The back hall of the Minister of War’s office.

Shi Xing was drinking tea and talking with the Left Censor-in-Chief Wu Shilai.

At this time, the official came in to report that the slave chief had been successfully captured, tied up and gagged, and put into a car to be sent to the Censorate.

Wu Shilai finally breathed a sigh of relief, put down his teacup, bowed to Shi Xing and said with a smile: "Thank you very much, General. But as for the hundred or so Tartars in Huitong Hall, I'll have to trouble you to keep a close eye on them and make sure they don't cause any trouble, otherwise it will be embarrassing."

"It's just a small favor." Shi Xing said with a bitter smile, "It's incredible that the Chief Justice would mobilize so many troops for a small slave chief."

"To be honest, this beast is Li Chengliang's Achilles' heel..." Wu Shilai thought to himself, who can say it is not true? But this is the order of nephew Zhao Xian, which is much more effective than the imperial edict.

Then he said in a low voice, as he had prepared in advance, "The previous time, the Prime Minister wanted to move the Liaodong King to another place, but he failed. Do you think this is terrible or not?"

"So that's it!" Shi Xing suddenly realized, and the reluctance on his face disappeared.

Li Chengliang was a brave and strong general. He defended Liaodong for decades and led the Liaodong cavalry to win hundreds of battles, including more than ten major victories. His military achievements as a frontier commander were unprecedented in the past 200 years. In the sixth year of the Wanli reign, he was promoted to Taibao and was granted the title of Ningyuan Earl. His official rank was far higher than that of Qi Jiguang, the Grand Tutor.

However, as his status grew, he became extravagant beyond measure. He took all the profits of merchants and civilians in Liao for himself and regarded himself as the King of Liaodong.

Moreover, his military exploits were all far outside the Great Wall, so it was easy for him to whitewash the real results, and even to disguise defeats as merits. When the enemy invaded the Great Wall, he would gather his troops and hide, and wait for the enemy to retreat before following the enemy and attacking the old and weak soldiers. Or he would take advantage of the opportunity to destroy scattered Tatar tribes and lure and kill those who took refuge in the Great Wall to pretend to be merits. This was already a common practice.

In fact, all the imperial censors who inspected Liaodong had impeached him.

But he climbed up to the emperor's uncle's family, and spent a lot of money to make friends with the powerful, so he was always able to escape danger and even drove out the censor who impeached him. Moreover, Li Chengliang played the trick of keeping the enemy for his own benefit to perfection. If he was touched, Liaodong would be in chaos. Even the chief minister Zhao tried to move him to another place but failed. It can be said that he was already a warlord in Liaodong who was too powerful to be eliminated.

Qi Jiguang, the only person who could clean up the situation in Liaodong, was also suspected by the emperor and was thrown into idleness...

So for Shi Xing, Li Chengliang was a time bomb that was destined to explode, but there was nothing that could be done about it.

Now that he heard that the Censorate was going to prosecute Li Chengliang, Shi Xing naturally wished for it, but he was also worried and asked, "Will there be any trouble in Liaodong?"

"It's okay. The Prime Minister has already made arrangements, and it's just the right time to reinstate Qi Shaobao." Wu Shilai said lightly.

"In that case, our Ministry of War will fully cooperate!" Upon hearing that the Prime Minister already had a foolproof plan, Shi Xing became spirited and nodded heavily.

~~

On the other side, Eyidu, He Heli and others waited and waited, but Nurhaci never came back.

Just as he was pacing around the house anxiously, a female Zhir warrior came in quickly and reported with a gloomy face: "There are many more government troops outside, even the roofs are full of soldiers holding bird guns."

"What?!" The two of them hurriedly opened the window and looked out, and sure enough, they saw a dense row of musketeers climbing onto the eaves of the house in front.

"Something happened to the Prince!" He Heli's heart sank when he saw this.

"Damn it, let's fight them!" Eyidu drew his sword, his eyes blazing with fire, and said, "Kill them and save Beile!"

"You are so impulsive!" He Heli quickly grabbed him and said in a low voice, "If you want to charge, don't charge now. If you charge out in broad daylight, you will be shot!"

Eyiduo thought about it and realized that it would be safer to rush out after dark.

After a while, someone shouted in Jurchen on the roof, telling them that Nurhaci was only taken away to investigate the situation, and asked them not to do anything stupid, otherwise it would only harm their master.

After hearing this, Eyidu and He Heli both believed that their own prince was implicated by Li Chengliang.

"Could it be that the prince is unwilling to betray Marshal Li?" Eyidu said in a muffled voice.

"Who knows..." He Heli thought to himself how could it be possible? Our prince is not a man of such integrity.

No matter what, their determination to fight to the death suddenly faded. Think about it, only a hundred people were surrounded, trapped in a jar, how many could break out?

Even if he rushed out, where could he find Beile? Even if he found Beile, how could he escape from the heavily guarded capital? How could he cross Shanhaiguan and return to the outside of the pass?

If you calm down and think about it, there is no hope of escaping... So let's just wait and see how the situation develops.

~~

Meanwhile, Nurhaci was taken back to the Censorate and locked up in a heavily guarded courtyard, with someone guarding him 24 hours a day.

In order to prevent him from escaping, he was given a pair of shackles made of fine steel, so that he could only move using rabbit hops.

He spent the night in humiliation. The next day, when the officials of the Censorate interrogated him, he finally knew why he had been wrongly treated like this...

It turned out that it was Gong Zhengliu who betrayed him!

It turned out that after leaving Huitong Hall, Gong Zhengliu went straight to the Censorate and reported him by name for openly establishing the Jurchen Kingdom in Feiala City in June of the 15th year of Wanli, and setting Feiala City as the capital and building a palace. He called himself the Lord of the Jurchen Kingdom, Shule Beile, and even solemnly promulgated the national policy...

Compared with this one, the other charges are just embellishments. This is the crime of treason!

Otherwise, the Censorate wouldn't have made such a big fuss...

Moreover, Gong Zhengliu also brought a large number of documents as physical evidence. Because he was in charge of documents and handled foreign affairs in Jianzhou Nuzhi, all the replies and official documents came from his hands, so he had a lot of direct evidence of Nurhaci's founding of the country.

Among them, there are more than a dozen documents in which Nurhaci calls himself "Shule Beile, the ruler of the Jurchen Kingdom". There is even an imperial edict in which he claims to be a descendant of the Jin people and claims to have been ordered by God to rebuild the Great Jin Kingdom.

This could be fatal.

Nurhaci tried desperately to defend himself, saying that this was just a lie he made up to avoid being looked down upon by the powerful people of the Jianzhou Jurchen tribes because he was born in a humble family. He had absolutely no intention of being disloyal.

In fact, usurpation was a common problem among vassal states. Except for model vassal states such as Korea and Ryukyu, most of the vassal states called themselves subordinate kings to the Celestial Empire, and behind closed doors they claimed to be the only ones who could rule and indulged in the thrill of being emperors.

For example, the small countries in Indochina had seven or eight dynasties and emperors...

China is not unaware of this, but due to its own declining strength, it has turned a blind eye to this kind of self-satisfaction.

But the problem is that Jianzhou Zuowei was still a directly governed territory of the Ming Dynasty and an important and inseparable part of Liaodong Dusi. However, Nurhaci openly regarded himself as a Jurchen country, which was a serious act of division even internally!

And that’s how things are in the world. If you don’t weigh it, it’s nothing. But once you weigh it, it’s heavier than a thousand pounds!

Since the "Nurhaci founding the country case" was brought to the table by the Censorate, and the evidence was sufficient and conclusive, the court could only treat it as a major case and enter the stage of joint trial by the three judicial departments.

Anyone with a discerning eye could see that Nurhaci's case was already a proven conviction. The key to the three-court trial now was whether Ningyuanbo Li Chengliang would be implicated!

This is entirely possible! Although Nurhaci insisted on not admitting that he was Li Chengliang's adopted son, it is an indisputable fact that he came from Li's army and was later supported by Li Chengliang. The Ministry of War still preserves the memorial he wrote on behalf of Nurhaci to request the succession...

Moreover, the presiding judge of this case was Hai Rui, the Minister of Justice, which directly eliminated the possibility of favoritism and abuse of power.

The news soon reached the Liaodong General's Headquarters in Guangning.

Li Chengliang was also stunned. He quickly wrote a book to defend himself while arranging people to organize a Tartar rebellion.

He originally planned to discuss countermeasures with Hao Jie, the Liaodong governor who arranged Nurhaci's tribute, but when he arrived in Liaoyang, he found out that the other party had already returned to Beijing.

Li Chengliang felt bad after hearing the news. He sat on his horse for a long time before muttering to the general Li Pinghu beside him: "This is very strange. Why did Hao Jie go to the capital to do something stupid without giving me a good confession?"

"Did he go to his backstage to ask for help..." Li Pinghu guessed, "Lao Xi'er is the most cunning one."

Hao Jie is from Weizhou, Shanxi Province. He has the support of jealous gang leaders such as Liu Dongxing and Wang Jiaping in Beijing.

"If it was just a request for help, it would be fine." Li Chengliang's adviser Li Ning said in a deep voice: "I'm afraid he was guilty and ran away before the Marshal could react!"

"What do you mean?" Li Chengliang's face darkened and he asked, "Could it be that they are in collusion and want to use Nurhaci to deal with me?!"

"Marshal, who do you think arranged for Nurhaci to pay tribute to the capital? It was Hao Jie!" Li Ning said coldly: "And the person who was responsible for contacting Hao Jie on Nurhaci's side was Gong Zhengliu!"

"Hiss..." Everyone in the group took a deep breath. Everything is really possible!

"Then why did Hao Jie plot against me? I have always been respectful to those old guys!" Li Chengliang's heart was pounding. If this person was instigated by the Jin Party to deal with him, it would be a lot of fun.

During the Longqing reign, Hao Jie had inspected Liaodong. Because the Jin Party had a close relationship with Li Chengliang, he was the only inspector who had not impeached Li Chengliang during his one-year term.

After Li Chengliang ruined the exchange with Qi Jiguang two years ago, Hao Jie was appointed as the Right Censor-in-Chief and the Governor of Liaodong the following year. Li Chengliang was very happy about his appointment, thinking that it was the push of the Jin Party and that he could finally live a peaceful life for a few years. Therefore, he acted very recklessly in the past two years, doing many ugly things such as killing innocent people for credit and not saving people in danger.

Especially last winter, Haizhou was looted for a full thirteen days. Deputy General Sun Shoulian did not go into battle, and Li Chengliang did not provide assistance, resulting in tens of thousands of border residents being killed or injured, and thousands of people being looted.

The imperial censor Hu Kejian was very angry about this and rode his horse into the palace to present a memorial to impeach Li Chengliang. The Ministry of War and the Censorate summoned Hao Jie to Beijing for questioning, but in the end they strangely shelved the matter and kept Hu Kejian in Beijing.

At that time, Li Chengliang believed that it was all the help of Hao Zhongcheng and the Jin Party, so he rewarded them handsomely. After that, he became less guarded against Hao Jie.

If Hao Jie is deliberately plotting against me, then even gods can't save me...

Li Chengliang looked up at the sky in panic, only to see three wild geese flying by, which happened to form a playful smiling face, which was quite creepy.

ps. It’s the last day of 2021, I wish you all a happy new year. This book is also about to enter its last month, come on!