On the Brink of War

War—two simple words, yet behind them lay records written in blood.

At the Eastern Han's peak, its population had been around 65 million; during the chaos of the Five Barbarians, it plummeted by 40 million. Yanhuang Civilization had once been driven to the brink of extinction.

At the Song Dynasty's peak, its population had been around 126 million; at the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, the national population was 8.87 million.

From the late Qing Dynasty to the founding of the nation, approximately 150 million people had died unnatural deaths.

These were all tragedies seared into the soul of Yanhuang Civilization.

Likewise, to Yanhuang Civilization, war and conflict were not the same thing.

A battle involving a few hundred or a few thousand people could only be called a conflict. Only one involving tens of thousands qualified as war.

The total population of the Dragon People and the Justice Faction now stood at roughly 45 million—counting only the Red Pine City Cluster and Azure Cloud City Cluster.

Of those, the Red Pine City Cluster had around 20 million people—quite a few had died in the recent string of battles and chaos.

Here in Red Pine City, the Dragon People faction had a population of around 12 million.

The Justice Faction, meanwhile, had only around 8 million people.

The reason was that ordinary people tended to follow blindly. They had been brainwashed by all kinds of Heavenly Dragon Sect propaganda, then swept along with the tide.

The Justice Faction had at least some bottom lines in how it handled things, and as a result, it had lost right at the starting line.

However, in an age of cultivation, numbers were not the main factor in war. The number of experts also mattered. Yet the Dragon People faction could cooperate with mutants