Several days later.
In Changning Guard alone, quite a few chaotic situations had already emerged.
Every day or two, Wang Shouzhe received letters from Wang Shouyi recounting the events unfolding in Changning Guard. The City Guard Office had reached agreements with the two Celestial Aristocratic Clans, several top-tier Spirit Platform Realm aristocratic clans including the Changning Xu Clan, as well as forces such as the Qian Clan Trading Firm, and had begun opening the granaries to provide disaster relief within the city.
However, Citadel City had a huge population. It was a major city of more than a hundred thousand people, and the grain consumed each day was an astronomical figure.
Several outrageously audacious merchants had actually joined forces to hoard grain and profiteer, secretly selling it to the city's commoners at five or six times the price. The City Guard Office caught them red-handed. Not only were they beheaded and displayed to the public, but all the grain they had schemed to hoard was confiscated by the City Guard Office.
There were even rumors circulating that this disaster had spread beyond Longzuo Prefecture. As a result, grain from outside the prefecture could not be dispatched quickly enough to suppress the shortage, and even the enormous prefectural city had fallen into a grain famine.
It was said that the Longzuo Prefectural City was a great city with a population exceeding one million. A grain shortage there was inevitably a matter of earth-shaking importance. This alone showed just how thoroughly rotten the overall situation in Longzuo Prefecture had become.
Rumors and whispers now sprang up everywhere. Some said the Purple Mansion Academy could not procure grain from outside. Others claimed that the prefectural city had ordered its subordinate city guards to surrender grain in order to ensure its own food supply.