The news of the Hu invasion of the southwest spread quickly, and although the people of the capital were very surprised, they were generally calm.

After all, the southwest is located on the border, and the distance from the capital is too far to reach the capital, so the daily life of the people has not been greatly affected. Only those who read books who were concerned about current affairs would often get together to discuss the matter.

Compared with the calm of the capital, the southern provincial capitals are panicked.

These ordinary people living in inland areas may have never seen the Hu people in their lives, but most of them have heard of how fierce and terrible the Hu people are, and there are even rumors that the Hu people like to eat human flesh raw.

In the imagination of these civilians, the Hu people in the north are simply a group of beasts in human skin.

Originally, these things had nothing to do with them, because the south belonged to the inland area of the Great Wei Dynasty, and it was too far away from the northern border passes, even if it hit the capital, it would not be able to hit this side.

Therefore, for the people in the south, the Hu people in the north are just after-dinner conversations.

However, no one expected that a large number of Hu people would suddenly invade the interior from the southwest plateau.

Moreover, it is reported that more than 20,000 troops of the Southwest Army have been wiped out and died at the hands of the Hu people, how can this not cause great panic among the people in the surrounding areas.

For a time, many wealthy people in the south fled with their families to avoid being affected by the war.

As for the ordinary people who have no money and no things, they can only look to the sky and hope that the Hu people will not call.

In response to the invasion of the Hu people, the local capitals became unprecedentedly tense, and the defense of the city walls was strengthened.

Usually, the gates are closed, and everyone who wants to enter the city has to be carefully checked before entering.

Not only that, but there is also a curfew in place, and you are not allowed to go out at will.

In this stormy atmosphere, people in the south became more nervous and began to store food at home for emergencies.

As more and more people buy and store grain, the price of grain rises again and again, almost no different from a famine year.

In contrast to the rising panic among the people, the commanders and envoys of the guards in the south were no better, and almost all of them were in a hurry to burst into flames.

Because they are all facing the same very serious problem: the weapons in the warehouse are all unusable goods, and they are in urgent need of usable weapons.

As for why this is happening, in fact, they are very clear in their hearts.

The weapons that really worked were sold by them a long time ago.

Because many inland areas have not experienced war for many years, at most they have only occasionally suppressed bandits, and the loss of weapons is very rare.

In order to make money, the commanders of the local guard posts would collude with the quartermaster to resell the weapons distributed by the Ordnance Bureau to those local guard posts in the north that really needed to fight.

They would buy the same amount of cheap goods from some local private workshops to fill the warehouse in order to cope with the inspection.

Then, every once in a while, the quartermaster of the guard station would apply to the Ordnance Bureau for another round of windfalls, on the grounds that the loss was serious or the warehouse was on fire, and so on.

Of course, the application for new military supplies needs to be reviewed layer by layer according to the normal process.

But these quartermasters do this as a business, and naturally know how to use gifts and money to honor their superiors to avoid scrutiny, and it is easy to get approval from above.

Many local health centers, including Jiangnan, Jiangdong, Huainan, etc., have almost always done this, and nothing has happened for decades, which has become a common practice.

This was originally no problem, but who would have thought that the Hu people outside the gate would suddenly be killed inland, and the lack of enough spare weapons in the local guards became a very fatal weakness.

At one time, almost all local health offices submitted requests to the provincial ordnance bureau to apply for new weapons, and the reasons were varied, but the most used reason was the indiscriminate street fire in the warehouse.

In the face of the collective application requirements of so many local health centers, where can the Ordnance Bureau cope with it, it is simply impossible to produce so many weapons in a short period of time.

As for the small amount of inventory, it can only be distributed in batches according to the background and relationship of the commanders and envoys in various places.

If the hard relationship in the background is good, it will be given priority, and the general relationship in the background will generally be slowed down, and if there is no background relationship, you can only wait.

For those local guards who can't get new weapons, this is really too bad.

In case the Hu people really killed, and the soldiers in charge of defending the city didn't even have replacement weapons, how could they fight?

As the so-called fear of something, just when the commanders of the guards in the south were having a headache about the new weapons, tens of thousands of Hu and Changmao allied troops really killed them.

The first to be attacked by the Hu coalition was Zhongyuan Town, which was under the jurisdiction of Yixing Prefecture.

In just two days, Zhongyuan Town, which had only 1,000 defenders, was captured by the Hu people's coalition army, and more than 20,000 civilians in the town were slaughtered by the Hu people. The entire Zhongyuan Town instantly turned into a dead city, and it was miserable.

After capturing Zhongyuan Town, the Hu coalition continued to advance southward, attacking other southern towns. Everywhere he went, he burned, killed and looted, and no one was spared.

The garrison was completely powerless to resist, not only was it far inferior to the enemy in numbers, but the soldiers also lacked actual combat experience.

What's even more ridiculous is that many guards don't even have enough weapons. Often, after a round of fighting, the soldiers did not even have a replacement weapon, and had to fight with homemade weapons or clubs.

Where is this still an army, it is not even as good as a bandit.

How can such a defender resist the fierce Hu people like a tide.

For all towns that refused to surrender, the Hu people would carry out a bloody massacre after the capture.

In just one month, five towns were slaughtered one after another, and more than 100,000 Han Chinese were killed, and rivers of blood flowed.

Since all the towns that resisted would be slaughtered by the Hu people, this led to some towns simply surrendering without a fight in the face of the attack of the Hu people, and directly opened the city gate to surrender to save their lives.

As more and more towns did so, the Hu people's offensive became even more overwhelming and unstoppable, taking several prefectures and cities in just two months, capturing nearly a million Han Chinese.

Civilians in other towns and cities that had not been devastated by the war fled to the north with their families, forming a long wave of refugees.

At this time, in the capital, the new emperor Shuntian Emperor made a decision that shocked everyone: he ordered more than 300,000 soldiers from hundreds of guards in Yannan, Zhenyuan, and Pingnan provinces to gather in Jiangkou Mansion in Pingnan, with the Huai River as the boundary, and defend the Jiangkou.

Never let the Hu people continue to advance to the south of the Yangtze River and Jiangdong. In addition, all localities stepped up the autumn harvest, and it was necessary to collect grain and put it into storage before the arrival of the Hu people, and transfer most of the grain to Jiangnan by waterway.

This decision is equivalent to directly ceding the two provinces of Yannan and Zhenyuan, which are closest to the southwest, and allowing the Hu people to wreak havoc in these two places.

However, the hundreds of thousands of heavy troops deployed in Jiangnan and Jiangdong not only did not go south to help, but also asked various local guard posts in the southern region to gather soldiers to assist in the defense with the Huai River as the boundary.

Such a coping strategy is really unbelievable, and many people of insight have discussed it.