Wang Xuan had given everyone a whole new line of thought, and they fought the urge to start extrapolating along it.
Everyone present was more than a mere armchair strategist. Their practical experience was absurdly extensive, and they soon came up with their own calculations.
On the grasslands, a tribe of around a thousand people could only be considered a small tribe. Yet the cattle, sheep, and horses it raised numbered more than ten thousand in total; only that many could sustain the tribe's consumption.
How much could those tens of thousands of cattle, sheep, and horses be worth?
On the grasslands, they truly weren't worth much—nothing more than food. But what if they were transported to the Central Plains?
Take horses alone. Even the ordinary draft horses used to pull carts now cost more than three times what they had during the former Han. That was all because the roads were open and the transport industry had flourished. The same went for cattle: whether raised as oxen or used to pull carts, they fetched mouthwatering prices. And under Liu Bei, the demand for wool, sheepskins, and mutton was also enormous...
Just think of the revenue tens of thousands of cattle, sheep, and horses could bring. Even if they were sold directly to merchants on the grasslands, they couldn't be sold at the prices used to swindle the grassland tribes, could they? As for the merchants, although their purchase prices were much higher, the roads were safe, so they still made plenty of money. Wasn't that a win-win?
What about a medium-sized tribe of several thousand or even ten thousand people?
They didn't dare think about it. They really didn't.
As for how to wipe out a tribe of around a thousand people, no one had even considered it. Nobody