"...Sigh, it's lonely at the top."
Shen Tang's ideas ran completely counter to the prevailing consensus.
She proposed restoring the forests' vegetation, both to give the animals a chance to survive and to give the local common folk a livelihood that could keep providing income. Human settlements and wild beasts' habitats overlapped on a massive scale, so bloody conflicts between the two were inevitable.
Ordinary people had little chance of fighting back against wild beasts.
One-on-one, they were basically doomed.
Martial Gall Warriors could kill the beasts instead, but unless they wiped them all out, beasts driven to desperation by a lack of resources would still be forced to invade human settlements. Besides, the world did not belong to humans alone.
What she thought was perfectly reasonable struck everyone around her as the most heretical of heresies, the most brain-dead of brain-dead ideas, the stupidest thing imaginable. After all, those mountains and rivers already belonged to someone. They were the property of powerful, prestigious families in every region.
Everything produced there was their asset.
If a commoner trespassed and got caught, they would be beaten half to death at best, or killed and buried on the spot at worst. That was why so many people froze to death as soon as winter arrived, and why two families had recently let their children freeze because they couldn't bear to keep the kang warm. Firewood and charcoal for heating were precious. Commoners couldn't enter privately owned mountains to cut trees, so they had to walk all the way to remote, unclaimed wilderness to gather firewood. A round trip could take ten days or half a month.
Along the way, they had to face hunger, bitter cold, and attacks from wild beasts.
One person, two legs—how much firewood could they bring back in