The next day, the Cao Army attacked Anyang again, only to retreat empty-handed. It left more than two thousand corpses behind.
Anyang stood immovable.
In Ye City, Tian Yu and Murong Ping had finished reorganizing and selecting the troops.
Following Bai Xiaowen's order to cut the force in half, they selected just sixty thousand capable soldiers, who set out for Anyang in successive groups.
The sixty thousand who failed to make the cut were poorer soldiers, but they were more than capable of farming. They could also serve as an outer defensive screen for Ye City.
It was worth noting that Psionic Particles also affected how long grain crops took to mature.
Just as mutated beasts on Earth could breed a new generation in a few months, grain crops matured much faster. Temperature had little effect, too. Even north of the Yangtze River, crops no longer needed to overwinter before resuming growth in spring.
Wheat, for example, began heading and filling out a month after sowing, and ripened in no more than a month and a half.
So if farming was this easy, why was there still a shortage of military grain in the Three Kingdoms Plane?
There were three main reasons.
First, armies in the Spirit Realm's Three Kingdoms Plane ate far more than ordinary armies. One soldier consumed as much as two or three people once had.
Second, transporting military grain across the Three Kingdoms Plane was difficult, and much of it was consumed along the way.
Third, and most important, the proportion of soldiers in the population was far beyond safe limits!
Take Yuan Shao, for example. First, consider the total population during the age of competing warlords.
According to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, after Cao Cao seized Jizhou and checked the household registers, he found