The End of the Southern Campaign, Black Wolf's Divine Stone

In early March, warm spring winds blew across the southern fields, and the growing grasses and trees showed tender green. It was the season when birds and beasts bred again, and everywhere pulsed with leaping vitality.

Xolotl led three thousand Imperial Guards on an inspection circuit of the Apa Plain, then returned to Apa Military City in the east. At this point, the southern campaign came to an end. The lands of the south had to be reorganized, and the gathered households also had to be settled and assimilated. The hunting kestrel had filled its belly for now, and for next year's hunt, it quietly stored up strength.

Before Xolotl went south, Purple Grass County had roughly 210,000 people, with more than seventy thousand in the east, more than sixty thousand in the center, and more than seventy thousand in the west. After the reduction and reshuffling of fiefs and the punishment of the rebellion, forty thousand rebels from Purple Grass County were escorted to the Capital Region and demoted to serfs. In the campaign against the various southwestern Coalcoman tribes, ninety thousand people were gathered in all. Of those, forty thousand were likewise moved to the Capital Region as serfs, while the remaining fifty thousand stayed in the west to open up the Apa Plain. As for the three Otomi states on the northern bank of the Lerma River, each received one or two thousand reshuffled and exiled nobles and officers.

By this rough count, after the southern campaign, the population of Purple Grass County was about 220,000. With Kuramo City as the center, the east had more than fifty thousand people, the center more than fifty thousand, for a total of 110,000, mostly of Purepecha descent. And with Apa City as the center, the western Apa Plain had