News of the New Continent and the new sea routes swept through Portugal and Castile like a storm over the ocean. The wealth and tidings of the "eastern" world sent wave after wave of agitation through the entire Iberian Peninsula, even the Catholic World. The dawn of a new world had, without a doubt, appeared!
And as the storm over Iberia blew past, on the Mexican Plateau twenty thousand miles away, the same undercurrents were surging through the hearts of the nobles. The southern campaign's camps stretched layer upon layer, and the siege of Yodzocahi had already lasted two years. The heaviest of the rainy season had just come to a stop, and the grain in the siege camps had been consumed almost to the dregs.
From the Mexica's Southern Three States, to the Tlaxcala Valley conquered years ago, then to the God Stone City valley where farming had been forced upon the land, tens of thousands of laborers were conscripted. Bent-backed, carrying loads of one or two hundred jin, they were watched and driven on by Royal Warriors, continuously paying with their lives as they transported grain toward the front, stage by stage.
The three armies attacked Mixtec Yunzhong, and the hundred-thousand-strong legions were scattered like vanilla beans into three long lines hundreds of miles out. The newly conquered Mixtec lands were vast and desolate, and the captured grain had long since been consumed. As for the farmland of the local Mixtec tribes, it too had lain abandoned for a full two years!
The destruction that grinding war wrought on agricultural production was almost annihilating. And without enough grain produced, that meant famine and death spreading across six hundred miles of Yunzhong...
For the Alliance's southern expeditionary army, apart from the God Stone City valley, where forced farming allowed