Not long ago, Yizhou City and Kou Harbor had once again fallen into the hands of the Ming Empire's Li Family Merchant Association fleet. They had been seized by a force of roughly eight hundred Li Family musketeers. At the same time, over three thousand Ming soldiers had stationed there as auxiliaries to the Li Family musketeers.
That was right. The Ming Empire's true fighting forces now consisted of the Li Family Merchant Association's sailors and its fifteen thousand most elite musketeers. Everyone else was nothing but grass swaying with the wind and auxiliary troops—utterly useless in battle!
After the Ming naval commander and East Sea Admiral Li led an army of twenty thousand to conquer Beijing, reclaim Shanhai Pass, kill over forty thousand invading Jianzhou troops, accept the surrender of tens of thousands more, win a great victory at the capital, and drive the invading enemy completely beyond the passes on the seventeenth day of the sixth month of Chongzhen's seventeenth year, the Ming Empire soon swept back once more. It reclaimed Shandong, Shanxi, and the regions north of the capital all the way to Shanhai Pass.
Especially after the bandit Li Zicheng suffered another crushing defeat at the hands of the Li Family and the Ming army along the Pingyang–Huaiqing line, the imperial authority of the Ming Empire had, remarkably, been consolidated once more—like the clouds parting to reveal the sun, or the moon appearing after the storm had passed.
The fifteenth day of the eighth month of Chongzhen's seventeenth year—the Mid-Autumn Festival.
On that day, the Ming naval commander and East Sea Admiral Li, known throughout the Ming Empire as its "Huo Guang," holding the offices of Grand General, Commander of the Capital Guards, and Governor-General of the Five Military Commissions, welcomed the Ming Grand Princess Zhu