The Han culture is spreading strongly in Southeast Asia

Chapter 896 A Groundbreaking Advance - Bulk-Fired Gun

"Snapped!"

With a gunshot, Hu Yixiao, who came from Silla, accurately killed a Cossack cavalryman from more than 100 meters away.

His gunshots were a symbol of issuing orders; as the captain of the company, he had that authority.

'Clap clap clap clap!'

The soldiers in the company opened fire leisurely, not in volleys, but by firing at their chosen targets one by one.

This wave of fire was extremely accurate. Even though the Cossacks who were rushing in could kick up dust as cover, they were still hit repeatedly at a distance of tens of meters.

"Spread out, spread out even more! They have a lot of hunters!" a Cossack officer with a leopard-like head and piercing eyes roared.

His personal guards waved signal flags as if they were dancing in the air, while junior officers around him whistled loudly to convey the commander's orders.

Rostov is close to the Cossack region, or rather, it is an outflow of Cossack culture. In addition, its proximity to the Ukrainian plains is very suitable for raising horses, so there are a lot of cavalry.

They were so numerous that they were practically worthless, so numerous that they dared to charge at the elite infantrymen located on the hillside with only sabers and carbines.

But the Cossacks soon realized something was wrong. Even though they were already very scattered, the number of people who had been knocked off their horses had not decreased, but rather increased.

The officer with the leopard-headed hair wiped the water from his face. "Damn it, it's raining, so why aren't the Khitans' muskets affected at all?"

It was indeed drizzling at the time, but it did not affect the firing of the muskets of the Dayu infantry in the slightest, because they were not using flintlock muskets at all, so there was no need to worry about the less than 60% firing success rate of flintlock muskets in the rain.

After firing a shot, Hu Yixiao instinctively tried to raise the barrel of the gun so that he could load the propellant through the muzzle.

But soon he realized that what he was holding was not a flintlock musket loaded with gunpowder at the front, but the latest needle-firing musket of the Great Yu Dynasty, loaded with gunpowder from the rear.

After a brief reaction, Hu Yixiao quickly pulled back the bolt and put the ammunition wrapped in cardboard into the chamber. These cardboard bullets were specially designed for use with percussion guns, and contained both black powder and detonator.

After inserting the bullet, a push of the bolt completed the loading, and then with a snap, another Cossack cavalryman was knocked to the ground.

"Alexei, my brother!" Not far away, another Cossack roared and charged at Hu Yixiao on horseback, brandishing his saber.

The two sides were only about thirty meters apart. Given the reloading speed of the flintlock musket, Hu Yixiao was doomed.

But in that instant, Hu Yixiao's adrenaline surged. Although his legs began to tremble involuntarily, his hands did not slow down at all.

Pulling back the bolt, loading a bullet, closing the bolt, raising the gun to aim—all of this is completed in five seconds, a loading speed about five times that of a flintlock musket.

'Snapped! '

The charging Cossack cavalrymen, with expressions of disbelief, shook their horses twice in reluctance before falling off.

From flintlock pistols to percussion pistols, from lead-miner bullets to cardboard-cased bullets, this was a revolutionary advancement.

Mo Zibu wasn't a weapons expert before he transmigrated, but there was one thing he remembered: the evolution of rifles was moving towards integrated cartridges with primers and firing mechanisms.

This is actually quite remarkable. The biggest obstacle to technological development is not inventing things, but rather imagining them in a relatively reasonable way and confirming that the path is correct.

With Mo Zibu's very determined plan, and given that he was the emperor and his word was law, the ordnance experts of the Ministry of War of the Great Yu Dynasty were able to develop the Dreiser needle-firing gun, which was based around 1841 in history, about thirty years ahead of schedule.

John Nicholas von Dresner, who invented this gun in history, is only 23 years old and is currently working as an engineer at a gun factory in Paris.

During this period, Dreiser, who came from a family of arms manufacturers, showed considerable talent. He had already begun designing breech-loading guns, but because his ideas were not yet mature, he was currently in the initial exploratory stage.

In the distance, the officer with the leopard-headed uniform who was commanding the Cossack squad realized something was wrong. It seemed that the Khitans had acquired a particularly powerful new weapon, and their firing rate was unbelievably fast.

"Get two of these guns. Once we have them, we'll retreat and ignore these Khitan musketeers."

The officer with the leopard-headed head was very intelligent. Even after dozens of his own men had been killed, he could still distinguish between primary and secondary matters and knew what was most important.

But at that moment, a dense sound of hooves suddenly came from behind the hill. Soon, hundreds of cavalrymen came galloping from three directions, brandishing gleaming sabers. With one charge, they split the Cossack cavalry apart.

Just as the officer with the leopard-headed head was about to give orders to defend against the enemy, he saw a cavalry force of more than twenty men charging toward him.

Among them, a white horse galloped like the wind, shining brightly like a morning star in the night among the majority of black and yellow warhorses.

The Cossacks around them were spurred on by this impressive sight, and many ignored the officers' orders and swarmed to attack the dashing cavalryman.

"Fools!" the leopard-headed officer cursed, but not at the Khitan man who was showing off on the battlefield; he was cursing his Cossacks.

If you try to run away now, you can still escape, but if you actively charge into battle, you're guaranteed to be trapped.

The 'clever' officer with the leopard head was about to escape with a dozen or so of his men when he saw the Cossacks on white horse break free of their encirclement. Their target was very clear: he was coming for him.

Now there's no way to leave. With soldiers fighting in full view of everyone, how can you, the highest-ranking officer, run away? Not only will it be difficult to gain the respect of the troops in the future, but even if you manage to escape, you might face a military court.

In the chaos of battle, the White Horse Knight quickly closed in on the Leopard Head Cossack officer. At a distance of sixty meters, the Leopard Head raised his carbine and fired a shot, but unfortunately, it missed.

The enemy opened fire, but not with carbines used by cavalry; they used bows and arrows.

Feeling the sharp whistling of the arrows whizzing past his ears, the leopard-headed officer cursed inwardly, knowing he had been targeted by a master.

This was a tradition of the Khitan cavalry, a very stubborn tradition that seemed somewhat brainless to European cavalry.

Their best charioteers and hussars rarely used carbines, stubbornly relying on bows and arrows, then revolvers at fifteen meters and sabers at close range.

In a panic, the leopard-headed officer tried to reload, but the white-horse knight didn't give him the chance. Another arrow came flying, knocking off the leopard-headed officer's dog-skin military cap.

The leopard-headed officer let out a miserable howl. He knew he wouldn't have time to reload, and he didn't know if he was already injured. With a howl, he drew the pistol from his saber, spurred his horse, and charged towards the white-horse rider.

"Hmph!" The white horse knight sneered. Cavalry using muskets is tantamount to crippling themselves. So what if your muskets are powerful? Can you unleash a barrage of fire in a single breath?
He conjured three arrows and fired them simultaneously. The officer with the leopard head had nowhere to dodge; two arrows struck his face and one struck his chest. Blood soaked through his uniform, and he collapsed to the ground with a thud.

Seeing that their commander had been dealt with so quickly, the four hundred-plus Cossacks finally began to panic and tried to escape.

But at this moment, Hu Yixiao, who had just been besieged by them, had already led his soldiers to outflank them. These infantrymen, armed with breech-loading needle-firing muskets, were exceptionally accurate and far more lethal than the cavalry.

After their relentless pick-offs and the encirclement by the Yu cavalry, half an hour later, only a few dozen of the more than four hundred Cossack cavalrymen escaped; the rest were almost all killed.

At this point, Hu Yixiao became somewhat timid.

Sure enough, not long after, his elder brother, Hu Yijie, a thousand-man commander of the Jingying Xiaowu Army's hunting cavalry and a white horse knight, galloped over and kicked his younger brother, Hu Yixiao, into a muddy ditch filled with blood.

"Do you know that you are the personal guard of General Huang, the deputy commander of the Western Route Army and the front-line commander?"

"You dared to run this far for a little military merit! To save you, even the deputy commander's command post was moved forward. If anything goes wrong, even losing your head won't make up for it!"

Hu Yijie started cursing loudly. After crossing the Gaoliang Mountains (Caucasus Mountains), the Western Route Army's operations had been very smooth. However, it was this smoothness that made Gui Han, the seasoned commander of the Western Route Army, and Huang Renyong, the deputy commander, even more vigilant.

After discussing the matter, Huang Renyong led 3,500 elite soldiers and more than 10,000 auxiliary troops of his own Xiaowu Army to scout ahead, in order to find the main force of the Russian army and hold them back, or perhaps attract the main force of the Russian army to attack.

As a result, Hu Yixiao was incredibly audacious, always thinking of emulating Huo Piaoyao's great success on his first expedition beyond the Great Wall. So, this lowly captain and another audacious third-generation military colonel charged forward relentlessly, advancing 120 kilometers in three days.

"Since the mission of the front line is to find or mobilize the main force of the Rakshasa, we must create some openings to attract them to appear."

Hu Yixiao, on the contrary, spoke with great conviction, pointing at the small village he had just captured, covered in mud, and said:

“This village is located at a strategic point on the Don River. We can block the river by setting up cannons. The river is narrow, so we can cross it easily by building a wooden bridge. If we occupy this place, we don’t believe that the main force of the Russians will not appear.”

When his elder brother Hu Yijie heard this, he almost fainted. There were 20,000 men here, with a bunch of generals. When did it become your turn, a mere captain, to make decisions?
"Thirty lashes per person, and when we attack Rostov, send them to the very front!"

Even though it was his own younger brother, Hu Yijie showed no mercy in the face of military law, and was even afraid that others would accuse him of favoritism because of this relationship.

“Since we’re going to be the first to charge, let’s just remember this beating for now, lest we injure him and make things worse,” Huang Renyong, commander of the Xiaowu Army and deputy commander of the Western Route Army, said with a smile as he rode over from a distance.

The brothers Hu Yijie and Hu Yixiao were the sons of Hu Quanhuan, the Earl of Guang Prefecture, whom he had once fought alongside. Therefore, Huang Renyong took good care of them.

Hu Yijie was brave and skilled in battle, intolerant of any flaws, and overly meticulous in his work, but this was not necessarily a bad thing in the army.

Hu Yixiao is incredibly audacious, perhaps because as the second son who cannot inherit the title, he is too eager to advance his career, and it is indeed necessary to suppress him a little.

"Pass down the order to set up camp here, and send auxiliary troops to cut down trees everywhere, making it look like we're going to cross the river here. Let's see if the Russians will come."

. . . .

As night fell, Hu Yijie, the elder brother, came to visit his younger brother Hu Yixiao with medicine for wounds. Although their company had been exempted from the thirty strokes of the cane during the day, they had still been whipped twenty times as punishment.

Upon seeing Hu Yijie arrive, most of the soldiers in Hu Yixiao's company stood up and addressed him as "Grandpa".

It turns out that the soldiers in this company were mostly recruited from Gwangju, Silla Province. Twenty years ago, the parents of these soldiers were all people under the rule of Hu Quanhuan, the Prince of Shunzhi of Gwangju, in the then-Zhenfan system.

However, in recent years, the five provinces of the Eastern Seas—Silla (Southern Dynasty), Penglai (Kyushu and Shikoku), Yingzhou (Chugoku region), Asahi (Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagoya area), and Fusang (Kanto region)—have undergone significant changes after the reform of the vassal system.

The elite troops of the Japanese garrison, which originally had a decent fighting capacity, were mostly withdrawn, and the rest were turned into local police forces to maintain order.

The only legal authority to conscript soldiers in these areas now is the imperial court; the various vassal states have lost the power to recruit private soldiers.

Other governance systems have also undergone significant changes. For example, in Guangzhou, if Hu Quanhuan, the Earl of Guangzhou, cannot concurrently serve as the Prefect of Guangzhou, he can only wait for the imperial court to allocate a portion of the tax revenue to him.

Although it was a fiefdom, it could not collect taxes on its own, and it was completely barred from interfering in government affairs.

At the same time, the only force he could mobilize was the feudal military system that had become the police. In terms of specific governance, apart from the estates directly under his control, he could no longer exercise the power of life and death.

This model is very similar to the position of the Duke of Qian's Mansion in Yunnan and Guizhou during the Ming Dynasty. It had considerable power, but it also required the cooperation of local officials from the imperial court.

Of course, those who could concurrently serve as fiefdom officials still held much more power than before.

“When we’re out in the field, we’re all comrades-in-arms, all brothers. Please don’t call me ‘uncle’ anymore.” Hu Yijie waved his hand, and the Azerbaijani laborers behind him brought over a large amount of supplies in wheelbarrows.

Rice, cured meat, fresh fish, several large vats of pickled vegetables, and even a piece of tofu the size of a door panel.

The soldiers from Gwangju immediately lit up, especially when they saw the kimchi.

The local environment shapes the local people. Even though the peninsula in this time and space has become much more abundant in resources, the dishes and flavors on the peninsula are still heading towards kimchi and bibimbap after the introduction of chili peppers and cabbage.

The cook began preparing the dishes with a smile, and the village was filled with jubilation. Hu Yijie stood on a high place and distributed the Cossack serfs he had just captured, as well as various supplies from the village.

Gold, silver, and military merits were given to the Han army, while the other serfs, mules, horses, grain, farm tools, and even clothing were given to the Western Torgut people, Zoroastrian Azerbaijanis, Dreymu Persians, and others who came with them.

These people will only work hard if they benefit from it.

Soon after, shrill screams came from outside. It was the Azerbaijanis interrogating the captured Cossacks, demanding information about the movements of Count Bennigsen's army.

"The Russians haven't done anything good in Gaoliang Prefecture over the years. These Azerbaijanis have a blood feud with them. If used properly, they'll be the easiest auxiliary troops."

Hu Yijie was already used to all of this. He ate grilled fish, cured meat, and kimchi tofu soup with his younger brother Hu Yixiao and the soldiers of the Guangzhou Company, while chatting idly.

Gui Han's Western Route Army brought more than 10,000 Azerbaijanis, and this was the job they were asked to do. The Azerbaijanis were also very willing to do this job.

Because over the past few decades, the Russians have repeatedly invaded Baku and other places, looting and even massacring people each time, thus forging a deep enmity with the Azerbaijanis. Therefore, these Azerbaijanis are now naturally very interested in attacking the Russians.

"Is the Commander not going to recruit the Cossacks?" Hu Yixiao asked in a low voice. Facing hundreds of thousands of Cossacks, it would be difficult to fight if they didn't recruit any.

“We can’t recruit them.” Hu Yijie shook his head. “Leaving aside whether recruitment is reliable, the Western Torguts, Azerbaijanis and Persians behind us make it impossible for us to recruit them.”

Everyone knows that the Cossacks are formidable warriors. If we recruit them, they will fear being relegated to the third class under Cossack rule, just like they were in the Rus' Empire.

Once they have this concern, they won't cooperate with us as much. Without their cooperation, not only will the transportation of supplies be problematic, but the rule of Gaoliang Prefecture will also be difficult to maintain.

The problem that Hu Yijie mentioned was the biggest challenge for the expeditionary force to Russia, because the force included a large number of Western Torgut (Kalmyks), Azerbaijanis, and Dreymu Persians.

Many Georgians and Armenians even spontaneously organized themselves to join the army as auxiliary soldiers in order to pledge their loyalty.

They longed to take revenge on the Cossacks who had previously helped the Russians cruelly exploit them. The Great Yu also needed these people to forge a blood feud with the Russians so that they could use them with peace of mind.

Therefore, the plan to recruit Cossacks, initially proposed by the General Staff of the Russian Expeditionary Army, was essentially impossible to implement, which undoubtedly increased the difficulty for the more than 70,000 troops of the Western Route Army to attack the Cossack heartland.

With hot soup and rice, and mud-brick and thatched huts in the village to stay in, nothing could be more comfortable during the march. Thousands of people, including Huang Renyong, fell asleep, except for a few sentries, both visible and hidden.

As dawn broke and a faint light appeared on the horizon, a gunshot shattered the morning tranquility. Following the gunshot, a large fire suddenly broke out in the woods not far from the village.

The Western Route Army's strategy of treating the Zoroastrian Azerbaijanis well was successful. The Russian army suddenly attacked at dawn. The Azerbaijanis, who had just gotten up to go logging in the forest, discovered them and, without hesitation, immediately risked their lives to light the campfires they had prepared in advance.

More intense gunfire erupted as Cossacks massacred Azerbaijanis who were logging in the forest.

The brothers Hu Yijie and Hu Yixiao were immediately alerted. The two brothers, on foot and on horseback, set out from outside the village to meet the Azerbaijani who had fled back, without waiting for Huang Renyong's order.

"You were right, the Russians really can't tolerate us building a bridge to cross the river here," Hu Yijie murmured.

Looking through his telescope, he saw an endless expanse of at least twenty or thirty thousand Rakshasa people constantly appearing on the vast plain, and they were mostly cavalry.

"Hu Yixiao, lead your 150 men to reinforce the mill by the river. You must hold it, or the army will run out of water."

Hu Yijie shouted that their Western Route Army's vanguard consisted of 19,000 men, of whom only 3,500 were regular soldiers. In order to establish supply depots along the way, only 2,000 regular soldiers and 6,000 auxiliary soldiers remained in this village.

Now that tens of thousands of Russians have arrived, they will definitely besiege us. We don't lack food at the moment, but we absolutely cannot let our water supply run out.

Unlike the Hu brothers, who were a little nervous about their first encounter with the army of a major European power, Deputy Commander Huang Renyong was not nervous at all. He even had the mood to joke with the officials from the Ministry of War's Ordnance Department around him.

"The breech-loading needle-firing rifle has always been criticized for being too precise and not durable. It is said to leak air and the firing pin is not working properly. Today, I am outnumbered and will test it out."

(End of this chapter)