"Old Orange, you didn't see it wrong, did you?" Bitter Granny could hardly believe it. "How could Bastard Slope be connected to Heroes Mountain?"
Orange Garden Elder sighed. "I'm no good at fighting, but asking the earth is my specialty. The land doesn't lie. Some things may not be clear from one or two cubic measures of soil, but hundreds of cubic measures will tell the truth plain as day.
"There's a road from Bastard Slope to Heroes Mountain. It was opened up in the past few days, and quite a bit of earth was sucked into the road.
"A good deal of earth was also blown back out by the strong winds, so there's no way this could be wrong.
"And the soil here told me something else. Bastard Slope may not have only fifty thousand people. It seems quite a few are buried in the earth as well."
The Peddler rubbed his forehead, muttering, "Losses and gains, losses and gains—"
Others did not understand what he meant, but Li Banfeng did.
Sending Cui Tike to Chaoge City—had that ultimately been a loss or a gain?
Cui Tike posed an enormous threat to Shang Country. His arrival in Chaoge had thrown the city into chaos, creating favorable conditions for Li Banfeng's later sneak attack on the Bandit Suppression Camp. By that measure, the Peddler had made a killing.
Then Cui Tike had gone on a slaughtering spree in Chaoge. The Peddler had naturally suffered no loss, while Qiao Yi had purged his dissidents. That counted as a gain too.
Cui Tike had massacred a city in Hao Province, Qiao Yi had continued purging dissidents, and at the same time had amassed a huge amount of materials for the Great Totem. That had to count as a major gain for