To achieve immortality, I cultivate using Qi Luck

Chapter 781: Chapter 340: The Great Maha Divine Power

The marriage envoy returned to Baling, and Lu Yuan first issued an edict to reward all the members of the envoy, with promotions, titles, and various rewards.

Following that, he personally summoned the leader of the envoy, Assistant Minister of Rites Wen Yuan, who went to marry the spiritual woman.

“For this trip to the snowy wilderness, you’ve endured hardships along the way and seem to have lost a lot of weight.”

In a study room within the palace, Lu Yuan smiled as he looked at the minister sitting upright before him.

“Serving the king’s command, I dare not speak of the hardships,” Wen Yuan said solemnly.

Lu Yuan nodded and didn’t dwell on it, instead asking, “So, on this trip to the snowy wilderness, how do you feel about the many tribes there?”

This time, the mission to the snowy wilderness was to welcome the spiritual woman back to the country, which was of the utmost importance and the top priority.

Besides this, the envoy had also taken the opportunity to probe the details of the Snow Plains Nomads, and to check out their strengths and weaknesses, which was also essential to the mission.

Most of the spies sent by the palace in the past could not infiltrate the snowy wilderness tribes due to difficulties in communication and the vast distances between tribes.

It was nearly impossible for an outsider to infiltrate the Snowy Wilds’ tribes because of the long, arduous journey and the fact that most everyone there knew each other.

Moreover, the snow wilderness was so vast that it was common for tribes to be several thousand miles apart.

As a result, a spy wanting to enter a tribe would spend a year or more in transit, making the journey highly inefficient.

For all these reasons, previous attempts to infiltrate the Snowy Wilds had been unsuccessful, and the cost and risks were simply too great.

The information gathered through these efforts usually arrived months later, making it worthless.

So, instead of focusing all their efforts on the snow area, the spies eventually began focusing on the storm center of the barbarians and the Zhou Country in the Helong region.

By doing so, they could gain more useful information with less cost, time, and energy than if they tried to infiltrate the snowy wilderness directly.

However, this approach made the information they gathered incomplete, making it difficult to gain a deeper understanding of the Snowy Plain Barbarians tribes.

Thus, Wen Yuan, as the main envoy, was not only responsible for welcoming the spiritual woman back to Chu but also to observe the situation of the Snowy Plains during the trip, filling in the last piece of the puzzle for Chu.

The Snow Plains were vital for Chu’s future strategy and an essential asset to counterbalance the Zhou Country, leaving no room for negligence.

So after welcoming back the spiritual woman, Lu Yuan summoned Wen Yuan to inquire about the details of the trip.

“Your Majesty.”

Wen Yuan paid his respects before recounting the twenty thousand-mile journey to the Snowy Wilds, where he finally reached the remote border tribe of Qingmu and welcomed back the spiritual woman.

He was struck by the boundless vastness of the snowy wilderness and its extreme desolation.

The Qingmu Tribe, where the marriage took place, was a small tribe with only ten thousand inhabitants.

However, despite being such a small tribe, they possessed a territory of three thousand miles, which was roughly equivalent to one of Great Chu’s regional territories.

Even with such a vast territory, the people of Qingmu still lived in poverty. Food was scarce, and many died from starvation and freezing each year.

The reason behind their plight lies in the fact that more than ninety percent of this three-thousand-mile snow-covered tundra is barren and uninhabitable.

The few remaining grasslands and valleys in the region were too poor in quality to support agriculture or livestock.

Moreover, these grasslands supported only a few thousand people and were hundreds or even thousands of miles apart.

The ten-thousand-strong tribe was divided into more than ten separate groups, spread out over three-thousand miles of wilderness.

Gathering them together would take months.

Whenever they needed to take action outside the tribe, they had to travel for months at a time.

This scattered arrangement made it difficult for them to accomplish anything.

Therefore, despite its vast territory, the Snowy Wilds were an inhospitable land for living beings.

Numerous tribes spread throughout the area, like scattered stars, making it difficult to gather support.

In Wen Yuan’s view, although the Snowy Wilds encompassed millions of miles, only a small portion of that territory could be effectively utilized.

Furthermore, most of this usable territory was grasslands rather than fertile valleys, making it even more challenging to sustain human life.

Millions of people constituted the limit of what the territory of the Snow Wilds could support, if not less.

In recent years, the Great Cold of Heaven and Earth has made the living environment of the Snowy Wilds increasingly unbearable.

Wen Yuan spoke to many Snow Plains tribespeople.

They all mentioned how in the past, numerous snowfield valleys once suitable for grazing had become barren, frozen tundra, with rivers freezing over, making them unusable.

Now, the snow-capped valleys and grasslands were shrinking, while the snow-covered land was expanding, putting even more pressure on the existence of these tribes.

Although the Qingmu Tribe claimed to have a population of ten thousand at their peak, a detailed inspection during the marriage visit revealed a current population of only seven thousand.

The three thousand missing individuals had either died in the conflict with Zhou Country, starved or frozen to death due to the worsening weather conditions.

Nowadays, the strong cold wind and snow have caused the Qingmu Tribe to lose three thousand people in just a few years.

If this trend continues for another decade or even several decades, with grasslands and valleys gradually withering, this tribe will likely plummet from a large tribe of ten thousand people to a small tribe of only a few thousand or even face extinction, which would be considered normal.