August of the sixth year of Wanli is just around the corner, and the climate in Asia is getting hotter.

If anyone can look down over Mexico, just south of Mexico City, a huge lake in the middle of the lake, there is a road that the Aztec ancestors carved out with great difficulty, and the road that zigzags along the mountains to the west leads to what was once Acapulco, now the county of Changsheng.

On this road, tens of thousands of aborigines and mestizo natives worked for their Spanish suzerains, using manpower to carry stones mined from the mountains to build star-shaped fortresses.

The construction of four star-shaped fortresses to divide the main roads of the mountains and valleys was a helpless move for the Duke of Alva, who gave this order, and no one wanted to work in July, when the rains were heaviest, but the Ming scouts were too arrogant.

The fighting between the Minsi and the West ended in May when Alva sent a message of an armistice after his army recaptured Mexico City, and then both sides withdrew their troops and turned from artillery to verbal warfare.

But behind the scenes, the scouts of the Ming army and the scouts of the Western army never gave up getting more information from the area controlled by the other side.

At first, the Western scouts had the advantage, because the army behind them was more numerous and powerful, and although the Ming army that won the battle of Bernal in the canyon achieved brilliant results, it also caused them a lot of losses in the end, which was even worse for the Ming army, which was already weak.

When the Ming army entrenched in Changsheng County was less than 3,000 at full capacity, and the untrained aborigines barely had 5,000 troops, the Western army near Mexico City had more than 14,000 troops, and the Western army scouts were not afraid of anything.

They roamed unimpeded, carrying red flags through the mountains and dense forest paths, probing everything that could be seen around them.

It's a truce anyway, isn't it? As long as they don't enter Changsheng County, even if the Ming army scouts see them, they can only scare with weapons, and they will not shoot without authorization.

But things are not what they imagined.

The guerrilla bannermen under Lin Manjue were in charge of scouting, and they were indeed ordered not to fire their guns on the Western Army during the armistice, but that didn't mean they couldn't attack to expel these uninvited guests.

Landmines are their weapon of choice.

A large number of firearms were consumed during the battle between the main Ming forces and Bernal, but grenades were rarely used because the personnel of the two armies often killed in one place, and there were mines that had been placed along the harbor to ambush enemy ships.

These mines, which were transformed from grenades and mines, were often placed in the necessary places of forest paths, and most of them used ropes to fire as a means of firing, and sometimes they were even so rudimentary that they were just sealed clay pots containing gunpowder, and when the Western army scouts walked nearby, they were blown off and cut off their hands and feet.

It's not that the Ming army didn't trample on the firing mechanism, there is actually no difference between the two kinds of mechanisms in terms of complexity and cost, but the buried mines are easy to forget, and Lin Manjue doesn't want his flag army to step on them.

In a matter of days, less than twenty mines were detonated, and the scouts of the Western Army were much more well-behaved.

Of course, they also sent people to Changsheng County to issue a condemnation, but to no avail, the official caliber of the Toyo Military Office was 'that it was a one-time weapon planted before the war', and the advice given was that the Western Army scouts should not take the forest paths again.

Okay, then don't take the forest path, but what's the matter with you setting up a card on the official road?

Seven checkpoints, from the Changsheng Gorge on the edge of Changsheng County, to the east through the aboriginal town 120 miles away, the last checkpoint even to the north and south of the White Horse River.

The banks of the White Horse River are 250 miles from Changsheng Port in the west and 330 miles from Mexico City in the east.

Lin Manjue's several guerrilla troops, not even a small flag, stood next to the official road on the first day, set up tents and cut wood the next day, and on the third day at the latest, the rejection horse symbolizing the Ming Dynasty defense stood alone in the middle of the road.

If you really want to say that these people have nothing to fear, but there are few people and they are extremely arrogant, it is not that the army does not allow the scouts of the Western Army to pass, they allow it.

However, the guerrillas under the command of Lin Manjue said that they were tax cards, and they had to pay tolls to pass through them, and because the scouts of the Western Army were always dispatched in groups of three or five, the price offered by the Ming scouts was to pay a silver coin for passing the checkpoint, and they could not ride a horse, and they had to pay an extra small silver coin for each additional horse.

The Great Silver Coin is an irregular silver coin from the Mexican Mint, which will have a thunderous name in the original world for the next 300 years, the eight rials, also known as the peso.

Today, however, these hand-hammered and pressed silver coins resemble small irregular silver cakes, with a Spanish coat of arms and crown on the obverse and a cross castle and a lion on the reverse, about an inch and two cents in diameter and weighing seven coins.

Small silver coins are also produced in Mexico and Peru, but they belong to the previous generation of silver coins, and are called four liels, which are not as valuable as eight liels.

Okay, after informing their officers, the scouts of the Western Army pinched their noses to pay the toll tax through the tax card, and received the road guide issued by the Ming Army printed with the Chinese character 'Baima Pass' all the way to the west, but before they could get out of the fifteen miles, another tax card appeared in front of them, and they were asked to pay the tax.

It's still one peso, or four more liels per horse.

This is a bit excessive, as soon as the scouts of the Western Army inquired, there are still five checkpoints from Changsheng County, three people and three horses, and after passing a checkpoint, they have to pay two and a half liels, and if they want to reach Changsheng County, they have to pay seventeen and a half silver coins, who can stand it!

Not to mention that Duke Alva has been in arrears for six months since this army was assembled from the Spanish mainland, and even the meager wages of these scouts can't afford to give this group of vampires from the Ming Dynasty.

It's not that they haven't tried to rush the checkpoint, and the Ming Dynasty guerrillas didn't stop the checkpoint, and within 200 steps of the forest, there were aborigines who were replaced with iron arrows and shot out of a rain of arrows, and they couldn't dodge.

The scouts of the Western Army who carried out the work in Changsheng County had a very hard time, and they all worked hard in vain, not to mention handing over the silver to the Ming army, the pay was not proportional to the return at all, and only a few people could get true or false information from the knights of Changsheng County.

The guerrilla armies, which could work in the Mexican direction, were different.

The Western army did not have mines, and although they put some traps in the forest, they had little effect on the guerrillas, and these guerrillas who had been trained to walk in the wild did these things, not to mention that they not only took small roads to drill into the forests, but also swaggered and fearless when they walked the official road.

If you get in the way, you will break in, and if you move your hand, you will take a gun, and you will have words at every turn: "Why don't you let me pass through the co-governance area in the agreement, and why do you collect taxes?" ”

If you want to say that the agreement has not been signed, they are even more arrogant: "You won't let me pass without an agreement?" Isn't there a truce? ”

They crossed the White Horse River and walked all the way to Mexico City.

The Duke of Alva really had no other choice but to station a large army and build a fortress in a dangerous place, in order to completely stop these unscrupulous Ming scouts.

However, as August approached, a very bad news came from Changsheng County for the Western Army.