The voyage from Jiangjin to Baqiu is 350 miles away, and there are 450 miles from Baqiu to Xiakou-Hanyang. Therefore, from Sun Ce and Zhou Yu to the rebellion and return to the rescue, to finally completely breaking away from the occupied area of ​​Liu Bei's camp, it took a total of 800 miles of the Yangtze River surface.

Fortunately, the Yangtze River is wide, even in the middle reaches near Jingzhou, it is generally more than four miles wide. Baqiu, Xiakou and other points that meet other water systems are even six to ten miles wide.

Therefore, Sun Ce and Zhou Yu felt that the road back was easy to go, even if Li Su sent troops to intercept and defeat them directly. If Li Su wanted to fly a kite, then the Wu army would go downstream and rush downstream without caring about it, just throw away the enemy and don’t fight.

There are only two or three particularly narrow sections of the Yangtze River in the 800-mile Yangtze River. It is a dangerous place where "if you are blocked by the enemy fleet, you can only fight hard battles and it is difficult to take a detour from the river."

The first dangerous part is the Yujiangkou and the river surface between Gong'an County, which you will encounter immediately from the mouth of the Youjiangkou shortly after Sun Ce and Zhou Yu set off. The Yangtze River in this place is only two to three miles wide, which is a point that is easily blocked.

But the problem is that this place is too close to Jiangjin Ferry and even Jiangling City, only more than a hundred miles away. During the stalemate of more than two months, it has been completely wiped out by Zhou Yu, and there are no remnants of the Han army around.

The Han army did not have large warship reserves on this section of the river, and ships from other battlefields could not drive. If Li Su wanted to intercept the Youjiangkou, he could only push the Baqiu garrison upstream and block the entrance.

Therefore, on the ninth day of January, the second day after Sun Ce and Zhou Yu returned to the army, the troops easily passed through the river surface of Youjiangkou-Kong'an County. No accident happened. In another day, you can reach the mouth of Dongting Lake north of Baqiu.

Faced with the smoothness of the first half of the voyage, Sun Ce's inner uneasiness further eased. Looking at Dongting Lake appearing at the end of his vision, he discussed with Zhou Yu:

"Gan Ning indeed took away a considerable part of Li Su's naval forces to implement what he called "surrounding Wei and saving Zhao". From Jiangjin to Dongting, Li Su did not dare to concentrate his troops to advance to the public security to intercept us. It must be that the remaining troops in Baqiu were empty.

At that time, as long as Gan Ning is intercepted and killed in the hinterland of our army, Li Su's elite troops in Jingzhou will be weakened by at least one-third. In the future, our army will no longer have to work so hard to annihilate these elite troops in the siege battle, and it will be nice to clean up the field and water battles."

Zhou Yu also agreed with Sun Ce's opinion, but he carefully checked and filled in with one sentence: "Bofu, don't underestimate the enemy. From Jiangling to the 800-li River in Xiakou, you didn't finish the whole journey last time. I personally took the army to walk through it.

Before we arrived in Dongting in the first half, there was indeed only the narrow river area of ​​the Public Security Bureau, which was easily blocked. However, in the second half, it was 450 miles from Xiakou, and there were two narrow areas. One was Shaxian County in Jiangxia County, and the other was Chibi at the junction of Shaxian County and Xiakou County.

Since Li Su is short of troops, even if we want to intercept us, we can only concentrate one place to intercept us. Therefore, after passing the police, we cannot relax our vigilance. In the future, Sha Xian and Chibi must maintain combat readiness. Unless all three places have passed, we can ensure that Li Su is really cowardly."

"Gongjin, you are still so cautious." Sun Ce smiled confidently, "Since you can't tell whether Li Su is really empty and dare not intercept us, I still have a quick verification method: Baqiu Port is near, so I send someone to test and attack.

If it is really empty, with weak resistance and can quickly take it down, it would be best. In this way, when we chase and annihilate Ganning and then come back to conquer the city and seize the land, we will also pacify Jingnan faster.

The essence of Jingnan lies in Changsha. Once Changsha takes it, at least Lingling Guiyang is mostly just to persuade him to surrender. Only Wuling is close to Yiling and backed by Yizhou, and it is mountainous and not connected to the Xiang River. Perhaps it can still be controlled by Liu Bei. At that time, our territory will be east of the Xiang River."

Zhou Yu thought for a while: "Li Suduo is conspiring and deceitful. If we test the feint attack, even if he stations many troops in the fortress in the port, he might still show weakness first, lure us into feeling a chance and increase the attack. In the end, it will cause us major damage in the defensive battle?

If I have to try, I think I have to set a tone, such as if the enemy is determined to resist, then more than a thousand casualties must be removed and the enemy's defense is tested.

If the enemy lures the enemy, it looks like the defense is lukewarm. As long as we suffer from two thousand casualties, even if we seem to be "struggling harder to attack", we must withdraw our troops and not give Li Su the chance to consume us. In addition, the attack time cannot exceed half a day, and we cannot afford to delay."

"That's right, just do it." Sun Ce humbly accepted these detailed suggestions, and then divided Lu Meng and Dong Xi to test the attack.

It's true that Zhou Yu's prediction of Li Su's ingenuity was indeed not in vain.

When the Wu army first chose to use warships to test the attack on the port, they were indeed attacked by Han army warships and the crossbows of Baqiu Tower and Qiuding Fortress on the shore, catapults cross firepower, and fireballs wrapped in lit fibers such as linen in the throwing objects.

Dong Xi attacked from the port on the south side, and was beaten to an instant and injured several ships. The soldiers were drowned and were arrowed into the water. Seeing that they were not allowed to do anything, Dong Xi quickly opened the distance again and did not dare to rush straight to the port. Instead, he went further south and left the coverage of the fortress position on the Baqiu Mountain Top in the north.

Lu Meng attacked from the north and did not attack the port, but wanted to take the fortress on the top of Baqiu Mountain, so he was not covered by fire at the beginning.

He took advantage of Dong Xi's death in the south to catch the enemy's attention. Lu Meng sent five crafts and dozens of crafts to choose to land directly on the river bank section without deep berths. Then he climbed up Baqiu Mountain from behind and attacked the fortress on the top of the mountain by land.

Li Su and Lu Su and Gan Ning have been operating in Baqiu for many years, but they have not built a wraparound city wall on the top of the mountain. They just set up camps and dug trenches, used the digging soil to make rammed earth walls, and also built many stone-cattering machines with wide-open vision, as well as the "Baqiu Tower" as the general lookout post.

Therefore, it is easier to capture the fortress on the top of the mountain than to attack a solid city. It is mainly because it is a loss to go uphill, but you don’t have to bring a siege car to break through the city gate and wall.

However, Lu Meng rushed to the hillside with thousands of infantry. Shortly after entering the range of the divine arm crossbowman beside the wall of the mountaintop village, he encountered Huang Zhong commanding the arrow.

The new weapon, the Divine Arm Crossbow, has been manufactured and equipped in Liu Bei's camp for less than a year, so the output is not very high. So far, there are only more than 3,000 equipment in Li Su's army, and it is estimated that it can be expanded to 5,000 next year.

This thing consumes extremely huge beef tendons. A magic arm crossbow costs at least twice the amount of beef tendon used for ordinary slash crossbows. Fortunately, the "Five-Year Expansion Plan for Feisuo Shujin Loom" before Liu Bei's camp has almost been completed. In 197, the consumption of beef tendons for manufacturing crossbows began to decline.

The scale of purchasing beef tendon by Liu Bei's camp is still the same as in previous years. It has spent a lot of foreign exchange to ask the northern grassland ethnic groups to purchase it. In addition, after the complete pacification of Liangzhou in 196, the scale of cattle pastures in the northwest was also expanding, and the self-sufficiency of beef tendons has increased, so so many new types of individual crossbows were built, which did not make the three major princes of Guandong alert in advance.

After all, the market in the world's beef tendon market has not ushered in a new wave of surges. How could Yuan Caosun realize that Liu Bei is holding up new military moves?

Just like Steeling did not notice the head of state's Barbarossa plan because the cotton market did not soar in 1941.

One truth.

Because he was unprepared, Lu Meng's team suddenly encountered the shooting of the Divine Arm Crossbow, and was still using it on a large scale. Of course, he was stunned for a moment.

For a moment, many soldiers even stood on simple wooden shields and were still penetrated by crossbow arrows. If they happened to be shot at the part where the shield was holding the arm, then they would nailed the arm and palm directly.

Lu Meng himself also charged forward with a shield, and did not rush to the front, and was hit by several crossbow arrowheads. Fortunately, he was still wearing armor, and the crossbow arrowhead behind the shield was no longer enough to penetrate the armor. So Lu Meng was only covered with blood on his arm.

He immediately realized that the battle of attacking the mountain could not be fought at all, and immediately called on the soldiers to retreat before the enemy and our army had even joined the battle.

Huang Zhong on the top of the mountain did not expect Lu Meng to retreat so simply, so he always maintained a defensive attitude of being on guard against crossbows, so he failed to pursue him as soon as possible. By the time Huang Zhong organized the offensive formation and led the troops to retaliate, Lu Meng had already opened up the gap for more than a mile.

Huang Zhong took the lead in riding his horse and rushed out of Baqiu Village with a small number of troops and killed down the hillside. The Wu soldiers ran slowly and were chased and killed one after another.

The Han army pursued only more than 200 horses, and the rest were slow-moving infantry. Because Li Su's army originally planned to defend the city, village and fight water, so there were no more horses, only officers had horses. The established cavalry remained on Zhao Yun's side in Dangyang, confronting Han Dang, the commander of Jiangling.

However, the more than 200 cavalrymen chased Lu Meng's thousands of retreating troops. The soldiers of Lu Meng's army knew in their hearts that as long as they were entangled by the cavalry, they would not take a cup of tea and dragged them to the subsequent black infantry of the Han army to catch up and stick, and that would be the end of the entire army.

Therefore, although the Han army had few cavalry and were weak, they did not have plate armored iron cavalry, the Wu army still dared not turn around and fight, and only dared to escape in all directions. Unfortunately, Huang Zhong's two hundred cavalry officers had only one weapon each, and even if he caught up, he could not kill so many people. After more than a thousand casualties, the Wu army still retreated successfully.

Lu Meng himself did not retreat to the beach and was targeted by Huang Zhong halfway. However, Lu Meng was smart. He was originally among the Wu army and had a very accurate positioning of his martial arts. He had practiced Pan Zhang several times and knew that his martial arts were similar to Pan Zhang.

Two months ago, Pan Zhang was killed so easily by Huang Zhong. How dare Lu Meng fight?

When he was chased by Huang Zhong's back shot, he had just removed his chin by two-thirds of the hillside. On the left was a cliff, which was twenty or thirty meters away from the surface of Dongting Lake. As a result, when Lu Meng heard the sound of feather arrows breaking through the air, he subconsciously broke through the shield block and dodged sideways, but he was still lifted off his shoulder armor by an arrow, leaving a blood groove on his collarbone, and his injury was several inches long.

Lu Meng knew that he would definitely die halfway through the way after running like this. He gritted his teeth and jumped to the left and fell into the water of Dongting Lake. Huang Zhong couldn't see clearly beyond more than a hundred steps. He just thought that Lu Meng was shot and killed by arrows, so he no longer struggled and continued to shoot and chase other Wu soldiers.

Lu Meng almost fainted after falling into the water. He endured the severe pain of the impact and threw away the iron helmet. He used a short knife to remove the belt that tied the armor, and abandoned the metal armor, so that he slowly floated to the water surface and avoided drowning.

Seeing the main general fall into the water, the other Wu soldiers were so anxious that they imitated diving and escaping. Fortunately, most of the soldiers did not have heavy metal armor, so they would not drown after falling into the lake without removing their armor.

However, some officers whose martial arts and reactions were far inferior to those of Lu Meng, who jumped off the cliff in metal armor and fell to death and drowned in Dongting Lake.

Zhou Yu observed the miserable attack on the hillside of Baqiu from afar, and had already ordered Chen Wu to take a fleet to the cliff to rescue people, and finally rescued most of the officers and soldiers who jumped off the cliff. However, all the warships sent by Lu Meng to land on the beach were seized by Huang Zhong.

Li Su also sent Taishi Ci to take some warships out of the port, hoping to intercept Chen Wu, who was reaping the fishing people. Fortunately, Zhou Yu pushed the main fleet up and suppressed the exit channel, so that Taishi Ci did not dare to act rashly.

However, with this toss and conscience, Zhou Yu also completely saw that there were definitely many warships that the Han army could use in the port. The fleet that Taishici tentatively wanted to leave the port could accommodate many people.

The two sides started and the war ended that day.

Fortunately, the Eastern Wu army had a surplus of warships. Each ship was not very full, and it also distributed a lot of tonnage to carry supplies with the army. So it was nothing to lose the small boat that transported thousands of people from Lu Meng, but it was nothing more than the remaining fleet that had slightly squeezed.

Sun Ce also regretted: "I didn't expect that Li Su's defenders in Baqiu had such combat power. In the battle just now, just looking at the intensity of the enemy's bows, crossbows, arrows and stones, the number of warships chasing in Baqiu Port was probably not that at least more than 10,000 people were left to defend, so that they could completely defeat Lu Meng and Dong Xi's feint attack so simply and completely.

Fortunately, it was also tried for us. Gan Ning took so many big ships and so many people, and Li Su left so many in Baqiu. In the narrow and dangerous places such as Shaxian and Chibi in front, it was impossible for Li Su's troops to intercept the river. Otherwise, Li Su would not have been able to transform out of thin air and could not have so many troops."

After withdrawing the troops, after a counting, the general casualties of the Wu army approached 3,000 people, but nothing was found, and they just found out the enemy's information. The morale of the army was shaken and lowered again due to this setback.

Although many people still have the confidence to pursue and encircle Gan Ning, they dare not think about the dream of "being back and taking over Jingnan after destroying Gan Ning". Everyone fully realized how difficult it is to seize the Han army's territory in a fair combat environment.

Jiangling before was just an illusion, and it was won by the inner supporter. Without Cai Mao’s inner supporter, Wu Jun’s ability to attack seemed to be nothing…

Sun Ce ordered a meal to boost morale for the troops. Fortunately, when the fleet retreated from Jiangling, the military rations were already very abundant, and the soldiers could eat openly. Today, the boat that transported thousands of soldiers was lost, which made the 60,000 army eat more supplies equivalent to the weight of thousands of soldiers, and just freed up the tonnage.

After some rest and recovery, Sun Ce and Zhou Yu led their main force to bypass Dongting Lake mouth and head downstream to the northeast.

However, they did not realize that not long after they left, as the night gradually came. Li Su also ordered Taishi Ci and Huang Zhong to take all the mobile troops in Baqiu Port to board the ship, including boarding the five-toothed warships that had been hiding in the depths of the water village today without revealing their combat power. Then, he led 25,000 people to drag dozens of miles away, and took advantage of the night to chase Sun Ce and Zhou Yu.

Although Li Su's five-tooth warship is also a slow-moving building ship, it has frame keels and relatively sharp and streamlined bows, and its navigation speed is definitely faster than Sun Ce's building ship, and even slightly faster than the largest fighting ship.

There are only ships below medium-sized fighting ships in the Wu army, and their speeds can exceed those of the Five-Tooth Warship. As for the craftsman who are famous for their speed, it is naturally even less difficult.

One night was enough to bring back more than half of the distance Sun Ce had traveled in advance.

Moreover, the order to block the river section of the sandbank was secretly passed on to the upper reaches of Hanyang in advance. Li Su estimated that if it was fast, Shaxian, and if it was slow, in Chibi, he would definitely be able to block the head and tail of Sun Ce and Zhou Yu's main fleet, and close the door and hit the dog.

The width of the Yangtze River is less than four hundred feet, and the riverside on both sides is cliffs cladding the river. The fleet will inevitably drag into a snake formation and there is no place to hide if you want to.
Chapter completed!