Remove Stones to Minimize the Total

You are given a list of piles of stones, where piles[i] is the number of stones in the ith pile. You need to remove some stones from the piles so that you have the smallest possible total number of stones.

Choose any pile and remove x stones from it. If the pile contains fewer than x stones, then remove all the stones from it. Repeat this process until all the piles contain fewer than x stones.

Return the smallest possible total number of stones after removing some stones.