Both Weizhou, which Ye Zhen had just left, and Luozhou, his destination, lay on Great Zhou's northwestern frontier. Of course, they were not the northwestern frontier in the absolute sense.
Beyond the northernmost reaches of the northwest lay the Human-Demon Battlefield. Thus, Great Zhou's northwestern territories were entirely different from the borderlands in its other directions.
Great Zhou's northwest was rich in land and mineral resources, and it served as the rear area of the Human-Demon Battlefield, giving it immense strategic importance.
Half of the Human-Demon Battlefield's supplies came from the northwestern territories.
Under normal circumstances, borderlands near war zones were extremely sparsely populated.
Take Ye Zhen's North Sea Commandery, for instance. The Devil Race lay to its west, the North Sea Aquatic Race bordered it to the north, and its condition was simply too dreadful to bear looking at. It was perfectly normal to travel a thousand miles without seeing a trace of human habitation.
But the northwestern frontier was different. To ensure supplies for the Human-Demon Battlefield, the common people across the seventeen northwestern provinces were strictly forbidden from relocating, and an extremely severe household registration system was enforced.
Not only that, Great Zhou also relocated large numbers of people to the northwestern frontier. Criminals sentenced to exile were all sent there.
At the same time, generous immigration policies encouraged indebted or propertyless commoners to move northwest, with food, wealth, and land allotted to them.
Under such circumstances, although the provinces of the northwestern frontier lay close to the Human-Demon Battlefield, they were far from sparsely populated. On the contrary, they were densely inhabited, and in terms of prosperity, they did not even lose out to the south or east.
But whenever war and armies were involved, there were always things too dark to probe.
Whether Devil Race