In this locust disaster, the hardest hit were naturally those low-ranking Profound Martial Aristocratic Clans with no means of weathering it.
For instance, the Zhao Clan and the Liu Clan.
A rough calculation made it clear. Using the previous example: twenty mu of land, with production reduced by seventy percent, yielded only 90 Big Copper. The tenant farmers had to receive 30 Big Copper as their guaranteed share, followed by 40 Big Copper in taxes, 10 Big Copper amortized for plow oxen, farm tools, and seeds, and 20 Big Copper for Pest-Exterminating Powder. From these expenses alone, the Zhao Clan and Liu Clan not only earned nothing this season, but had to pay out an additional 10 Big Copper for every twenty mu.
Take the Liu Clan. Their several estates totaled a little over ten thousand mu of fertile land. Not only would they fail to earn a single Jiao, they would have to pay out another 50 Qian Gold.
That sum did not even include expenses such as the overseers responsible for farming and sericulture. Altogether, they would be out more than a hundred Qian Gold.
A loss of one hundred Qian Gold might not sound like much, but in truth, this wave would make them cough blood. In ordinary years, those ten thousand mu of fertile land could bring them eight or nine hundred Qian Gold in net profit each season. Going back and forth like this meant a loss of over a thousand Qian Gold in pure profit.
Under normal circumstances, a clan like the Liu Clan had enormous annual expenditures. If they could save an additional five or six hundred Qian Gold a year, that was already quite an achievement. This thousand-Qian-Gold loss alone had swallowed up two years of their savings.
"There is another fatal