In the main hall of Shiliang Fort, after fierce debate, they finally settled on a broad outline for dealing with the Qiang people.
Now, when Yao Xiang's father had just died, which was also when they had first moved south, he had commanded some sixty thousand households. Later, in the battle of Xuchang, Fu Xiong had carried off thirty thousand households outright, costing him over half his strength. But through counterattacks, replenishment from Xuchang's Han population, and subsequent large-scale recruitment of refugees-which had brought him into direct conflict with Yin Hao-his following had once recovered to nearly fifty thousand households, according to the surrendered Xue Zan.
But when they settled in Luoyang, quite a few refugees from the Huai River region had been unwilling to move, reducing the number to around forty thousand households. They had then spent two years in Luoyang, during which local fortified manors in Luoyang and Hongnong had joined them, but they had still never regained their former scale of sixty thousand households.
This time, many had died in battle, Liu Cheng had taken away over a thousand households of Lueyang Di people, and local men who had surrendered, including Yang Liang, would remain in Hongnong, Luoyang, and elsewhere. With all these complications, they could not even reconcile the household and population counts, and could only estimate that some twenty-seven or twenty-eight thousand households remained.
But that was already an enormous wealth of people.
What the transmigrator Liu Cheng did not know was that history's butterfly effect was still spreading.
In the original course of history, Huan Wen had easily defeated Yao Xiang, but had never swallowed up the Qiang people's core population. In fact, because of his standoff with Zhou Cheng, Yao Xiang had not even had time to rest and rebuild his strength in