diymy Chapter 77 The Chaos of the White Lotus
Chapter 77 The Chaos of the White Lotus
July 5th, the second year of the Tianqi reign (1623), outside Yuncheng.
The sky was a sickly leaden gray, and the low-hanging clouds looked like a tattered piece of cotton soaked in blood, pressing heavily on the plain.
The main force of the government army was stationed five miles north of the city, while Lu Yan's "Directly Subordinate Supply Battalion" was assigned to a high hill on the flank due to its special "unpopular" status.
This location is excellent, avoiding the suffocating stench of excrement from the government troops' camp while offering a panoramic view of the entire battlefield.
"Master, this battle is... too chaotic."
Zhao Changying lay prone behind a breastwork made of sandbags, holding up a monocular telescope. His voice trembled slightly as he said, "The government troops are fighting haphazardly, and the rebels are fighting haphazardly too. This isn't a battle between two armies; it's clearly two packs of wild beasts biting each other."
Lu Yan sat on a folding stool, holding a charcoal pencil and a notebook, recording battlefield data.
Give me the binoculars.
Lu Yan took the binoculars and looked towards the battlefield.
In the footage, the city walls of Yuncheng have been transformed into a giant meat grinder.
Although Commander Zhao Yan was eager for quick results, his government troops—especially the visiting troops—were clearly unwilling to risk their lives for the mess in Shandong. They drove the able-bodied men they had captured along the way, carrying makeshift ladders, and sparsely charged toward the city walls.
The scene atop the city wall was even more shocking.
There were no orderly guards there, only countless fanatical believers with red headscarves and long, disheveled hair. Some held pitchforks, while others brandished waist knives they had seized from government troops, muttering incantations as if in a state of frenzied hallucination.
"The Eternal Mother! The Vacuum Homeland!"
The sound could be heard from three miles away; it was like a kind of mental virus.
Suddenly, the city gate opened a crack.
"Master! They're going to launch a counterattack?" Zhao Changying exclaimed.
"No." Lu Yan's hand was as steady as a rock, the camera fixed on the city gate. "They are 'clearing out their inventory'."
A group of ragged civilians, many without shoes, were being forced out of the city gate like livestock by Red Turban soldiers armed with knives and guns. They carried no weapons, each only a tattered sack filled with dirt.
"Fill the trench," Lu Yan coldly uttered.
The moat of Yuncheng, fed by water from Liangshan Marsh, was five zhang wide and posed the biggest obstacle to the government troops' attack. Xu Hongru's solution to the government troops' plan to fill the moat was surprisingly simple: have the common people do the filling.
Moreover, it was filled with the body.
In the footage, the civilians cried out as the supervising officers behind them slashed their backs repeatedly, leaving them no choice but to jump into the moat in despair. They threw down sacks of earth, but it was far from enough.
Immediately afterwards, a scene that made Zhao Changying's eyes widen in horror occurred.
The leader of the White Lotus Sect on the city wall waved his command flag.
"shoot!"
Arrows rained down from the city walls.
The target was not the government troops in the distance, but the slow-moving civilians in the moat.
The people who were hit by arrows screamed and fell into the river. Their blood stained the river red. The corpses and sacks of earth were piled up together, and soon a "floating bridge" made of flesh and blood was formed.
"This is their 'divine skill'."
Lu Yan put down his binoculars, his voice devoid of any warmth, "To Xu Hongru, these people are not assets, not even labor, but merely 'consumables' that can be consumed at will. In his eyes, the cost of human life is lower than that of sandbags."
"brute!"
Zhao Changying slammed his fist on the sack of earth, his knuckles turning white. "This is what they call 'saving all living beings'? This is even more corrupt than the government!"
"When a belief needs the blood of innocents to prove its purity, it is a cult." Lu Yan wrote a line in his notebook: Enemy tactical characteristics: anti-humanity, no bottom line.
But that's not the most chaotic part.
At noon, the government troops' offensive was repelled. A strange ceasefire ensued on the battlefield.
Lu Yan adjusted his perspective and looked towards a bandit camp on the west side of Yuncheng. A detachment of Xu Hongru's army, numbering approximately three thousand, was stationed there.
"Master, it seems like... they're fighting over there?" Zhao Tie, who had been silent all along, suddenly pointed to the west.
Even without binoculars, it was clear. Suddenly, black smoke billowed from the camp, and the shouts of battle even drowned out the clamor of the main battlefield.
Lu Yan raised his binoculars.
Two groups of people, both wearing red headscarves, were engaged in a fierce battle. One group wore stolen mandarin duck battle jackets and carried standard-issue rifles; the other group wore tattered short clothes and carried broadswords and wooden clubs.
The focus of the dispute was several large trucks loaded with grain.
"The spoils were not divided fairly," Lu Yan said calmly.
That was a coalition that Xu Hongru had cobbled together to win over various bandits. The group wearing battle coats were probably the garrison rebels who had surrendered earlier; the ones in short jackets were local bandits.
"Put down that bag of rice! I stole it!"
"Bullshit! We're all brothers in the Holy Church, we share the good fortune!"
"Pfft!"
A rebel captain stabbed the bandit leader in the throat with a single shot.
"Enjoy my ass! I'm risking my life in this rebellion to eat meat, not to listen to your sermons!"
A chaotic battle erupted instantly.
Thousands of people wrestled together like mad dogs. Some were pushed into the fire, others were stabbed in the back by their own comrades. There were no formations, no friend or foe, only the most primal, bestial outburst.
Xu Hongru's main force on the city wall ignored this, and some people even pointed and talked on the city wall as if they were watching a cockfight.
"This is what is known as the 'righteous army'."
Lu Yan closed the notebook and turned to look at the pale-faced new recruits behind him.
Many of these 800 new recruits were from displaced backgrounds, and some even had harbored illusions about the White Lotus Sect before coming to Lu Ji, believing it to be the savior of the poor.
But now, this cruel scene has completely shattered their illusions.
"Did you see it clearly?"
Lu Yan stood up, pointed to the hellish scene in the distance, and his voice pierced the eardrums of every soldier.
That is a world without order.
"No one is safe there. Whether you're an official or a farmer, whether you're religious or not, as long as you don't have a knife, or even if you do have a knife but aren't ruthless enough, you're just meat in someone else's mouth."
He patted the cold breech-loading cannon beside him, a product of industrial civilization, representing order, calculation, and precision.
"Why do we train? Why do we need to follow discipline? Why do we have to line up like idiots even if the sky is falling?"
Lu Yan's gaze swept over everyone like a sharp blade.
"Because we don't want to become beasts. We not only want to survive, but to live like human beings."
The recruits' eyes changed.
The gazes that had previously wandered due to fear began to focus, to harden. They instinctively gripped their muskets and spears, as if they were their only anchor in this crumbling world.
"Pass on the order."
Lu Yan sat back down on his stool, regaining his project manager-like composure. "The entire battalion is on level two alert. No matter how the fighting goes outside, no one dares to cross our perimeter..."
He looked up at the burning camp in the distance.
"Whether they are government troops or bandits, shoot them all."
"yes!"
At this moment, Lu Yan's "Independent Supply Battalion" was like a reinforced concrete pile driven into this murky swamp. No matter how turbulent the wind and waves, it remained steadfast and unmoved.