"Oh Main God! Your fortress—how did it end up looking like this...?"
"? Abo, this... mm... Jurchen darqan noble is asking a question. Go answer him, and serve him well!"
"Yes! Master Bule... Noble one, what did you ask just now?..."
"I said, why are you raising so many sheep that look like cotton in your fortress? Where are your cattle and horses? Could it be there are only those few?..."
"Huh? Please speak slower, this lowly one does not quite understand. Cotton—what is that?... A lot of sheep? Oh! Right! A tribe is just one big sheep pen; everyone counts on sheep's milk to eat... Cattle? Cattle are for pulling carts, horses are for riding. Both of those are large livestock, hard to raise. Raising too many isn't worth it; as long as there are enough to use, that's fine..."
"Right! Sheep produce milk, and it can be made into all kinds of food. Sheep are what keep people alive! Fields? Uh... noble one, I've never farmed a field. I only know how to herd sheep, milk them, scrape wool, ferment cheese, dried yogurt, and breed sheep... Right! There's no end to the sheep work in the tribe. Look, they're doing sheep work right now. Using stone knives to scrape the wool off the sheep, then pressing it into felt, making warm clothes and blankets..."
The Hebian Tribe was not small in scale. Though it had only four hundred-odd tribespeople, it possessed a full six or seven thousand sheep, three or four hundred horses, and another two or three hundred cattle. But counted per person, each tribesperson had roughly sixteen sheep and one and a half head of large livestock, which was indeed terribly poor. Among them, the number of sheep made up ninety percent of all livestock, and