If you want to read 20 Chapters ahead and more, be sure to check out my P-Tang12!!!
______________________________
(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
...
He could hear the distant, joyous cheers of the common people in the streets, marveling at the scent of mint and the gift of health. He could hear the muffled, frantic calculations of the Ministry of Revenue, hauling in the wealth of the nobility. And soon, he would hear the rhythmic, metallic clattering of iron wheels on iron tracks, echoing across the plains, binding the world together in an unbreakable web of commerce and speed. The chaos of the warlords was nothing but a memory.
After this monumental meeting concluded, Lie Fan did not return to the joyous celebrations echoing from the outer courtyards, nor did he retire to the warm embrace of the Harem Palace.
The monumental gears of his ambition were already turning toward the next century. He walked slowly back into the deepest, most secure inner sanctum of his private study room.
He closed the heavy, iron reinforced mahogany doors, sliding the thick deadbolt into place. The room was perfectly silent, bathed only in the flickering, golden light of a few strategically placed oil lamps.
Lie Fan walked behind his desk and sat down in his high backed chair. He closed his eyes, steadying his breathing, plunging his consciousness deep into the quiet, isolated void of his own mind. With practiced, flawless focus, he mentally reached out and accessed the otherworldly interface that had been his silent companion since the very beginning.
The System responded immediately, its ethereal glow illuminating the darkness behind his eyelids. From the inventory if his system, he pulled forth the Book of Knowledge.
The book manifested in his hand as an infinite, sprawling library of human advancement, detailing every technological, agricultural, and sociological leap from the dawn of civilization to the modern era.
Lie Fan slowly navigated through the myriad of pathways, bypassing the sections on agriculture and basic metallurgy that he had already exploited to conquer the Han territories. He was looking for the absolute next step, the foundational pillar of true industrialization.
His mental gaze finally settled upon a specific, heavily detailed section.
The Steam Engine.
Lie Fan opened his eyes, a sharp, predatory smile touching his lips in the empty room. It was time. The wagonways would soon provide the iron arteries for the empire, but they would eventually need a heart that beat with a power far greater than a horse's muscle.
He pulled a fresh, unblemished roll of thick parchment toward him and dipped a fine tipped calligraphy brush into his inkstone. He began to meticulously write down the concept knowledge for a very basic steam engine.
However, Lie Fan was incredibly cautious. Even now, seated upon the highest throne in the world, he strictly maintained the absolute secrecy of his identity as a reincarnator. He still held onto a profound, philosophical hope that the brilliant minds of this era, people like Huang Yue Ying and Zhuge Liang, could eventually learn to advance on their own without his heavy handed, divine interference.
He knew he had been drastically altering the timeline, pulling technologies centuries forward out of sheer survival necessity, but he wanted to plant seeds that his people could water, rather than simply handing them the fully grown tree.
Therefore, he did not draw complex, modern schematics of high pressure pistons, rotating crankshafts, or future locomotives. That would be far too alien, too incomprehensible for the metallurgists and scholars of the current age. It would invite dangerous, unanswerable questions about where the Emperor derived such witchcraft.
Instead, he simply introduced the most natural, logical next step in pneumatic engineering, explicitly omitting any mention whatsoever of future vehicles or self propelling carts.
He began drafting the blueprints for an atmospheric water pump.
It was a brilliantly primitive design, heavily inspired by the earliest steam pumps of his past life's history. It was a machine that utilized the fundamental principles of a vacuum, possessing absolutely no moving parts with the exception of a few simple, manually operated copper valves.
But Lie Fan knew that simply drawing the machine was not enough, he had to bridge the gap between modern thermodynamics and the philosophical understanding of his current scholars.
To make the imperial craftsmen, the scholars, and the court alchemists truly comprehend the mechanics without suffering a crisis of logic, Lie Fan wrote down a lengthy, incredibly detailed explanation using the familiar, universally accepted terminology of Daoist alchemy and the philosophy of the Five Elements.
At the top of the parchment, he penned the title in bold, sweeping calligraphy, "Harnessing the Qi of Water and Fire."
"The universe is bound by the eternal struggle and balance of the Five Elements," Lie Fan wrote, crafting a masterpiece of scientific translation disguised as ancient mysticism.
"When Fire, the absolute pinnacle of Yang energy, is applied continuously beneath a sealed iron vessel containing Water, the Water does not simply vanish. The Fire overcomes the Water, forcing the liquid to transform. It is reborn into an invisible, expanding, and furiously powerful Qi, a steam of pure kinetic intent that desperately wishes to escape its confinement."
Lie Fan sketched the primary boiler, an iron sphere suspended over a furnace.
"By trapping this furious Qi within a heavy vessel, we can harness its desire to expand. But the true miracle lies in the sudden introduction of Yin, the cold. If we allow this invisible Qi to fill a chamber, pushing all the ordinary air out through a valve, and then we suddenly close that valve and douse the outside of the chamber with freezing water, the hot Qi condenses instantly. It shrinks back into a mere droplet of liquid water. But because the valve is sealed, the space where the furious Qi once lived becomes a total void. Nature absolutely despises a void."
He drew a long, reinforced copper pipe descending from the chamber directly into a river or a deep mine shaft.
"This void generates an immense, invisible pulling force. If a second valve at the bottom of the chamber is opened, connecting the void to a body of water below, the sheer weight of the heavens pressing down on the river will violently force the water up the pipe to fill the empty space. Thus, by simply cycling the Fire to create the Qi, and the Cold to create the void, we can compel the rivers to flow upward. By mastering the breath of water and fire, we can make an iron vessel perform the grueling, back breaking work of a thousand men."
Lie Fan set his brush down for a moment, examining his work. He smiled, a genuine, delighted grin. It sounded profoundly mystical, yet it was mechanically, undeniably factual. The alchemists would read it and believe they were manipulating the very soul of nature, while the engineers would follow the diagrams and accidentally invent the industrial revolution.
But abstract philosophy would only motivate the scholars. To secure the absolute, fanatical devotion of his generals to this new project, Lie Fan knew he had to weaponize the concept.
He rolled out a second sheet of parchment and began writing down the direct, terrifying military applications for this new invention. He named the machine the "Water Dragon."
He detailed how a battery of these heavy, brass and iron atmospheric pumps could be mounted on massive, reinforced siege wagons.
During a prolonged siege against a stubborn, deeply entrenched enemy fortress in the future, the Hengyuan engineers could roll the Water Dragons to the edge of the battlefield under the cover of darkness.
"By dropping the intake pipes into the enemy's defensive moats, and cycling the Qi of Fire and Water through the night, a battery of these engines could entirely drain a deep water moat before the sun rises," Lie Fan noted, his eyes narrowing as he envisioned the sheer psychological terror of the enemy waking up to find their greatest defense reduced to a shallow puddle of mud.
He wrote of offensive terraforming, pumping thousands of gallons of river water up over high ridges to deliberately flood enemy encampments situated in low lying valleys, drowning them in their sleep without ever risking a single Hengyuan soldier in a pitched battle.
He detailed its lifesaving applications for the engineering corps. When Hengyuan sappers were ordered to dig deep, subterranean tunnels to undermine towering city walls, the greatest threat was striking the water table and drowning the miners.
The Water Dragon could be placed at the tunnel entrance, constantly maintaining the vacuum cycle to clear flooded sapper tunnels, keeping the earth dry and saving the lives of countless skilled laborers during grueling sieges.
And finally, Lie Fan's thoughts turned toward the eastern oceans and the mighty southern rivers. He envisioned naval combat, where the wind and the current dictated the victor. He wanted a weapon that would grant his galleons absolute, terrifying supremacy on the water.
He consulted the Book of Knowledge once more, flipping forward through centuries of military history. He searched for incendiary weapons, bypassing the simple fire arrows and primitive pitch pots currently used by his navy. His mind locked onto a magnificent, horrific invention that historically would not see the light of day until the year 919 AD, during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.
It was a continuous, double acting flamethrower.
Lie Fan opened his eyes and grabbed a third sheet of parchment. He would not just introduce steam power tonight; he would leap seven hundred years into the future and birth a new nightmare for his enemies.
He began to meticulously draft the blueprints for what he titled the "Fierce Fire Oil Cabinet."
He detailed the primary fuel source first. The central plains lacked the raw materials, but Lie Fan had just completely subjugated Liang Province and the northwestern territories. From his historical knowledge, he knew that the arid, rocky basins of the northwest contained shallow surface seepages of crude petroleum, a substance the locals sometimes called "stone lacquer" or "burning spring water."
He drafted a logistical mandate to immediately secure these seepages and harvest the black, highly flammable sludge, refining it into what he coined Meng Huo You, the Fierce Fire Oil.
Then came the mechanical genius of the cabinet itself.
Lie Fan sketched a large, rectangular brass tank designed to hold the refined petroleum. Above the tank, he drew the heart of the invention: a complex, double acting piston syringe made of tightly fitted copper tubing.
"This is not a simple water pump that sprays only when pushed," Lie Fan wrote, drawing the intricate array of check valves. "By utilizing two opposing chambers and a system of automatic bronze valves, the continuous pumping of the handle draws oil into the back chamber while simultaneously forcing oil out of the front chamber. Whether the operator pushes or pulls the lever, a continuous, unbroken, high pressure stream of Fierce Fire Oil is ejected through the forward nozzle."
At the very tip of the nozzle, he sketched a small iron bracket designed to hold a slow burning gunpowder match. When the high pressure stream of oil shot through the burning match, it would ignite instantly, creating a roaring, unyielding torrent of liquid fire.
He imagined the sheer devastation. A weapon that sprayed inextinguishable, clinging fire across the decks of enemy ships, turning wooden armadas into floating pyres within seconds.
But as Lie Fan looked at his newly drafted Fierce Fire Oil Cabinet, his incredibly pragmatic mind identified a critical vulnerability. Pumping a double acting brass syringe filled with thick, heavy petroleum required immense, exhausting physical strength.
Even his strongest, most battle hardened marines would tire out after a few minutes of frantically working the lever back and forth during the chaos of naval combat. The spray would falter. The range would drop.
A brilliant, ruthless spark of inspiration flashed in Lie Fan's dark eyes.
He placed the blueprints for the Fierce Fire Oil Cabinet right next to the blueprints for the atmospheric steam engine. He was not just inventing two separate machines, he was going to marry them.
"By utilizing the incredible expansion pressure of the trapped steam Qi, rather than its condensing vacuum, we can weaponize this cabinet to a terrifying degree," Lie Fan wrote rapidly, his brush strokes becoming sharp and aggressively confident as he drew a connecting iron pipe between the steam boiler and the oil tank.
"Human arms grow tired, and the spray of the hand pumped cabinet is ultimately limited by the stamina of the operator. But the Qi of Water and Fire never tires. If we connect the Fierce Fire Oil Cabinet directly to a high-pressure steam boiler, we bypass the need for a manual pump entirely. We can use the violent, escaping steam pressure to continuously propel the burning oil out of the nozzle."
Lie Fan sat back, imagining the horrific, majestic sight. A steam pressurized, continuous ship mounted flamethrower. It would act as a devastating, unstoppable weapon for his navy.
A single galleon equipped with a steam pressurized Fierce Fire Oil Cabinet could spray a continuous, unbroken torrent of liquid, unquenchable fire across the waves for hundreds of feet, burning entire enemy armadas to ash before they could even bring their archers into range. It would secure absolute, eternal naval supremacy for the Black Dragon.
Having laid out the theory, the 919 AD flamethrower, and the steam powered integration, Lie Fan realized that such heavy, high pressure brass and iron casting required a level of metallurgical mastery that even the brilliant Liu Ye might struggle to oversee alone.
The foundries would need men who could hear the song of the steel, men who understood the exact carbon content required to forge a boiler that would not explode and kill its operators.
He dive once more into the Book of Knowledge. He scoured the historical records of this era, searching for the names of specific talents, men who were historically recognized as unparalleled prodigies in blacksmithing and mechanical engineering.
The digital pages flipped rapidly in his mind until two names illuminated in bright gold.
Ma Jun.
Pu Yuan.
Lie Fan opened his eyes, a profound sense of satisfaction washing over him. Historically, Ma Jun was a brilliant, eccentric mechanical engineer, the man destined to perfect the South-Pointing Chariot even though he have introduced it in the past so Ma Jun wouldn't introduce it anymore, but he could still revolutionize silk looms.
Pu Yuan was a master metallurgist, a legendary blacksmith who would eventually forge three thousand miraculously sharp swords for Zhuge Liang's northern expeditions, pioneering radical new quenching techniques in the rivers of Shu.
Lie Fan quickly did the mental math regarding the current year. The timeline had been drastically accelerated by his conquests. In this current year of 203 AD, those two brilliant minds were likely still very young, perhaps mere children, or at most, unknown youths laboring in obscurity in some dusty provincial village.
Lie Fan pulled a small, dark slip of specialized Oriole parchment from a hidden drawer in his desk. He drafted a swift, highly classified secret order. He commanded the network of shadows to immediately scour the registries of the western and central provinces. They were to find these two specific prodigies, Ma Jun and Pu Yuan, and recruit them immediately.
He of course didn't want them to be bought from their families with a chest of silver or kidnapped in the dead of night. They were to be brought to the capital and fostered directly by the state.
They would be granted the finest tutors, infinite resources, and comfortable lives. Lie Fan was securing the next generation of genius, grooming them specifically for the future heavy metallurgy and high pressure boiler projects that would define the next century of Hengyuan dominance.
He sealed the secret order with black wax, pressing his personal, imperial signet ring deeply into it.
In the meantime, the initial, primitive prototypes of the Water Dragon and the hand pumped Fierce Fire Oil Cabinet could not wait for children to grow up. Lie Fan decided to entrust these freshly drawn atmospheric pump and piston syringe blueprints directly to Liu Ye and Huang Yue Ying.
They were currently managing the Wagonways Department, but their minds were flexible enough to absorb the Daoist alchemical translation he had written. They would begin constructing the very first copper and iron prototypes in the deepest, most secure wings of the Ministry of Work. With the steam engine and flamethrower seeds securely planted, Lie Fan rolled his neck, feeling a satisfying crack of his vertebrae. The night was growing incredibly late, but the visionary fire burning within his chest refused to be extinguished.
______________________________
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