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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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"The time for offering the olive branch has passed," Lie Fan's mandate echoed through the ranks of the vanguard. "Either subjugate them completely, dragging them to the dirt in chains, or entirely eradicate them if they arrogantly do not want to surrender. Burn their remaining winter camps. Shatter their holdfasts. Drive them into the frozen rivers. Leave no warlord alive who can raise a banner of rebellion in the spring."
The imperial armies executed the order with flawless, terrifying efficiency. The Black Dragon Cannons were dragged into the hidden valleys, blowing apart the hastily constructed timber palisades of the holdouts.
The heavy shock cavalry of Liang Province ran down the fleeing horse archers across the snowdrifts, while the repeating crossbowmen of You Province pinned the desperate nomadic infantry against the cliffs, filling them with steel bolts.
The slaughter was systematic, brutal, and mathematically precise, cleansing the northern hemisphere of its ancient, chaotic threats mile by bloody mile.
However, amidst this mandate of total eradication, Lie Fan issued one strict, highly specific, and profoundly merciful caveat to his generals. It was a direct order that highlighted the sheer, terrifying depth of his long term geopolitical vision, proving that he was not merely a butcher, but a masterful architect of the human soul.
Before the armies had marched, he had looked directly into the eyes of his most ruthless commanders, including the fierce Lu Lingqi, and laid down the absolute law regarding the innocent blood of the steppes.
"You will slaughter the men who hold weapons. You will execute the elders who preach defiance," Lie Fan had ordered strictly. "But you must leave the young children alone and completely unharmed during the slaughter."
It was a command that went against the brutal, traditional grain of ancient warfare, where the children of a defeated enemy were often killed to prevent future generations of vengeance, or sold into brutal, short lived slavery. But Lie Fan's mind operated centuries beyond the crude brutality of his era.
He understood that a child's mind was a blank slate, highly impressionable, and entirely devoid of the ingrained, stubborn cultural hatreds that poisoned their fathers.
"Gather every infant, every toddler, and every young boy and girl who has not yet been taught how to hold a bow or harbor hatred in their hearts," Lie Fan's decree mandated. "Any soldier who harms a child of the steppes will answer directly to my halberd."
And so, as the imperial infantry burned the defiant camps and put the stubborn warlords to the sword, they meticulously spared the youngest of the nomadic generation. The heavy, terrifying soldiers in black armor, covered in the blood of the enemy, would gently lift crying infants from the snow and pull terrified toddlers from the burning wreckage of the yurts.
These orphaned children were then placed safely into heavy, fur lined wooden supply carts and transported back behind the advancing frontlines, away from the carnage and the trauma of the war.
They were safely taken care of and delivered directly to the massive, highly regulated refugee city that Sima Yi and Xu Shu were managing. There, under the strict oversight of the imperial bureaucracy, these children were handed over to be raised by the newly surrendered tribes within the confederacy.
This was the true, chilling brilliance of Lie Fan's social engineering.
By placing the orphans in the care of the pragmatic, surrendered clans who had already bent the knee, he was ensuring that these children would not grow up in the wild, sovereign traditions of the open plains.
They would not be raised around campfires listening to glorious tales of raiding the Han borders, nor would they be taught the ancient, blood soaked feuds that had fractured their ancestors.
Instead, they would be raised within the rigid, geometric confines of the Hengyuan refugee cities. They would eat food provided by the imperial granaries.
They would learn to speak the Han dialects from the Oriole scholars who walked their camps. They would watch their adoptive fathers constantly striving to prove their loyalty to the Dragon Throne in the desperate, ten year political elections that dictated their survival.
The environment they would grow up in would be one of absolute, unquestionable submission to the Emperor.
Lie Fan was completely severing the cultural and historical roots of the nomadic world.
He was ensuring the next generation grows up fully, deeply assimilated as fiercely loyal subjects of the Hengyuan Dynasty. When these orphaned children grew into young men and women, they would not view the Han as their historical enemies or southern invaders, they would view the Hengyuan Dynasty as their absolute saviors, their providers, and their only true identity.
They would be the ones to fill the ranks of Lie Fan's future auxiliary cavalry divisions. They would ride the finest warhorses, wield the sharpest steel, and wear the crimson and black banners of the empire with fanatical, unquestioning pride.
But while the pragmatic factions had correctly read the winds of fate and bent their knees to survive, there were still those who arrogantly, stubbornly refused to see that their era had ended.
Far beyond the newly established imperial borders, deep within the most unforgiving, freezing, and desolate stretches of the northern steppes, the battered, exhausted remnants of the five major tribes desperately retreated. They were the defiant holdouts, the fanatic traditionalists, and the desperate stragglers who had refused to join the massive caravans of surrender.
Stripped of their supply lines, their finest warhorses, and their warmest furs, they had been pushed further and further into the freezing abyss by the relentless, methodical advance of the Hengyuan vanguard.
The retreat was a grueling, pathetic march of misery. The snow was knee deep, biting at the exposed flesh of the weary warriors. Horses that had once been the pride of the steppes were now little more than walking skeletons, their ribs jutting sharply against their flanks as they starved on the barren permafrost.
Men who had once boasted of conquering the central plains now shivered uncontrollably, their lips blue, their eyes hollow and haunted by the echoing thunder of the imperial artillery that still rang in their ears.
Eventually, driven by the sheer geographical limits of the known world and the crushing pressure of the advancing imperial armies, these fragmented, bleeding remnants gathered at one massive, sprawling encampment in the middle of the vast open plains.
It was a bleak, desolate location, a massive, flat expanse of frozen grass surrounded by distant, jagged peaks. There was nowhere left to run. Behind them lay the impenetrable, frozen taiga of the deep Siberian north, a place where even they would freeze and starve to death within a week. Before them lay the encroaching death of the Hengyuan Dynasty.
And so, setting up a chaotic, sprawling sea of ragged leather tents and hastily constructed timber barricades, the remnants of the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Wuhuan, Fuyu, and Yuezhi intended to unite. They convinced themselves, through the blinding lens of their own desperate delusion, that this vast open plain would be the site of their glorious, bloody last stand together against the Han invaders.
They spoke in hushed, freezing whispers around their dying campfires of dying with swords in their hands, of sending a final, devastating cavalry charge into the teeth of the Han army that would be sung about by their ancestors in the afterlife.
However, despite the world ending threat rapidly approaching them from the southern horizon, the grim reality inside the sprawling encampment was far from heroic.
Fierce internal infighting was still actively happening inside each of the five tribes. The shadow of total annihilation had not cured them of their toxic ambitions, it had only concentrated them into a vile, festering poison.
Only this time, the violence had changed its shape. Instead of open physical brawls in the mud, or massive clashes of cavalry out in the open valleys where warriors tested their strength against one another, the conflict had devolved into something much more insidious. It was now a toxic, shadowed political intrigue fight.
The sprawling encampment was a labyrinth of paranoia. Ambitious men schemed and plotted in the dark, smoky confines of the command tents. The air was thick not just with the smell of burning dung and unwashed bodies, but with the suffocating stench of betrayal. These men desperately wanted to first become the sole, undisputed representative of their own tribes.
A minor Xiongnu lord would invite a rival cousin to his tent to share a cup of warm, fermented mare's milk, only for the cousin to collapse choking on his own blood, poisoned by a rare root harvested from the deep forests. A Xianbei noble would pay assassins to slip into the sleeping quarters of a rival sub chieftain, quietly slitting his throat in the dark before blaming the murder on a Han spy.
This ruthless, venomous backstabbing was executed with a singular, blindingly arrogant goal. Once they had murdered, blackmailed, or bribed their way to the top of their own fractured factions, they wanted to aggressively compete with the newly elevated leaders of the other four tribes.
They wanted to stand in the center of the massive encampment, draped in stolen furs and meaningless authority, so that they could be crowned the supreme leader of the entire five-tribe alliance to proudly lead the final stand.
It was a staggering display of absolute cognitive dissonance. They were fighting over who got to wear a crown of ashes in a graveyard that was about to be completely incinerated.
This pathetic, selfish, and deeply cowardly infighting absolutely wouldn't continue to happen if the strong, veteran previous leaders and respected representatives were still alive.
If the legendary Khans, the battle scarred elders, and the peerless vanguard champions who had actually understood the meaning of unity and discipline were still breathing, they would have instantly executed these plotting snakes and forced the camp into a strict, unified martial order.
But tragically for the nomadic world, due to their sudden deaths and crushing battlefield defeats in the earlier artillery bombardments orchestrated by Lie Fan, the true heart and soul of the steppes had already been entirely vaporized. The men who knew how to organize a defense, the men who knew how to inspire courage, and the men who understood the true, terrifying scale of the Hengyuan war machine had all been left dead in the mud weeks ago.
What was left in the tribal leadership now was a collection of the absolute worst elements of their societies. They were the opportunistic cowards who had conveniently stayed in the rear guard when the cannons first fired.
They were the pampered, arrogant nobles who had inherited their titles through blood rather than merit, men who possessed blind, greedy ambition but absolutely no real military skill, martial prowess, or tactical wisdom to back it up.
Inside the largest, most ornate tent situated in the absolute center of the sprawling plains encampment, a sickening display of this incompetence was currently taking place.
The self proclaimed leaders of the five remnants had gathered to hold a "supreme war council." The interior of the tent was adorned with stolen tapestries and looted gold, a pathetic attempt to project power in the middle of a frozen wasteland.
At the head of the heavy timber table sat a newly elevated Yuezhi noble, a man whose soft, uncalloused hands had never drawn a bow in anger. He wore a pristine, glittering suit of scale mail that did not have a single dent or scratch on it, having spent the entire war hiding behind the lines of his dying infantry.
To his right sat a Fuyu warlord, a bloated, arrogant man who had poisoned his own older brother just three days prior to seize control of their surviving heavy cavalry. Opposite them sat the self appointed representatives of the Xiongnu, Xianbei, and Wuhuan, men whose eyes darted around the room with paranoid, rat like intensity, completely ignoring the strategic maps on the table in favor of watching each other's hands.
"When the Han Emperor arrives, we will not wait for his iron tubes to fire," the Yuezhi noble declared pompously, puffing out his chest as he outlined a battle plan so profoundly ignorant it bordered on comedy. "We will draw them into the center of the plain. I will personally lead a glorious, sweeping charge of our horse archers directly into their vanguard. We will shatter their shield walls with our sheer speed, and I will personally deliver the head of this so called Black Dragon to the altar of our ancestors. Once I have done this, you will all formally recognize me as the Supreme Khan of the North."
The Fuyu warlord sneered, slamming his fist onto the table, his jowls shaking with indignation. "You? Lead the charge? Your desert ponies will freeze before they cover half the distance! The honor of the first strike belongs to the Fuyu! My heavy infantry will march out and crush their lines. I have read the old histories, the Han cannot fight in the deep snow. I will be the one to break them, and the crown belongs to me!"
"You are both fools!" the Xianbei representative hissed, his hand dropping to the jeweled dagger at his belt. "You know nothing of tactics! We must feign a retreat, draw their infantry out, and then encircle them! And it must be a Xianbei who commands the encirclement, for only we have the true blood of the wolf!"
The argument instantly devolved into a chaotic, screaming match. They yelled over each other, their faces turning red as they fiercely debated flanking maneuvers they did not understand, logistical supplies they did not possess, and glorious victories that would never, ever happen.
They threatened each other with execution, demanding fealty, entirely consumed by their petty political infighting and their endless arguing over a doomed throne. They were completely blind to the reality of the world outside their tent flaps. They thought they had time. They thought they were the masters of their own fate, preparing to dictate the terms of a glorious, legendary battle that would be sung about for generations.
And so, while these foolish, unskilled warlords were still deeply embroiled in their pathetic, screaming argument, completely isolated from the harsh reality of the freezing winds outside, the earth suddenly began to violently shake.
It was not a subtle tremor. It was a deep, rhythmic, terrifying vibration that started in the very bedrock of the plains and traveled up through the frozen dirt, rattling the ornate silver wine cups on the council table and causing the stolen tapestries to sway violently.
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Name: Lie Fan
Title: Founding Emperor Of Hengyuan Dynasty
Age: 36 (203 AD)
Level: 16
Next Level: 462,000
Renown: 2325
Cultivation: Yin Yang Separation (level 11)
SP: 1,121,700
ATTRIBUTE POINTS
STR: 1,010 (+20)
VIT: 659 (+20)
AGI: 653 (+10)
INT: 691
CHR: 98
WIS: 569
WILL: 436
ATR Points: 0