Besides, on the other side of the gambling table, the Zhang brothers had already used up their gambling money. After a few battles, the number of rebels was almost gone. In addition, the little food he snatched from Yan Bao’s military camp last time was about to be eaten up. The allies Yiwu Army completely turned to Li Cunxu, and the rescuers of Houliang and Khitan were gone. No matter whether they looked up, down, left, or right, it was not easy to survive!

But the Zhang brothers really didn't want to die like this, so they had to take the mentality of being a dead horse and decided to give in the last attempt to surrender. Zhang Chuqiu climbed the city tower and asked to talk to the commander of the Jin army. At this time, Li Cunshen had not yet taken office, and Ren Yuan was the temporary coach. Zhang Chuqiu begged for mercy at the top of the city: "We have been fighting with the King of Jin's army for a long time, and the food in the city is about to be finished. We have wanted to surrender for a long time, but we are afraid that if we surrender, we will die. Can you tell me a way out?"

Ren Yuan replied: "Of course, your crime of deceased father cannot be forgiven! But a benevolent monarch practices the law and his sins are not as good as his descendants. He could have been lenient. But you have been fighting against the army for a whole year and killed our generals. Now you have finally surrendered. It is not easy for you to avoid death. However, now, please surrender and take a little vitality. It is better than waiting for death to sit 100%?"

Zhang Chuqiu cried: "You are right." Then, he sent his son to Weizhou as an envoy to submit a letter of surrender to Li Cunxu. But it was too late. Before Zhang Chuqiu's son had already arrived in Weizhou, the new head coach of the Jin army, Li Cunshen, had led the army to the city of Zhenzhou.

Li Cunshen knew that the situation in the city was already very bad, so he sealed all channels inside and outside the city, supported by force, increased the psychological pressure on the defenders, and used means of inducing surrender. Under the control of despair, the originally iron-clad defenders finally wavered. General Li Zaifeng secretly surrendered to the Jin army, willing to respond to the inside.

Late at night on September 29, Li Zaifeng quietly lowered the rope ladder from the city wall and carried the Jin army into the city. By dawn the next day, the Jin army had completely controlled Zhenzhou. The Zhang brothers and their main party members failed to break through and were all arrested, and were then escorted to Weizhou for beheading. Zhang Wenli's body was dragged out of the coffin and pulled to the downtown area and chopped into pieces! Wang Rong's remains were found among a pile of burned ashes and were reburied.

At this point, the Chengde crusade, initiated by Li Cunxu, ended with the tragic victory of the Jin army. Since the Middle Tang Dynasty, all the three towns of Heshuo, which had been rebellious for more than 150 years, were annexed by Li Cunxu. Among them, the weakest Chengde Town made the Jin army pay the heaviest price.

However, it is one thing to swallow the three towns of Heshuo into their stomachs, and it is another thing to whether the stomach and intestines of Jin can truly digest them. The facts afterwards will show that although the independence of the three towns disappeared, the pathogenic gene that caused the three towns to be unruly did not die.

The position of the governor of Chengde was empty, and most of Wang Rong's descendants were dead. The civil and military officials of Zhaozhou had already connected with the gentry and planned to jointly ask Li Cunxu to serve as the governor of Chengde. So Fu Xi firmly resigned from the position of the governor of Chengde, and finally said with a noble character: "If you must reward me, please give me one of the vassal states of Henan's pseudo-liang and let me conquer it myself!"

Li Cunxu humbly accepted advice and appointed Fu Xi as the governor of Tianping and the envoy of the southeast. He accepted the recommendation of the gentry Chengde, and in name, he served as Hedong and Lu Long.

Wei Bo, the Jiedushi of Chengde, the Jiedushi of the Four Towns. He looks quite prominent in his identities, but for Li Cunxu, this is just a short step, and he is about to be promoted to the top.

More than a year ago, Li Cunxu had already planned to proclaim himself emperor and founded the country. Due to Zhang Wenli's mutiny and Zhang Chengye's opposition, he was forced to temporarily put it aside. Now Chengde has finally been pacified, Zhang Chengye has passed away, and the main obstacles no longer exist. Although the situation in Jin State was not very good at this time, Li Cunxu did not want to wait any longer.

In February of the third year of Longde, Li Cunxu began to form a new empire. The most important thing was to choose a prime minister. Since the father and son of the Li family have always regarded themselves as loyal ministers of the Li Tang Dynasty and were also recognized by the Li Tang Dynasty, the new empire must reflect the orthodox inheritance of the Li family and was the revival of the Tang Dynasty, which is not comparable to the pseudo-dynasty of the Zhu family!

How can people in the world feel that the Tang Dynasty was reborn? Li Cunxu slapped his head and came up with a bad idea: to restore the dead aristocratic system and rebuild a noble society determined by blood at the upper level of the state machine.

Li Cunxu specially set two conditions for potential prime minister candidates: those who were elected should have served as high-ranking officials in the Li Tang Dynasty, and it is best to be from a famous family of officials who had produced "four generations and three dukes"! Unfortunately, the great gentry who had emerged from the nine-rank Zhongzheng system of the Wei and Jin Dynasties and had been prominent for hundreds of years were almost devastating in the late Tang Dynasty. Unlike the chaotic times of the late Han Dynasty and the Sixteen Kingdoms, most of the heroes who rose to the end of the Tang Dynasty came from the lower class and had no good impression of most of the upper class.

The representative figures of various famous families were physically eliminated by Huang Chao, Zhu Wen and others! Many children of the gentry were forced to take out items that could prove their family's prosecutors, genealogy and other items to sell them for life-saving money. At this time, it is not easy to find a few authentic and non-counterfeit famous families.

After this selection with the first element of competing for ancestors, only a few inferior gentry were found to serve as prime minister candidates. They were: Lu Zhi, the judge of Hedong Jiedu, Dou Lu Ge, the judge of Yiwu Jiedu, and Lu Cheng, the judge of Hedong Observation.

Lu Zhi is the most talented among these three. His grandfather Lu Yan was once the Minister of Justice of the Tang Dynasty, and his father Lu Wang was the doctor of the Secretariat Sixun. Lu Zhi himself was the county magistrate. Because of his good writing, he was appreciated by Li Xiji, his subordinate Li Keyong, and he was called as his son-in-law and gradually entered the Hedong Group. When Li Keyong was given the deathbed, Lu Zhi had already replaced his father-in-law Li Xiji and served as the secretary of Hedong. He had the ability and qualifications.

However, Lu Zhi is a man who likes to drink. After getting drunk, he openly called Li Cunxu's younger brothers a pig or a dog. Fortunately, Zhang Chengye rescued him, Li Cunxu refused to cure him for a moment. Lu Zhi later learned about this. He was afraid and did not want to be in a high position, and was at the forefront of the storm to bear the envy and jealousy of others, so he recommended Dou Luge and Lu Cheng to replace him.

Lu Cheng came from a famous family of the Tang Dynasty. His grandfather Lu Yi was a minister of the Ministry of Personnel during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, and his father Lu Yun also served as a high-ranking official. When Lu Cheng came to Lu Cheng, he had no strengths except for his favorite philosophical propositions, boasting about how noble his family was, and saying some complaints and strange words that he was not satisfied with his talent.

Li Cunxu once summoned Lu Cheng to draft a document, but he actually said, "I just can't play with my mouth, I can't play with things like pens and inkstones." Later, Zhang Chengye arranged for him to take care of him.

When handling the in-and-out accounts of the warehouse, he refused, "It's not my strength to settle accounts, it's better to replace someone else with it." Zhang Chengye was so angry that he directly asked him: "My husband is still a literati, and he can't draft documents! He can't manage accounts! How can you do anything you can do?"

But he was such a bucket, and he was still very tempered. During the Battle of Huliupi, Wang Jian, the penman beside Li Cunxu, died in an emergency and needed someone to replace him. Lu Cheng thought it would be his turn, but he didn't expect that Feng Dao would be promoted. He immediately complained: "The Lord does not value the characters, and actually let a country bumpkin be above me!" Now, with Lu Zhi's recommendation, he can climb back to the head of "landscape".

Compared to Lu Cheng, who is not good at anything, Douluge is a little stronger. He can write poetry, his writing is elegant, and has a certain foundation. However, Douluge's identity as a famous family is very suspicious. According to himself, his grandfather Douluji was the governor of the same prefecture, and his father Douluzan was the governor of Shuzhou. However, because there is no family tree, there are still some questions about whether what he said is true. It is difficult for Douluge to directly prove his noble bloodline that he found a strong ally to help him support his storefront.

Douluge once asked Guo Chongtao, a popular man around Li Cunxu: "King Guo Ziyi of Fenyang is from the North and later moved his family to Huayin. Your ancestral home is in Yanmen. Will you be a descendant of King Fenyang?" Guo Chongtao is a man with strong desire for power and vanity, and always wants to find reasons to exclude his competitors. When he heard this question, he immediately replied seriously: "Because of the war, my family tree can no longer be found. But I once heard my father say that he is away from King Fenyang IV."

So Douluge got in touch with Guo Chongtao and formed an alliance to defend their common "noble origin". Those who came from a humble and had a low family should give way to our famous descendants!

Soon, the founding prime ministers were selected, namely Lu Cheng and Dou Lu Ge. In fact, Li Cunxu was also very clear that Lu Cheng and others were just a decoration and were actually useless. Li Cunxu granted such an important position to them, not afraid that they would delay national affairs. Because for the upcoming Later Tang Dynasty, the prime ministers had very little power, and they were decorations of the empire. Although they were useless, they could not make any mistakes.

The power originally belonged to the prime minister was assigned to an important organization newly established by Li Cunxu: the Privy Council. The Privy Council was close to the Chongzheng Yuan established by Zhu Wen of the Later Liang Dynasty, which mainly controlled the power to mobilize and use the national army and some other military-related powers.

The head of the Privy Council was the left and right Privy Councilor, with Guo Chongtao, the former Central Gate envoy, and Zhang Juhan, the eunuch of the former Zhaoyi army supervisor. Since the Later Tang Dynasty, the Privy Councilor has existed for a long time and has influenced later generations for hundreds of years. The Prime Minister and Privy Councilor were ranked as the main leaders of the country. The main difference is that the Prime Minister is in charge of the government and the Privy Councilor is in charge of the army.

In a chaotic era where military priority is absolutely preferred, the Privy Council, which is more important than the prime ministers who are the Privy Council. In fact, these personnel composition is largely planned by Guo Chongtao, who is the chief of the Privy Council, including who will serve as Privy Council. Originally, the person who served as Privy Councilor and Guo Chongtao as Privy Councilor should be the eunuch who left Youzhou and the former Central Sect envoy Li Shaohong.

If you want to know what happens next, please listen to the next breakdown!
Chapter completed!