A red sparrow flew over the treetops and landed on the branch of a fruit tree in the village. A kestrel circled in the sky, searching for small beasts that might poke their heads out. And beneath the gaze of all those birds, the gray-yellow Lime-soil Mixture road stretched from the populous, prosperous Apa Plain all the way southwest toward the mountains.
The Lime-soil Mixture road through the mountains was also a Second-level County Road, but it was clearly rather pitted, and ordinary villagers and travelers rarely appeared on it. Those responsible for maintaining these mountain roads were mainly the local Tecos tribes organized into Banner Units, the Tlaxcala Banner Units who had migrated here during the Eastern Expedition several years earlier, and a few cobbled-together mixed-tribe Banner Units.
The large Banner Units established by the kingdom usually numbered around four thousand people, rising or falling with the tides of war. One large Banner Unit had about ten small Banner Units. A small Banner Unit numbered around four hundred, similar to the early Jurchen "Niru." Within each "Niru," there was a leader's great tent of a hundred people, and four to six smaller tents of several dozen people each. The leader of a "Niru" was always an enfeoffed senior Kingdom Warrior, while the leaders of the small tents were promoted tribesmen or disabled warriors.
The so-called "mixed tribes," just as the name suggested, were savages of unknown origin and tribes from all sorts of chaotic backgrounds, cobbled together into a Banner Unit after a Kingdom Warrior was appointed as leader. The reason such mixed tribes appeared was naturally because the Nahua peoples had a long history of, and an increasingly flourishing passion for, captive-taking. As agricultural techniques improved and all kinds of farm tools became widespread, whether it was the