To achieve immortality, I cultivate using Qi Luck

Chapter 736: Chapter 325: The Unsolvable Situation

“Your Majesty is benevolent.”

“With your help, our tens of millions of people in the Snowy Wilderness will finally be saved.”

Hearing Lu Yuan’s personal pledge, the five messengers below couldn’t help but rejoice.

Some were so excited that they shed tears and prostrated themselves on the ground.

No wonder they were so emotional, as the help of Chu State was truly significant for these Snow Plains Nomads.

Lu Yuan’s previous estimate was not wrong.

In these more than four years of war, the Snow Plains Nomads suffered tremendously.

However, the actual loss of soldiers and population was not as high as the outside world had presumed.

For example, Lu Yuan calculated the number of Snow Plains people who had been killed by the Zhou People and concluded that the Snow Plains people had lost more than 1.5 million soldiers, but in reality, it was not that much.

You have to know that in total, there are only about a million people in the four tribes of the Snow Plains.

If the Snow Plains had directly lost 1.5 million soldiers, their tribes would have cracked long ago, and they wouldn’t have managed to hold on until now.

In fact, during the numerous fierce battles over these four years, the Snowy Plain Barbarians suffered heavy losses, but the majority of the soldiers killed were from servant tribes or slave tribes, and even simply from Zhou people’s young and strong slaves captured during the invasion of their villages and cities.

All of these accounted for most of the total war casualties, which added up to more than 800,000.

Of course, although most of the casualties belonged to those cannon fodder, the core forces of the four kings’ tribes and their subordinate tribes also didn’t suffer little.

Looking at the tribes of the four kings who sent messengers now, each tribe had lost 50,000 to 60,000, or even 70,000 to 80,000 warriors. These were the strongest men in a tribe, representing the essence of a tribe.

They lost so many valiant warriors at once, nearly a third to forty percent of their strength.

As for the secondary tribes other than the four kings’ tribes, the most miserable ones have lost seventy to eighty percent of their strength, and they are not far from extinction.

All these Snow Plains core tribes have altogether lost about half a million soldiers.

Well, during these four years of war, the number of soldiers the Barbarians lost, apart from those captured Zhou people who were conscripted temporarily, was only around one million.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

This is far from what was said in the Zhou People’s war report, even counting those powerful Zhou servant soldiers.

Of course.

In this chaotic world, every nation now worships belligerence, and there are many cases of exaggeration in war achievements and the murder of innocents for promotion everywhere.

Even in the newly-founded Chu State, there have been many cases of exaggerating war achievements in the army during these years, although it is not as serious as framing innocent people to death.

Everyone has their selfish desires, and everyone wants to climb up, so this kind of thing can’t be resolved.

At most, we can use a more standardized system and stronger willpower to maintain this system to hold the issue back to some extent.

Compared to that, the Zhou People only exaggerated their 200,000 kill count in these four years, which is already quite honest and could be considered loyal to the Emperor of the Zhou dynasty.

But that’s getting off topic.

Regardless of how corrupt the Zhou army may be, the fact is that the Barbarians have lost one million fighters in these four years of war, which is almost considered a devastating blow to the Snow Plains people who have a total population of around just ten million.

After this war, there won’t be a family in the Snow Plains where a male relative hasn’t been killed in action.

As a result, the strongest generation of men in their twenties to thirties are all wiped out.

All that is left are the elderly, weak, and disabled above thirty years old and under twenty years old.

At best, the tribes of the four kings sustained lesser losses, and they might still have some robust men in their twenties to thirties, but compared to the overall situation, this was of little help.

These figures only represent those who have died directly in the war.

In recent years, the weather has become colder and colder. The period during which pasture on the Snow Plains has grown has shortened from February to October of the previous years to March to October currently, reducing by a whole month.

In practical terms, it means that the cattle, sheep, and horses could not eat enough grass during this period, leading to weight loss and even starvation in some cases.

Due to this, cattle and sheep can reproduce less as well.

Each tribe in the Snow Plains has to store more hay by the end of the year to feed cattle and sheep during the winter. However, the stored hay often isn’t enough for all cattle and sheep to eat.

As a result, by winter, herders are forced to painfully slaughter a batch of thinner cattle and sheep in order to save hay and to stock up more food for themselves.

However, this leads to further depletion of cattle and sheep in grassland tribes each year.

With fewer cattle and sheep, each tribe can provide less milk, beef, and mutton.

Moreover, because of the cold weather, highland barley can only be planted for one season, which further contributes to the shortage of grain.

As of now, the food produced in the Snow Plains each year is only enough to sustain sixty percent of the Snow Plains people’s population, with more than forty percent of their people not having enough food to eat and could starve to death at any moment.

Furthermore, this hungry population is growing year by year with the arrival of the cold waves.

Almost every year, more than 500,000 to 600,000 of the elderly and weak from the Snow Plains tribes are selectively abandoned and expelled by their tribes, only to die from freezing and starvation on the Snow Plains grasslands.