Population Explosion II
First were the various resources that had already been deposited into storage.
Zong Shen had set fixed prices for resources from the very beginning.
Every captured Lord had to provide him with 1,500 units each of wood, stone, and hemp—the three basic resources—plus 1,000 units of iron, 200 units of Mithril, and 1,000 Denars.
These were the non-negotiable standards he had set, leaving no room for bargaining.
At the time, Zong Shen had taken the Lords' average resource reserves into account. Even the poorest Lords could scrape the amount together if they gritted their teeth. After all, the Defense Challenge had only recently ended, and any Lord who had survived could not possibly be that poor.
Whether it was the rewards for completing the challenge or the mysterious merchants that appeared during it, both had allowed the Lords to reap substantial gains.
Of course, little pitiful cases like Jiang Yi, who had barely managed to reclaim her life, were exceptions.
If Zong Shen had not remembered their past friendship and specifically used up one of his resurrection privileges, she probably would not even have had a future anymore. Although she had suffered some losses and her development ranking had fallen from the original T2–T1 tier to T3, putting her behind Medina, who had previously been on roughly equal footing with her—
At the very least, she was still alive.
And being alive meant she still had a chance to catch up.
Thus, the stored resource figures were the easiest to tally. Ninety-nine percent of the captives had paid as agreed.
The very few Lords who lacked sufficient resources had also managed to make up the difference by "borrowing."
A total of 3,172 captured Lords had contributed the following resources to Zong Shen's territory:
[Stone × 4,758,000]
[Wood