NOVGO.NET Chapter 796 - Chapter 796: Chapter 345: The Three Kingdoms of Lingnan
Chapter 796: Chapter 345: The Three Kingdoms of Lingnan
By mid-May, Qingyunzi finally led sixty thousand elite soldiers back to Baling.
Lu Yuan immediately ordered these sixty thousand men who had been on campaign for half a year to take a leave of absence. They were each given a month off to go home and reunite with their families.
Upon their return from leave, they were to rotate through various placements in Baling and join the local defense forces within the jurisdiction.
This force had been on campaign for a long time, falling under the category of tired veteran soldiers. For this southern expedition, Lu Yuan did not plan to use them.
After all, there were still ten legions remaining in Dongting jurisdiction. If he wanted to select three from among them, it would be extremely simple.
He certainly wouldn’t need to use a single force to the point of exhaustion.
Moreover, among the ten legions originally stationed in Dongting, most were new recruits. The longest serving among them had only just completed a year of training.
In one year’s time, they had become proficient in the use of signal flags and battle formations, and understood military law and order, barely meeting the standard of qualification.
Being merely qualified, however, was nothing more than the standard for county soldiers.
To become elite soldiers, to become brave members of the imperial guard, they would have to go through the refiner’s fire of warfare, roll through life and death, and pass this endurance test. Only then, after seeing blood, could a qualitative transformation occur.
Once their will had been strengthened, they would spend another two to three years honing their skills and martial abilities to become elite soldiers.
These recruits had just taken the first step, transitioning from greenhand soldiers to qualified soldiers. Now was the perfect time to send them to the battlefield, to undergo the baptism of blood and fire, and complete the second step.
Perfect.
Compared to the powerful elite forces of Zhou Country in the north, the standards of the various countries of Lingnan were really quite ordinary.
Even among the small southern countries, Su Country, known for its strength and belligerence, actually had a rather mediocre military level.
Su Country was just a small country after all.
With only a million citizens and less than ten thousand miles of territory, even if the people were unusually belligerent, they were limited by their resource pool. How many elite soldiers could they possibly produce?
Among the fifty thousand soldiers in the country, it was estimated that only ten to twenty thousand veterans, meeting the standard of Chu State’s imperial guard, were available. Most of the soldiers, similar to those of provincial county troops, were just qualified soldiers and could not be heavily relied upon.
To conquer them, deploying two or three legions, along with an Inborn Grandmaster, would practically be enough to obliterate Su Country.
As for Nanhai Country, even less needed to be said.
It had been five or six years since the deaths of Wen Tian and Wu Xi, and Yan Wangqiu. In such a long time, Nanhai Country had not cultivated a single Inborn Grandmaster?
Even if we take into account the period when Yue Country was invading the north, at that time Nanhai Country was still the Nanhai Sect. The sect was facing a lack of successors.
If they had selected a successor from that time and began the cultivation process, one would think that in over a decade’s time, they should have found a suitable successor, right?
But the fact is that from the time of the Front Yue Hongdao, through to the tenth year of Chu Kingdom’s Shenwu, a full fourteen years, Nanhai Country still hadn’t trained an Inborn Grandmaster.
It should be known that it took only five or six years for Lu Yuan to train Sun Siwen.
This showed that, as long as there was a solid foundation, coupled with a tilt in resources, cultivating an Inborn Grandmaster was not that difficult.
However, Nanhai Country simply couldn’t accomplish this seemingly uncomplicated task.
The reasons for this failure, Lu Yuan had come to understand through the extensive investigations conducted by the Imperial City Bureau over the years.
The truth was that Nanhai Country couldn’t cultivate an Inborn. The reason boiled down to a single issue – the system.
Back when it was still the Nanhai Sect, the sect was owned by every disciple. Even when Yan Wangqiu became the Sect Leader, essentially, he was still a disciple of the sect, subordinate to the sect.
Under these circumstances, the Nanhai Sect belonged to everyone in the Nanhai Sect, and the Sect Leader was just the manager elected from the people.
This public election system allowed the Nanhai Sect to select qualified disciples without bias and foster Inborn successors.
This ensured the sect’s continuity.
However, this public election system faced problems in the later years of Yan Wangqiu’s reign as Sect Leader.
Because at that time, when Yan Wangqiu, as the Sect Leader, wanted to cultivate a successor, he looked around and found that among his disciples and followers, no one was suitable.
Despite all the picking and choosing, they could not find a single suitable Inborn candidate.
Of course, this selection was limited to the disciples and followers within Yan Wangqiu’s lineage, along with his kin.
As for the whole sect, among the hundreds of thousands of Nanhai Sect members, of course, a suitable Inborn candidate could be found.
But Yan Wangqiu, compared to previous Sect Leaders, was undoubtedly very partial.
Compared to selecting a successor from another lineage within the sect, which would then strip his own lineage of its power,
Or even due to his favoritism, his disciples and kin already parasitized the Nanhai Sect, consuming too much of the interests and power that originally belonged to everyone, creating a situation that was too big to fail.
When a new Sect Leader assumed office, facing the complicated interest situations of the former Sect Leader’s lineage, they would have limited options.
If he were to think further, the next Sect Leader might initiate a purge against his disciples and descendants, destroying his lineage and family.
Yan Wangqiu would rather have no Inborn successors in the sect, than pick out an executioner who would turn against his descendants in the future.
This was the reason why the original Nanhai Sect, despite holding sway over Lingnan, having hundreds of thousands of disciples, and a sect strength several times that of the Nine River Sword Sect, still couldn’t find a successor.