Chris was busy.
He was busy planning Bich Town's irrigation, calculating the communal kitchens' consumption, promoting a new mayor, and drawing up plans for food consumption and replenishment.
Bich Town did not have a large population. It had only 2,729 permanent residents, and there were three villages nearby, each with roughly one or two hundred residents. Compared with the town, they were almost negligible.
But ignoring them altogether did not seem quite right, either. According to reports from the players who had visited those three villages, the villagers relied on hunting as well as farming for their daily food.
Among the three villages' combined population of over three hundred, more than a hundred and fifty were able-bodied young adults, and over a hundred of those were hunters skilled with hunting bows and traps.
They were all natural mountain infantry.
The proportion of able-bodied young adults in those three villages was frighteningly high, just as it was in Bich Town.
Why was it so high...? In times of famine, the first to starve were the elderly, who had lost most of their ability to work. Next came women, whose capacity for labor was lower, then children, and finally men.
Chris had already sent people to bring them under his control.
That was easy enough. The Republic's grain collection squads had passed through these villages, too. Although the villagers could hunt, in spring, wild animals were not only scarce but painfully thin.
No matter how hard the hunters worked, they could not bring back enough food to feed their entire villages.
As a result, these hunting villages were desperately short of grain. Even a band of mountain bandits near Bich Town had fled the famine, come down from the mountains, and surrendered to the town militia to beg for food.
These bandits