Massive sacrifice

>>43810350
Yes, that number is absolutely ridiculous. The Roman empire had some 50 million people in it. I don't have figures for age distribution in that time period, but you're talking about, at least, decimating an entire generation.

One attempt at such a sacrifice would doom the empire. The entire empire would revolt overnight. They'd never last long enough to make the first. No way could they hit seven.

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>>43811110
It's not that crazy.

The Jews arranged for the ritual immolation of roughly half of their total population to restore Israel.

>>43810350

A ritual requiring that many sacrifices would be a logistical nightmare to organize even today, assuming you can't just lay down a maginuke on a city and call it a mass sacrifice. Your empire is basically going to have to wage a continent spanning war against their enemies for no other purpose than to collect sacrificial bodies.

On top of that, you are specifying that they have to be infants. This completely, 100% fucks you over. This means that you need to gather an absolutely huge number of people for your ritual, and you need to do it in considerably less than a year otherwise your materials start aging out of usefulness. You would NEED to use magical exploitation to procure that many infants in that much time, either magically accelerated pregnancies popping kids like an assembly line, or rejuvenation magic to turn adults back into babies.

Either way, the resources and logistics to pull this off even once would seriously fuck you over. Thats not even touching the moral outcry from everyone in your empire who isn't a sage that understands why "a monster will wake up thousands of years from now" is a valid reason to take their baby and murder it on sentinel hill.

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>>43810350
The answer is slavery. Get enough slave women, knock them all up over short period of time (you can make a festivity out of it), wait 9 months, collect newborns, do your thing, rinse and repeat.

>>43810350
That number is utterly ludicrous and would be almost impossible to coordinate, especially in ancient times.

A few hundred (500-700) would be a lot more feasible.

>>43810350
Were you to try doing a sacrifice infants of that size even with today's populations it would be a nigh impossible feat primarily for the logistics as >>43812066 pointed out.
Now if age wasn't so much of an issue you maybe just maybe could pull it off over the course of several generations by a combination of war captives and well >>43812223 actually has a point some sort of breeding program would help raise numbers but you'd still have to somehow transport, feed, and warehouse all these people prior to the ceremony.
Basically even something the size of the roman empire with a fanatically loyal population (to avoid the whole moral outcry issue), would have to commit pretty much everything to pull off even one of these rituals let alone seven.

>>43813712
I believe that going the slaves and breeding program route, if you can pull one, you can pull seven. The biggest issue would be getting the breeders together and building infrastructure that can house and sustain them. But after that point keeping the system going should be significantly less effort than setting it up was.

>>43813805
Keep in mind the whole warehousing and feeding issue. Running out of food was a problem the Roman empire faced periodically even without a MASSIVE additional drain of these breeding farms. Where do you find the farmland?

>>43813805
Assuming "Infant" means born but less than one year of age, you'll get at most two infants per breeding mother per year if you keep them pregnant year-round. You can't amass them over time, so that means you'd have to have 58,500 woman constantly pregnant all in the same region. Except you have to deal with the 30% infant mortality rate. So you'll need 83,500 breeding mothers.

And don't forget that you'll have to cycle the breeding mothers too. Estimates indicate a maternal mortality rate of around 2.5% back then, times 1.3 pregnancies per year and you're having to replace 2,700 woman per year just from the ones who die giving birth. That's not including all the other likely causes of death in such a facility.

>>43813898
Magic. Im assuming there IS magic if thy're preforming a ritual involving eldritch horrors.