Mythical Three Kingdoms

Although Taishi Ci landed in the Wa Kingdom, the current situation there left him genuinely feeling that there was no hope for development. Everywhere were tiny states of a few hundred people. Alright, just a village enclosed with fences dared to call itself a city; even Taishi Ci was impressed.

Due to this chaotic situation, Taishi Ci found that there was simply no way to plunder anything from this broken place.

Even though Taishi Ci, in the mere month since arriving in Japan, had found several places with open-pit silver mines, and after on-site inspections conducted by professionals brought by Mi Fang, it was confirmed that the silver content in these open-pit silver mines was very reliable, and there were also many shallow silver mines nearby, making mining extremely easy.

Of course, this simplicity is relative to the Central Plains. If such silver mines existed in the Central Plains, the provinces and counties would probably capture ruffians or mobilize criminals and mine them year after year, potentially forming a prosperous urban area as a result.

However, in this place of Japan, they also mined these minerals, but not to mention technology and tools, just the number of people alone severely limited their development.

Simply speaking, a village-level city with less than a thousand people could be called a country. How many people could be mobilized for mining, a dozen or several dozen? Such a small number cannot achieve much mining, and the reason Taishi Ci could still see the open-pit silver mines is because these people might not finish mining them in decades.

This also resulted in Taishi Ci having no way to plunder, as what good was there to rob from a small village of one thousand people? And if he did rob, whether these people could survive afterward would be questionable, let alone that Taishi Ci’s goal was to use this place as a base to raise marines, he couldn’t just exhaust everything in one swoop and ignore what comes thereafter, right?

Of course, if he could get rich in one swoop, Taishi Ci would tolerate it, but the problem is, such a small country couldn’t possibly make him rich.

After all, even a king with one thousand excellent men would struggle to ensure his village’s basic needs throughout his life, while a king with ten million subjects could accomplish great deeds, and perhaps even lay the foundation for an empire in his era with effort.

This illustrates why an empire with ten million people is far stronger than ten thousand villages of one thousand people each.

However, during that period, the strongest country in Japan was Yamatai, with 70,000 households and a population of about 400,000. The next two countries, Touma Kingdom, had about 300,000, and Nakoku had tens of thousands. Adding several hundred small countries, the population was roughly over a million.

Additionally, there was an exceptional case, Izumo, although the historical records didn’t leave an accurate number for its population, the Nihon Shoki and the Records of Ancient Matters explicitly recorded the population to be around tens of thousands.

Naturally, Taishi Ci was unaware of these facts, even Chen Xi probably had forgotten most of the details, but what Taishi Ci saw was the larger areas he landed, with nearly two thousand people, the smallest having seventy or eighty people, the stronger ones built walls with earth and stone, while the weaker ones used fences to encircle an area and called it a "country"!

Taishi Ci expressed that he was really blind to it. If Yizhima hadn’t told him beforehand, he would have only thought these villages at his landing had some interesting aspects; albeit often involved in gang fights, once Yizhima told him these villages were all regarded as countries, Taishi Ci expressed he couldn’t bear to watch anymore.

If this could be called a country, then with Chen Xi’s Village Merging scheme, merging 5,000 people into a village and relocating it to this island, wouldn’t that ascend to a celestial state?

To not let these people blind him anymore, and also to establish his marine base here, Taishi Ci, after Yizhima’s wailing, decided that it was Yizhima, I, Taishi Ci, had decided that you would be the king of this country.

In reality, this was also Mi Fang’s suggestion to Taishi Ci. Taishi Ci hadn’t been exposed to certain books, but Mi Fang had read quite a few books during this period.

For the place they had landed now, destructive plunder was far less meaningful than constructive exploitation.

The so-called constructive exploitation was something Mi Fang saw recently. In simple terms, when a place was too poor to even make ends meet, plundering it would gain nothing substantial, but by building it up and developing that place, the benefits could be slowly reaped over time.

Of course, the precondition is that there must be low-cost manpower and adequate natural resources, and it would be better if you had extremely strong martial force protection.

Mi Fang, upon arriving in the Wa Kingdom, realized this place was particularly unsuitable for destructive plunder; accurately, plundering this place of destruction yielded nothing, as even the manpower was negligible in Mi Fang’s eyes.

Instead, the abundant open-pit gold and silver mines were very suitable for constructive exploitation, or rather, it should be termed supportive construction.

Thus, Mi Fang, bursting with ideas, suggested establishing a country here, from which they could receive tributes, both simple and labor-saving.

At that point, Taishi Ci was out of better ideas. Initially, they intended to come here to extract some benefits to replenish their resources, but this broken place, while it indeed had minerals, the open-pit silver and gold mines were indeed very large, mining them entirely could build a thousand Seventh Generation Ships without any problem.