After talking Zhang Ji around, Qin Tian once again raised troops and charged into Jingnan.
With Cangwu and Jiaozhi pacified, the forces under his command had not diminished, but instead increased.
In Jiangdong, aside from the navy, which had already expanded to twenty thousand sailors, there were another sixty thousand permanently stationed troops.
As for Jiaozhou, it originally had some sixty to seventy thousand troops in total.
Of those, Zhang Jin had thirty thousand, Shi Xie had twenty thousand, and the garrisons of the remaining commanderies numbered nearly another twenty thousand.
The troops Qin Tian had used to subdue Jiaozhou consisted of Taishi Ci's ten thousand men and twenty thousand troops from the Shanyue and Nanyue allied forces.
That was to say, Qin Tian alone could mobilize more than a hundred thousand troops.
Yet these soldiers were scattered across various regions; only thirty to forty thousand could truly be mobilized quickly.
Most of them were mixed-bag troops, while the elite soldiers numbered fewer than ten thousand.
After hastily making preparations, Qin Tian led Taishi Ci, Xu Sheng, and other generals north with an army of more than thirty-seven thousand.
Naturally, he did not expect these forty thousand men to defeat Liu Biao and seize Jing Province.
To forcefully take Jing Province, they would still need the battle-hardened elite troops in Liu Bei's hands.
Thus, before setting out, he had Gan Ning lead troops north and simultaneously sent swift riders to report the news to Liu Bei.
Naturally, there was a particular way to phrase the news he reported at this time.
After all, he had previously discussed taking Jiaozhou with Old Liu, and Old Liu had nodded his agreement.
That allowed him to arrange the timing of his campaign into Jiaozhou freely, but this time, he had not informed Liu