For various reasons, humans had no accurate count of the members of other races who still remained on the Sains Continent.
But the general consensus was that, of all these other races, the orcs were undoubtedly the most numerous.
And among the orcs, the werewolves were the largest group.
The Xinfei Merchant Guild had confirmed this during its earlier dealings with the various orc tribes on the Black Rice Wasteland.
Of the more than two hundred orc tribes of varying sizes on the Black Rice Wasteland, nearly twenty were werewolf tribes. Their combined population exceeded thirty thousand, accounting for almost thirty percent of all the orcs there.
Among the orcs entrenched in the northern Malo Empire, werewolves reportedly accounted for as much as forty percent. The largest of their tribes, the Wolverine Werewolf Tribe, had more than fifty thousand members alone.
Such vast numbers, coupled with the werewolves' formidable fighting prowess, made the Wolverine Werewolf Tribe a powerful force that could not be ignored in the northern Malo Empire.
According to some information Baron Franklin had privately disclosed to Hogg, although this northern region nominally belonged to the Malo Empire, the empire had never exercised much actual control over it.
Simply put, the situation here was much like that on the Black Rice Wasteland: the orcs were the true masters of the land.
Of course, this was entirely because the northern tundra, like the Black Rice Wasteland, had an exceptionally harsh environment. The Lampari Kingdom was unwilling to invest enormous amounts of manpower and resources in driving out the orcs merely to occupy a largely useless wasteland.
Likewise, the Malo Empire was unwilling to commit even greater manpower and resources to seizing this even less useful tundra.
But now the Xinfei Merchant Guild had set its sights on the region,