In the past, when feudal lords fought each other for territory, they competed based on the strength of their armies and the existence of diplomatic relations that checked and balanced each other!
Jiang Ming directly changed the rules of the game: let them expose each other, and whoever listens to him will have their territory expanded.
Conversely, if someone misbehaves, they become the cake, left for others to divide up...
In this way, a competitive mechanism can be formed, which will make all the feudal lords compete to curry favor with Jiang Ming.
Then, Jiang Ming will decide who will be the next unlucky one!
In this way, the focus of the feudal lords was shifted from the binary opposition between Jiang Ming and the feudal lords to a relationship of mutual distrust and opposition among the feudal lords.
Jiang Ming, on the other hand, plays the role of upholding justice!
The reason why the emperor was sidelined was because he was essentially a figurehead.
To put it bluntly, they simply didn't have any troops at their disposal.
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. If you don't have soldiers, no one will take you seriously!
Jiang Ming's goal was to assemble a royal army, which he would personally lead, to manage in place of Ji Buyi, to conquer the barbarian tribes and teach a lesson to the disloyal lords within the country...
If each country contributes two-thirds of its military strength, conservatively estimated, at least an army of 600,000 can be assembled!
In this way, they would have the resources to fight the Northern Xiongnu to the death!
As for the Qin state, Jiang Ming has plenty of ways to teach it how to behave.
In fact, in this era...
People's understanding of the concept of 'all under heaven' is still quite vague.
It's like playing a video game. At the start, everything is dark, and you keep exploring the map. Whether it's the northern barbarians or the southern savages, they're all just a bunch of monsters...
At first, the emperor of the Great Gan Dynasty felt that his territory was large enough and was too lazy to expand further, so he enfeoffed a ring of vassal states around himself.
Those you have a good relationship with will be kept close to you, while those you don't have a good relationship with will be sent far away.
Then, the feudal lords went out to conquer the wilderness and expand their territories.
On the surface, those feudal lords who were exiled to 'remote' areas were at a disadvantage.
On one hand, they had to deal with the savages in the 'other dimension', and on the other hand, they had to reclaim wasteland and establish a society, starting everything from scratch.
It is far inferior to the 'duke' vassal states that occupied the rich core area from the beginning.
However, in all things under heaven, great harm often masks great benefit!
Because these feudal lords, who were relatively distant from the emperor, occupied the outer areas, they had more room to expand their territory and could expand their domains further!
People can be born slowly, and land can be conquered slowly... Over a hundred or two hundred years, those peripheral vassal states will all become behemoths!
Meanwhile, the noble vassal states that clung to the rich and fertile lands lacked the space to expand their territory. Surrounded by powerful vassal states in all directions, their development was limited, and they gradually became small states.
Just like Jiang Ming's mother's homeland, the Song Dynasty...
It was originally a 'duke' state.
However, it was surrounded by other vassal states that were "relatives and neighbors," so it had no possibility of expanding its territory and thus restricted itself.
When it was first built, it was quite glorious and had a lot to boast about. After all, the country was rich and powerful, the land was fertile, and it also had the advantage of being located on a major transportation route with convenient water resources.
But in the later stages, they were directly reduced to being bullied by powerful countries, and others could bully them however they wanted!
Besides the issue of strategic space, people in this era also lacked knowledge of the world map!
How big is the world, really?
Are there any more Hu people after the Hu people? Nobody knows.
People like the Xiongnu and Baiyue were still tangible and visible to them... But further afield, they became more like mythical concepts found in the Classic of Mountains and Seas...
Although the Qin state was located in the western border region and had vast open spaces for exploration, the area it developed was still limited!
The Yellow River directly separated it from the other states in the Central Plains; to invade the Qin state, one could only pass through Hangu Pass.
Therefore, the naive people of Qin believed that as long as they held Hangu Pass in the east, they could easily defeat the incompetent barbarians to the north and west...
Whether he can succeed in dominating the Central Plains is another matter, but at least he won't lose his basic base!
As for the south, the Qinling Mountains provide a barrier, preventing the Ba and Shu kingdoms from invading. Moreover, these are two small kingdoms and are not worth worrying about.
However, what they didn't know was that the enemy could actually bypass the enemy from the north and directly reach the heart of the Qin state.
In Jiang Ming's previous life during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, why were the people of Qin so afraid of King Wuling of Zhao?
This was because when King Wuling of Zhao was conquering the north, he inadvertently opened up a passage that bypassed the Qin state from the north.
The Qin people were dumbfounded... They thought to themselves, "These Zhao people didn't go through Hangu Pass, so how did they end up here?"
The effect is like two players in a game where the other player discovers a shortcut that bypasses the dense forest and goes straight to your base...
So the people of Qin also began to build the Great Wall in the north.
But the cost of building the Great Wall was too high...
Therefore, in Jiang Ming's previous life, the Qin state spared no effort to eliminate the Zhao state in order to prevent it from betraying them!
Jiang Ming glanced at these simpletons below the throne; they still didn't know how to detour to the Qin Kingdom...
However, they don't need to know!
After defeating the Northern Xiongnu, on his way back to the capital, he conveniently dealt with the Qin state!
As for the "Decree of Grace" to divide the countries, Jiang Ming decided to postpone it for a while.
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