chanting incantations incessantly.

The soaring flame gradually extinguished as time passed, and everyone waited quietly.Until the last bit of sparks completely dimmed, the gemstone was pulled out from the ashes, and blood was splashed on the burnt red stone, and the stone suddenly cracked and cracked bit by bit when it was cold.

In the eyes of the shamans, this is the revelation that God gave them to the Huns.

He carefully observed the conditions of the stones, and even lay down on the ground to observe the corners carefully. After a while, he was silent for a long time.

"Great witch...? Did God give us some enlightenment?" Shan Yu, the military official, was so anxious at this moment that he couldn't help interrupting the great witch's thinking, "What should we do to appease the wrath of God and let our pastures grow again? "

The big witch stood up slowly with the help of the attendant. He looked at the military official Shan Yu and said, "North, God said that he left us a road in the north."

The military minister Shan Yu frowned. This answer was not the same as his plan. According to his plan, he planned to prepare the army to go south, combine left and right troops and miscellaneous troops to attack the Han defense line, and make up for the loss by means of plunder.

The military minister Shanyu hesitated. His experience told him that as long as he went south at this time, he could obtain resources, and he also urgently needed a victory to declare the rulership of the royal court to the left and right. Undoubtedly, this opportunity was lost.

But he didn't dare to argue with the big witch, the witch's words were absolute, so he asked cautiously: "Wu, when does God mean to go north?"

The implication is, can you wait?

Wu glanced at him lightly, raised his hands and shouted towards the blue sky: "North, the only way to survive is to go north!"

When the answer that only he heard was revealed, the crowd immediately cheered, and someone said: "I said go to the north, I saw the locusts going south with my own eyes!"

"Besides, it's colder in the north, and insects dare not go to cold places."

"Da Chanyu, please give an order. We are moving north now. It is nothing more than going to the wintering place earlier."

The military minister Shanyu squeezed his fist, he reluctantly announced the order, and began to arrange the order of going north, and the entire Xiongnu headquarters began to move with his movements.

While everyone was busy packing up the belongings, the military minister Shan Yu sat alone in the king's tent for a long time, silent.Princess Nangong brought someone to pack up her things, she was somewhat surprised to see him like this, "Da Shanyu?"

"What? You think I'm in the way?" Shan Yu, the military minister, was sitting in the backlight, his slowly raised eyes flashed like wolves.

Princess Nangong didn't know why he was angry. Even though she was the Dayan family and the hostess of the entire Xiongnu grassland, regardless of her Han blood or her status as a woman, she was destined not to appear at the ceremony, so she did not Don't know what happened.

"You are the master of the grassland, you can stay anywhere." Princess Nangong said softly with her eyes downcast.She had no intention of flattering the military minister Shan Yu, but chose to start tidying up the room. A Hun woman, no matter how noble she is, has her own tasks.

Take good care of your husband and children, for example.

What she didn't expect was that Shan Yu, the military official who had been silent all this time, grabbed her hand when she approached him and wanted to get a vase for display, "Nangong, I heard that you big men don't have big witches, right? ?”

Princess Nangong was slightly taken aback, she nodded, and seeing that the military official Shanyu didn't intend to let go, she just sat down in front of him, and asked softly: "If you are talking about the kind like a Hun great witch, there is no such thing as a big man. What happened, Da Shanyu?"

"Without the great witch, who will convey the will of heaven?" Da Shanyu did not answer her question, but continued to ask.Nangong seemed to understand something, but she had some doubts, so she half-tested and half-honestly replied: "The emperor of the Han Dynasty is the Son of Heaven." She said the word "Tianzi" in correct Chinese, "The Son of Heaven is The son of heaven, the one who can convey the will of heaven is naturally the son of heaven."

"Son of Heaven..." Shanyu chewed these two words, and laughed out loud, "You Han people really dare to say, if your great Han emperor is the Son of Heaven, why can't he communicate with the heavens like a great witch? You How can there be so many disasters in the big man?"

Nangong said indifferently: "Our big man has a saying that we should never bother others with small things. Since the current problem of a big man can be solved by himself, why bother to go to heaven?"

"You're so eloquent." Military Minister Shan Yu said, there was no negative emotion in his tone, he squeezed Nangong's wrist, and pondered for a long time.

He was silent, and Nangong quietly accompanied him until Shanyu, the military minister, slowly uttered a very terrifying sentence, "I remember... your big man's witch... isn't an inheritance system?"

The Shanyu system of the Xiongnu was handed down to the monarch and ministers here, and the power was already highly concentrated. He himself was fascinated and enjoyed the feeling of holding this power in his hands. He could easily play with other ministries in the applause. The grassland is the most expansive among all the Huns Shan Yu. Even the greatest enemy of the Huns, Han, married the real princess to him, and opened a trading port to please him.

Both the left and the right are subject to him, and he can win wherever he points with his whip. As long as he is there, the Huns will be invincible. Isn't this something he should be proud of?

But today he suddenly discovered that his so-called one-person opinion was not worth mentioning in front of Wu. Almost no one was waiting for his order. Everyone immediately made the judgment that "we are about to go north". Although it is the king's accountant, the entire Hungarian tribe's faith is in the great witch, and even his father has to retreat to this old man many times.

This is the unique power.

And he, or every Shanyu before him, was just a pawn in the witch's hands, which made the military minister Shanyu very disturbed.But it is just that his wife's home country has the most reassuring model in his opinion. The witches in the Han Dynasty are not an inherited system, and even the existence of the next witch is determined by the head of the country. reference opinion.The emperor can choose to adopt it, or he can choose to refuse it.

It's so fascinating.

The military minister Shan Yu said to his wife: "Tell me the story of your big men, not only the current big men, but also the old ones." He squeezed Princess Nangong's hand and patted the back of her hand , "I want to know you better."

Princess Nangong lowered her head shyly when she heard the words, and said, "As long as Da Chanyu is willing to listen."

But she would never tell the Great Chanyu that it was she who exchanged a bag of pepper for a word of the Great Witch of the Huns.

That word is exactly - North.

Very good deal, isn't it?Nangong smiled calmly and gently. Amidst the busyness outside the tent, the woman's voice inside the tent was as gentle as a gurgling brook, nourishing the tree called ambition in the heart of the Xiongnu Da Shanyu.

The Xiongnu went all the way north. As everyone expected, there were fewer and fewer places affected by locusts, and there was also melting water from glaciers in the north, which nourished a piece of land during the dry season.

This piece of land is like an oasis in the desert and has become a life-saving straw for the hungry livestock. It hardly needs to be driven by people. The tired and hungry livestock ran over immediately after smelling the direction of the fresh pasture.

Although going north in this season means that they don't have enough time to accumulate pasture, and this winter will definitely be more difficult than previous years, but the Huns were already discussing how to survive this winter when they migrated along the way.

The Xiongnu headquarters received an "apology" from the left and right departments before, and this unexpected income was enough for them to feed the entire tribe without doing anything in winter.In terms of the results alone, they are not bad. Generally speaking, they are in a relaxed mood, especially when they see that the drought and locust plagues in the north are not serious, and their admiration for the Great Witch is growing day by day.

While praising the big witch for his accurate judgment, they were laughing at the big man.

The reason is simple. Locusts are warm animals, so no matter where they are born, they will eventually migrate to warmer places, especially when the temperature on the grasslands has begun to gradually decrease.

And the south of the grassland is naturally the big man.

The Huns, who still remember the high walls built by the big Han in the past few years, said with a brazen smile: "The Han people like to build walls, but what's the use of their walls? Can they stop locusts?"

Can the city wall stop the locusts?Of course not.

However, there is something else that can stop the locusts.

On the city wall of Yuyang County, the soldiers had been waiting for the locust army for a long time.They didn't dare to slack off when they saw the locust army flying over arrogantly, and immediately ignited the inflammables placed on the sideline of the Great Wall.This kind of combustible material, which uses watered charcoal as the main raw material and adds sulfur, immediately releases a lot of smoke.

Strictly speaking, locusts are not afraid of smoke, but smoke can slow them down, and almost all insects don't like the smell of sulfur.This appetizing meal is a gift from the big man to the army of locusts.

After lighting the fire, these soldiers immediately put on their armor, put densely woven bamboo baskets on their heads one by one, carried a bamboo basket on their hands, and then started waving to catch locusts. Throwing it on the fire, the dazed locusts soon became part of the smoke.

It may seem stupid to do so, but they are the first line of defense, and the Great Wall is a higher place, where the locusts rise collectively, and the team is denser, so the harvest is really not small.

After them came the Allied Forces of Animals. The officers and soldiers of the Border County, who had been prepared for a long time, released the poultry that had been locked in the cages before, and some even released the pigs.The poultry who were very dissatisfied were immediately overjoyed by the overwhelming army of locusts, and they flapped their wings to hunt.

And the pig, which usually looks stupid, is also very flexible at this time, and can almost eat one bite at a time, eating quickly.It's true that locusts have wings and are flexible, but they are so numerous that they don't need to be seen clearly. As long as they open their mouths and wait there, insects can fly over.

Before being domesticated, pigs were also animals that lived at the top of the ecological chain. The hunting instinct was hidden in their genes, even though they have been domesticated for more than a thousand years.

After only an initial acclimatization, these hulking native black pigs start hopping around the fields, happy to eat extra.

After that, there is a third and fourth line of defense. All the way from the border cities to the first-tier and second-tier cities behind, there are similar defensive capture preparations. Starting from the "wolf smoke" burning on the Great Wall, the prefects in every place People, vassals, county magistrates, etc. are all ready to face the locust plague.

It's not that they pass the test with their psychological quality one by one, but that the big man has carried out such interceptions several times since last year, and everyone is already familiar with it.

The vegetation on the grassland is verdant, and the number of locust plagues is really not many, so it can be understood that they are completely passive in the face of this natural disaster, but for the people of the Han Kingdom, the locust plague is really too familiar, basically It will appear once every seven or eight years, and the difference is only in whether it appears in some areas or in the whole country.

This time the locust plague had already started to show signs when Xia Anran returned to Zhongshan, because he walked so smoothly on this journey that he hardly encountered any embarrassing situations such as rain.

The avenues of Dahan are all dirt roads. Although they are usually compacted, and the dirt roads have good water absorption. If it rains, it is not easy to accumulate water. It is no problem for people to walk on it, but it is not good for cars. The dirt road is full of water. The structure will become loose quietly. If you press down hard, it will immediately destroy the supporting structure and break the road surface, and the looser part below will be crushed immediately after being exposed to rain. The axle marks began to fall apart little by little.

Therefore, once it rains, if it is not extremely anxious, the carts generally do not continue to pass, and the livestock are not willing to continue to walk on rainy days, the journey will be greatly delayed and the road will be damaged.

This is also one of the reasons why Xia Anran submitted his resignation form - if he didn't leave, it would be the rainy season, and it would be too embarrassing to be on the road.

But when he left the drier Midwest, it didn't rain.In the wetter east, there was no rain either.The only time they encountered in the whole process required the team to stop and take shelter from the rain.

After arriving in Zhongshan Country, Xia Anran was even more astonished to find that the residents of Zhongshan Country had already started to build water fetching equipment.

This has almost never happened before. In the humid and rainy Zhongshan country, residents rarely need to carry water to irrigate the land. Generally speaking, the precipitation here is enough for the growth of plants. If necessary, canals can also be used for irrigation.But the problem is that the previously opened canals can no longer draw water - the level of the river has dropped.

They have re-modified the water intake, but unfortunately, the water level is falling faster than they have remodeled.

In the year when the vassal kings were deprived of their right to govern, that is, the year after the solar eclipse, when the bloody storm broke out on the prairie, the people of the Han Dynasty were already preparing for the drought.

In fact, unlike the expectations of many princes and kings, the power of governance is completely vested in the prime minister of a country, and the vassal states fought very well in this drought-resistant battle. They even used the vassal state to drive the surrounding counties to carry out drought prevention activities. Afterwards, under the guidance of the central government, preparations for the prevention and culling of locusts were carried out.

In addition to the inherent means, the government also encourages the public to spontaneously find ways to eliminate locusts.Xia Anran took the lead in printing a set of commemorative coins for the hero who wrote the letter to exterminate the locusts, in order to reward those who have made special contributions in this way.

Upward movement has downward effects, and Zhongshan State has done this very carefully.The vegetation coverage rate in Zhongshan is very high, and it is not a place where locusts like to live. According to the impression of local people, they rarely see locusts in the grass.But the situation is different now, because the river water has dropped, and large areas of tidal flats are exposed. This kind of dry, flat place with rich food and small cracks is the natural delivery room of locusts.

As long as you observe carefully, it seems that there are many small holes in the tidal flat of the river overnight, and these may be the places where locusts descended.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to find a way to dig out these eggs from the ground, flood them and burn them in the sun. As long as the eggs are exposed to the air, they are actually very fragile without the protection of the earth, but this is too expensive. time.

The tidal flat soil is compacted, and it is not easy to loosen it bit by bit, and the cost is too high, so the method of Zhongshan Country is to hire a group of children to poke each hole with a sharp cone to the bottom, and then Adults pour the medicinal juice down one by one, and they will come here again the next day to pour lime water into it.

Basically, less than one or two eggs can survive in this way. In addition to this method, there are herd chickens.

The Zhongshan Country Chicken Farm has exerted great energy this time. Many young chickens were released into the wild for the first time, and they learned to rummage for eggs or newly hatched larvae in the ground without a teacher.Chickens, which are good at digging three feet into the ground and causing serious damage to vegetation, are equally astonishingly destructive on tidal flats, but the loss of chicken flocks is also huge. Birds that have never been out of their nests are very vulnerable to injury, and may even be tripped In cases like fractures, but fortunately the effect is remarkable.

Herding poultry is also an effective way to control the number of locusts in modern times. In addition, there are many water marshes in Zhongshan, and there are also a lot of amphibians. Drug air defense and biological control are two-pronged. A widespread outbreak of locusts did not occur.

In fact, locusts are very timid animals, and they belong to the bottom of the ecological chain when they appear alone, and they have a characteristic that once their hind legs are touched... they will instantly transform into another bad-tempered insect.

It is impossible for locusts to migrate without touching each other, so when the locust plague comes, the locusts are basically in a state of rage, and they will irritate the local locusts wherever they go.

When locusts are infested, their numbers will not decrease due to long-distance migration, but will increase.Therefore, Dahan's prevention and control strategy is to reduce the number of local locusts as much as possible, and if it is impossible to stop the foreign ones, at least not to increase the burden on subsequent counties.

This time, the locust plague that forced the Huns to move north was successfully contained within one or two counties behind the Great Wall, and did not go deep into the main grain-producing areas of the Han Dynasty.

When he finally received the loss information submitted by various places, Liu Qi couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief.

According to his plan, the Han's grain reserves in the past two years are very important, because this is an important turning point for the Han's national power to catch up with the Xiongnu.How strong the Xiongnu is, to be honest, the people of the country didn't know it before the King of the Xiongnu voted for Han.But in the past year, whether it was map drawing, information collection, or the hedging training of the Han army and the Hun cavalry, after a comprehensive evaluation of various data, both soldiers and generals have a feeling-we will not lose .

In the case of facing each other, the Han army is no less than the Xiongnu soldiers, but the shortcoming of the Han soldiers is their short legs.Especially from the Xiongnu soldiers, everyone learned that the horses of the Huns were so rich that they rode one in peacetime, changed to another in wartime, and changed to another when retreating.And even if the big man has developed to the present, although he has got rid of the dilemma of not being able to find four horses of the same color when the country was founded, it is not enough to be able to exchange two or even three horses for one person.

In fact, even the most elite southern and northern camps of the Han emperor have not yet achieved full coverage of horses.

If you want to counterattack or even chase the Huns northward, you must enter the grassland, catch up with them at a speed no less than that of the Huns cavalry, and bite the Huns hard. In order to achieve this goal, the prerequisite is to raise horses.

And if you want to raise and raise a strong horse as quickly as possible, you have to use grain as a concentrated feed.This is very experienced in Zhongshan State, which is the leading livestock breeding country in the country, so the agronomists from Zhongshan State were invited to Chang'an.

In order to show his support, Liu Qi directly divided his own garden, Shangcemetery, to plant grain and raise horses. At the same time, he ordered to encourage counties and counties in various counties to raise more horses and raise good horses, and promised that the Central Committee would buy all good horses at a high price.

As long as the horses I raise can pass the national standards, the official purchase fee is basically one and a half times the cost of raising horses, and this profit is already considerable.

As soon as the official purchase price came out, the people rushed to raise horses.

Now is the rapid growth period of this group of foals that have been raised since childhood. After many inspections and explorations, these horses in Shanglinyuan that have been carefully cared for since childhood are much stronger than horses of the same age, and their shoulder height is even higher. More than an inch, the local information is similar.

Emperor Jing was delighted at this, but the news of the severe drought in the whole country came immediately.

The harvests of Dahan in the past few years have been good. Dahan’s agricultural tax is low. The plague of locusts... the agricultural structure of the entire Dahan will be on the verge of collapse.

At that time, people will not have enough to eat, let alone horses.

But half of the horses are raised halfway, and the loss is even greater.Generally, horses can be bought when they are three years old. Now the horses in the hands of the people are basically about two years old, and there is only one year left before they can make a profit. However, if it is too late to order the purchase of two-year-old horses, it is good for the people and the country. With this last breath, Emperor Jing wanted to endure it no matter what.

Fortunately, good news came one after another. The Xiongnu went north and did not take advantage of the fire to loot. The means of preventing and controlling locusts were very effective. The outbreak of locusts in various places did not constitute a disaster, but the drought had a greater impact on the income of agricultural products.

Emperor Jing began to think about whether to build water conservancy facilities across the country according to what his youngest son said.For this reason, he sent multiple messages to send people to Zhongshan to study the construction of local water conservancy facilities, and tried every means to recruit local talents to the central government.

Regarding the behavior of the old father's poaching, Xia Anran dared not speak out at first, but he was quickly appeased because the old father rented a big boat from Hejian Country from him at a very good price and was less affected by the drought. The coastal areas of the country transferred grain to the hinterland of the Central Plains to stabilize grain prices. When she was happy, Xia Anran packed the old grain in the warehouse of Zhongshan Kingdom directly and gave it to her old father.

Emperor Jing reciprocated. He ordered many places in Zhuo County to cooperate with the water dredging project in the Fu River Basin, taking advantage of the water level drop to widen the river and rebuild the embankment port, directly increasing the navigation capacity of the Fu River by [-]%. Since then, cargo ships from Zhongshan Kingdom can directly reach Baiyang Lake. generation.

Although it is only [-]% short, the transportation time by waterway can be shortened from ten days to one or two days with the wind, and three or four days with the wind. This is still a plain, and the road conditions are better in economically affluent areas. The more complicated the terrain is, the poorer it is. The advantages of this transportation time saving are more prominent.

After being on the border with Baiyangdian for a generation, Xia Anran immediately planned to reduce the proportion of poultry breeding in Zhongshan, and try to import as much chicken, duck and goose eggs as possible in the future.Especially the Baiyangdian Salted Egg, which is high in quality and low in price, is very popular among Zhongshan people.

Emperor Jing also accidentally discovered the transportation value of the waterway in this area by requisitioning the waterway of the Hutuo River. He was even moved for a few seconds by the idea of ​​going around the back of the Huns and attacking the Huns on the map Liu Che had drawn for him. The ninth son wrote a letter criticizing him for misleading his children as usual.

But Xia Anran didn't care at all,

Because, he wants to get married!