Divine & Bizarre: Increasing Points to Invincibility-Chapter 878 - 238: Arrival at the Shangwu Dynasty! Demons and Devils State Preceptor?_4
At that time, 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎
Huo Zhijin became more and more excited as he spoke, his main source of pride being his extensive knowledge about the Shangwu Dynasty. No matter what, he had been constantly traveling between the two dynasties. He continued, "Although I don’t really want to admit it, I have to say that the Great Yan Dynasty’s navy is nowhere near the level of the Shangwu Dynasty’s navy. It’s said that the Shangwu Dynasty’s navy has a total of over a million men. The navy of the Great Yan, all together, has only about ten to twenty thousand men."
"This port and dock are just one of the many ports and docks of the Commerce Dynasty, and these thirty-some warships are just a fraction of their numerous warships. Miss Yun, you have not seen the sight of hundreds of warships sailing together on the sea. I have had the fortune to witness it once, and the sight was so imposing that it made one’s legs go weak!"
"Moreover, the territory of the Shangwu Dynasty... it’s incredibly large. Honestly, the combined territories of the Great Yan Dynasty and the Great Zhou Dynasty don’t even make up half of half of its size. I heard that the kingdoms neighboring the Shangwu Dynasty have to pay tribute annually to maintain a peaceful existence, otherwise the Shangwu army would press their boundaries en masse."
"So overbearing?" Xing Fengzi frowned, "If the territory of the Shangwu Dynasty is that vast, then there must be quite a number of kingdoms bordering it, right? Among so many neighboring kingdoms, there must be some that are unwilling to pay tribute to the Shangwu Dynasty, no?"
"These kingdoms..." Xing Fengzi asked, "Had they all been swept over by the Shangwu army? Have they all received a ’lesson’?"
Huo Zhijin shook his head. Though he was born and raised in the Great Yan Dynasty, when it came to discussing another powerful dynasty, he was strangely excited. He replied, "It’s more than just being swept over once, more than just having received a lesson. The Shangwu Dynasty wouldn’t be so polite. It... it would just directly annex them all!"
"I’m not joking. It’s said that in just the past hundred years, over three small dynasties have been annexed by the Shangwu Dynasty. These three small dynasties were exactly those that were unwilling to pay tribute to the Shangwu Dynasty. Their fates are obvious, they have now become part of the Shangwu Dynasty."
After saying all this, Huo Zhijin suddenly felt a small desire to settle, but after some thought, he sighed helplessly, "To be honest, I quite fancy the idea of settling in the Shangwu Dynasty. It’s a pity that my family isn’t just me, there’s also the old and the young, big and small, adding up to more than a dozen people."
"Not everyone is willing to settle in a foreign land, and moreover, in a strange land where we know no one, if some villain covets our family’s wealth, we might even lose our lives."
Arriving at this point, something seemed to strike Huo Zhijin, and he quickly cautioned, "Right, Daoist Priest Fan, Miss Yun, Taoist Priest Xing Fengzi, the locals of the Shangwu Dynasty have quite a temper. They’re even more hotheaded than the people from our Great Yan Dynasty and are very martial; they’re the kind to resort to fists over a single disagreement."
"Once any conflict arises, they generally don’t reason with one another but rather decide based on who can beat whom. The one who loses, if he still won’t listen to reason, will get beaten up again."
"Furthermore, there are many more cultivators within the Shangwu Dynasty than in the Great Yan Dynasty! Even in the most remote places, there could be two to three cultivators among a hundred people."
"Two to three people out of a hundred could be cultivators?" Yun Jiuqing asked in astonishment, "Then how many people are there in the entire Shangwu Dynasty?"
"Um..." Huo Zhijin recalled, "Roughly seventy million?"
"Yikes! Seventy million?!" Yun Jiuqing was dumbstruck.
"Possibly more," Huo Zhijin said with a wry smile. "After all, those are just the people registered in the census. There are many people within each kingdom who are not registered. If you add those who are not on the census, there might be ten to twenty percent more."
Yun Jiuqing was utterly shocked, "If there are ten to twenty percent more, then wouldn’t that be eighty to ninety million people?"
"Probably, about that much?" Huo Zhijin scratched his head.
Goodness!
How terrifying!
The total population of the Great Zhou Dynasty didn’t even exceed ten million. Yun Jiuqing remembered, it was about forty to sixty million, right? In any case, the total population of the Great Zhou Dynasty wasn’t even a tenth of that of the Shangwu Dynasty. Perhaps, the combined population of the Great Zhou Dynasty and the Great Yan Dynasty together, just about equaled a tenth of that of the Shangwu Dynasty.
Yun Jiuqing had originally thought that even if the Great Zhou Dynasty wasn’t as mighty as the Shangwu Dynasty, the gap between them shouldn’t be so vast. Now it seemed she was too naive; there was simply no comparison between the two dynasties.
No wonder her father’s expression was so grave when he mentioned the Shangwu Dynasty. It seemed her father knew quite a bit about the Shangwu Dynasty.
Fan Wu and the others did not stay long at this dock. After parting ways with Huo Zhijin and a group of sailors, they stepped into the county town.
This was a county town called "Kaihai County." Though it was called a county town, its area was even larger than Yinghe Prefecture of the Great Zhou Dynasty. Moreover, the population within this county town was more than two million, more than that of Yinghe Prefecture!
