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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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"It is an incredibly big number of foreigners, my friends. To hold them in chains is simple, but to properly assimilate them into our society... that is a task that will require far more brilliance than any artillery barrage." He stepped toward the heavy mahogany map table that sat in the center of the platform, his gauntleted finger tracing the vast, empty expanses of the northern steppes that now officially belonged to him.
Lie Fan firmly put on notes to his advisors, dictating a grand, generational strategy that would permanently alter the demographic makeup of the world.
"We cannot simply leave them here to rebuild their tents and breed their horses in isolation," Lie Fan declared, his eyes locking onto Sima Yi and Xun You, ensuring they understood the absolute necessity of his next command. "If we leave them alone, they will simply repopulate, nurse their grievances in the dark, and remember the day we burned their Khans. To ensure permanent, unbreakable control over this land, we have to quickly begin massive, large scale government programs."
Lie Fan outlined a vision of aggressive, unprecedented demographic engineering.
"We are going to heavily repopulate the vast northern steppes with our own Hengyuan people," the Emperor ordered, his voice echoing with ruthless pragmatism. "I want incentives drawn up immediately. Offer land, offer tax exemptions, offer imperial stipends to the landless farmers of the central plains, the second sons of merchants and nobles, and the veterans of our infantry who wish to settle. We will move hundreds of thousands of Han citizens northward into these newly conquered territories."
He slammed his hand flat onto the map, indicating the complete integration he desired. "We will be aggressively mixing the populations. The surrendered nomadic women will marry our soldiers and our settlers. The nomadic children will attend schools taught by our scholars. We will dilute their bloodlines with our own, intertwining our families so deeply that any future uprisings become a mathematical impossibility. A man will not raise a sword against the Dragon Throne if his own son serves in my vanguard, and his own wife prays to the ancestors of the central plains."
The four advisors listened in absolute, awe struck silence, their brilliant minds instantly recognizing the flawless, terrifying perfection of this long term strategy. It was not just the conquest of a territory, it was the deliberate, calculated extinction of an enemy culture through forced unity and integration.
And as he said that, a sudden shift occurred in the Emperor's demeanor. Lie Fan's dark eyes narrowed with a profound, calculating light. The conquest of the north had triggered a much deeper, more fundamental realization within his omniscient intellect.
He stepped back from the map of the steppes and abruptly pivoted the entire conversation. He looked at his advisors, his gaze sharp and questioning.
"This problem of assimilation," Lie Fan began, his voice dropping into a quieter, intensely focused register. "It is not a problem unique to the northern snows, is it? Tell me, my brilliant scholars... just how many different ethnic groups are currently living inside the mainland itself?"
He let the question hang in the freezing air for a second before answering his own query with a knowing, heavy tone. "There is a large amount, aren't there? We sit upon a throne that claims to rule the world, but the world is fractured inside our own borders."
The four brilliant advisors, hearing the sudden, deeply philosophical statement, were momentarily taken aback. They had been entirely focused on the logistics of the immediate victory, and the Emperor had just expanded the scope of their conversation to encompass the entire, continent spanning internal sociology of the Hengyuan Dynasty. They exchanged a quick, knowing glance with one another before solemnly nodding their heads.
Xu Shu and Sima Yi, the two men whose administrative purviews gave them the most intimate knowledge of the empire's vast census data, stepped forward together.
"You speak the absolute truth, Your Majesty," Xu Shu said, his tone respectful and deeply serious. "The complexity of our internal borders is staggering. Aside from the dominant Han majority that populates the central plains and the major river valleys, there are easily over a hundred distinct ethnic groups and tribes scattered across the mainland and our newly conquered borders."
Sima Yi nodded, taking over to provide the precise, encyclopedic details his mind naturally organized. "The diversity is immense, and historically highly volatile, my Emperor," Sima Yi detailed, pointing to various regions on the grand map.
"In the deep, humid jungles of the south, we govern the numerous Baiyue tribes, peoples who hold fast to their ancient river traditions and jungle warfare tactics. To the rugged, mountainous west, we have integrated the Qiang and the Di peoples, fierce highlanders whose loyalties have always been notoriously difficult for past dynasties to maintain. And in the dense, impenetrable southwest forests, the Nanman tribes still operate under their own localized chieftains and ancestral laws even though they have assimilated into our government."
Sima Yi looked up, meeting Lie Fan's eyes. "That is not to mention the countless smaller, localized mountain clans, the coastal fishing tribes, and now, the hundreds of thousands of nomads we have just added to the imperial registry. It is a fragile mosaic, Your Majesty. A tapestry woven of a hundred different threads, many of which inherently despise one another."
Hearing that staggering number of diverse factions laid out so plainly, Lie Fan nodded his head slowly. He walked over to the edge of the elevated platform, letting the sheer gravity of the empire's internal demographics settle heavily into his mind. He looked down at the lines of Han soldiers marching past, their black armor uniform, their discipline absolute.
But beneath that armor, what did they truly believe in? Did a soldier from the deep south truly feel a kinship with a cavalryman from the arid west, or did they only fight together because they feared the Emperor's wrath?
Fear was an excellent tool for conquest, but Lie Fan knew it was a terrible foundation for an eternal dynasty. If the empire was merely a collection of a hundred different tribes held together by the threat of his cannons, it would inevitably fracture and shatter the moment he eventually passed from this world.
He stood in silence for a long time, the cold wind whipping his crimson cape, before finally turning his gaze back to the conquered northern horizon.
When he spoke again, he stated his intentions in a commanding, profoundly visionary tone that sent shivers down the spines of his advisors. He was no longer speaking as a general who had just won a war, he was speaking as the divine architect of human civilization itself.
"If we are to survive the centuries," Lie Fan declared, his voice ringing with absolute, unyielding conviction, "in order to have a truly unbreakable, unified spirit and belief across this vast, sprawling empire... we desperately need to forge a completely new, overarching national identity."
He walked back to the center of his council, his eyes burning with the fire of a man who was about to rewrite the very definition of what it meant to belong to a nation.
"We can no longer afford to be a Han empire that simply rules over the Qiang, the Baiyue, the Nanman, and now the Xiongnu and Xianbei," Lie Fan explained, his hands gesturing to encompass the entire map. "That model implies a conqueror and the conquered. It implies a majority stepping on the necks of a hundred minorities. That breeds resentment. That breeds secret rebellions in the dark. That breeds the very fractures that tore the ancient dynasties apart."
He looked deeply into the eyes of Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun, imparting the greatest, most ambitious social engineering project in human history.
"This new grand identity I envision," Lie Fan continued, his voice smooth and mesmerizing in its absolute certainty, "will make it so that these individual ethnicity groups are still culturally present. I do not care if a man in the southwest wishes to wear the traditional woven garments of his ancestors, or if a woman in the northeast wishes to sing the old songs of the deep forests to her children. They may keep their local flavors, their cuisines, and their ancestral arts within their own homes."
Lie Fan paused, letting the tolerance of his statement sink in, before delivering the crushing, absolute caveat.
"But," the Emperor stated, his voice dropping into a register of heavy, unbreakable iron, "the moment they step out of their homes and into the light of the empire, those individual differences will be completely, entirely overshadowed by a singular, unified imperial ethnic group. We will create a name, a culture, and a pride that supersedes the blood in their veins."
He slammed his fist against his chest, right over the golden dragon etched into his breastplate.
"By creating this ultimate, shared identity," Lie Fan boldly declared, his eyes flashing with the intoxicating weight of his ultimate destiny, "we will redefine the very concept of loyalty. The absolute spirit and the undying loyalty of the people would be truly, permanently rooted in the Hengyuan Dynasty itself."
He looked out over the burning steppes one last time, a visionary sovereign staring into a future of eternal, unbreakable peace.
"A man from the southern jungles and a man from these freezing northern plains must look at each other and not see a Baiyue or a Xianbei," Lie Fan concluded, his voice echoing with the profound, world altering majesty of his ambition.
"They must look at each other and see a brother of Hengyuan. They will not be stubbornly tied to their own isolated tribal groups or their petty regional factions anymore. We will forge them in the fires of our laws, our language, and our prosperity, until the whole world breathes with a single lung, and beats with a single, imperial heart."
Hearing that grand, sweeping vision of this unified ethnic group that their Emperor had just laid out before them, the four brilliant advisors were, of course, deeply shocked and utterly surprised.
To say they were merely taken aback would be a profound, laughable understatement, they were intellectually paralyzed. For a moment, the howling of the freezing northern wind faded from their ears, entirely replaced by the deafening, world altering magnitude of what Emperor Lie Fan was proposing.
These four men, Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun, were indisputably the greatest, most formidable administrative and strategic minds of their generation.
They had memorized the ancient texts, they understood the rise and fall of the Zhou, the Qin, and the Han, and they could manipulate the treacherous currents of court politics and battlefield logistics flawlessly. Yet, their entire understanding of the world was fundamentally rooted in the rigid, inescapable paradigms of their era.
In this ancient epoch, loyalties were strictly, violently bound by bloodlines, local provinces, or individual warlords. A man from Xuzhou considered a man from Yizhou to be an untrustworthy foreigner. A soldier fought for his immediate general, a peasant paid taxes to his local lord, and a scholar served the regional noble who sponsored him.
The very concept of a peasant in the humid southern jungles sharing a fundamental, intrinsic bond of absolute brotherhood with a horse breeder in the freezing northern steppes simply because they lived under the same imperial banner was entirely alien. Such a profound, deeply sociological, and empire building idea had never even been thought of before in their minds. It completely defied the natural, fragmented order of the ancient world.
They stood frozen on the elevated wooden platform, their eyes wide as they stared at their Emperor, realizing that Lie Fan was not merely satisfied with conquering the map of the earth; he was actively intending to conquer, dismantle, and completely reconstruct the human soul.
Breaking the heavy, stunned silence that had enveloped the command platform, Xun You at this time respectfully stepped forward. The usually unflappable, calm grand tactician found his hands trembling slightly, not from the biting winter cold, but from the sheer, exhilarating terror of standing on the precipice of a completely new era of human civilization.
He closed the distance between himself and the Emperor, bowing deeply, bending his spine until his forehead was nearly parallel with the wooden floorboards. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a quiet, intense reverence.
"Your Imperial Majesty," Xun You began, choosing his words with meticulous care, trying to wrap his brilliant but overwhelmed mind around the vast sociological mechanism Lie Fan had just unveiled. "To strip away the barriers of a hundred different bloodlines... to force the disparate tribes of the mountains, the rivers, the forests, and now the steppes to look at one another and see a shared, unbreakable reflection... it is the work of gods, not men. If you are to forge this new, singular imperial identity out of the ashes of their pasts, then I must ask..."
Xun You looked up, his eyes meeting the dark, omniscient gaze of the Black Dragon. He asked Lie Fan what this unprecedented spirit of a unified ethnic identity will be called. "What name shall we give to this fire, Your Majesty? What word will be powerful enough to replace the names of their ancestors?"
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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