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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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Every single ministry, every department, and every clerk would be furiously double checking their work, terrified that the Emperor and his Head of Censors would walk through their doors next. The balance was maintained. The Orioles ruled the night, and Lie Fan ruled the day. The Hengyuan Dynasty was a machine of perfect, inescapable obedience, and He, the Emperor and the Black Dragon, held every single string.
As Lie Fan stepped back out through the massive, heavy oak doors of the Ministry of Personnel, the bright, crisp autumn sunlight washed over his black and gold Mianfu robes, making the intricately embroidered dragons appear as though they were writhing in the light. He did not immediately depart for the comforting serenity of the Imperial Palace.
Instead, the Emperor of the unified Hengyuan Dynasty descended halfway down the sweeping stone steps, turned his back to the bustling capital city of Xiapi, and simply stood there.
He crossed his hands behind his back, positioning himself like an immovable obsidian monolith guarding the entrance to his own government. The Yellow Ghost Bodyguards fanned out around him, their hands resting easily but lethally upon the pommels of their broadswords, their masked faces revealing absolutely nothing to the terrified citizens and minor officials who dared to cast fleeting glances their way from the street level.
Lie Fan was waiting.
He did not have to wait long. From the direction of the Censorate's primary administrative block, a frantic, highly uncoordinated wave of motion disrupted the usual, rhythmic flow of the capital's morning traffic.
A detachment of over fifty imperial censors, dressed in their stark, unadorned robes of deep green, the color chosen specifically to represent the uncompromising rigidity of imperial law, was practically sprinting down the wide, paved avenue.
They were men usually known for their slow, deliberate, and terrifyingly methodical pacing. But today, they were running as if the hounds of the underworld were snapping at their heels.
They were panting heavily, their faces flushed bright red with exertion and a very distinct, cold sweat of absolute panic. The surprise inspection was not merely a surprise for the Ministry of Personnel, it had been a complete, staggering shock to the Censorate itself.
When the imperial summons had arrived, demanding their immediate presence at the Ministry of Personnel for a raid personally led by the Emperor, the censors had nearly suffered collective heart failure. To be beaten to the scene of an audit by the Son of Heaven himself was a profound, terrifying dereliction of duty in their eyes, even if they had possessed zero prior warning.
They rushed up the stone steps, gasping for air, their brass badges of office clinking wildly against their chests. As they reached the halfway point and found the Emperor standing there, looking down at them with an expression of absolute, unyielding stone, the entire detachment simultaneously threw themselves to their knees, ignoring the bruising impact of the hard granite.
"Y-Your Imperial Majesty!" the senior deputy censor gasped, his chest heaving as he pressed his forehead to the stone step. "We... we beg your divine forgiveness for our delay! We mobilized the moment your sacred word reached our halls!"
Lie Fan stared down at the trembling, panting mass of his supposedly terrifying inquisitors. He allowed the silence to stretch for five agonizing seconds, letting the cold autumn breeze chill the sweat on their necks.
"You are late," Lie Fan stated, his voice a low, rumbling hum that seemed to vibrate the very stones beneath them. "The Head of Censors is already inside, dissecting the beast alone. Get up. Get inside. And do not let a single scrap of parchment leave this building without your seal upon it."
"At once, Your Imperial Majesty!" the deputy cried out in desperate relief.
The censors scrambled to their feet, their exhaustion completely overridden by a frantic adrenaline. They surged past the Emperor and the Yellow Ghost Bodyguards, flooding through the massive front doors into the grand entry hall of the Ministry of Personnel like a swarm of angry, green hornets.
Once inside, they immediately got to work, seamlessly integrating into the absolute chaos that Pang Tong had already initiated.
The interior of the Ministry was a scene of unmitigated bureaucratic terror. Pang Tong, the Fledgling Phoenix, was entirely in his element. He stood atop a raised wooden dais that was normally reserved for the Chief Director of Appointments, looking down at the sea of panicked clerks.
His somewhat unkempt appearance contrasted sharply with the razor sharp, merciless precision of his commands.
"You, in the blue silk! Open the western vault! I want the regional appointment ledgers for Ji Province from the last year, and I want them on this table before I finish my next breath!" Pang Tong barked, pointing a long, ink stained finger at a trembling archive clerk.
"Director Shen! Why does this requisition form for grain stipends lack the secondary seal of the provincial governor?!" Pang Tong shouted, hurling a heavy bamboo scroll onto the floor at the feet of a sweating, pale faced senior official. "Are we minting our own authority in this office now? Explain the discrepancy!"
The Ministry of Personnel's clerks and directors, men who usually wielded immense, life altering power over the careers of tens of thousands of provincial magistrates, were currently sweating so profusely that their expensive silk collars were entirely soaked.
They scrambled over one another, tripping over the hems of their robes as they nervously followed Pang Tong's commands, rushing to unlock iron bound chests, hauling out towering stacks of silk ledgers, and desperately trying to explain away mathematical errors that suddenly looked indistinguishable from high treason.
The newly arrived censors descended upon the ledgers like starving wolves. They grouped into teams of three, immediately isolating the different departments, provincial appointments, military commissions, salary distributions, and noble promotions.
Soon enough, the pristine, untouchable facade of the Ministry began to crack. Under the terrifying, unrelenting pressure of the Fledgling Phoenix and his swarm of censors, the shadows hiding within the endless columns of ink were violently dragged into the light.
Small discrepancies in the ledgers were the first to be unearthed. A few dozen copper coins missing from a traveling magistrate's stipend here, a slightly inflated travel expense report there.
But as the censors dug deeper, the rot became more pronounced. Minor corruptions were exposed, gifts of rare tea, fine southern silk, or small jade ornaments recorded suspiciously close to the dates when under qualified junior officials were suddenly promoted to highly lucrative tax collection posts in the wealthy coastal cities.
Traces of petty nepotism were rooted out from the shadows. The censors discovered that a disturbing number of newly appointed harbor masters in the Wu territory just so happened to share the exact same surname as the Senior Director of Maritime Appointments, despite lacking any formal naval or logistical background. All kinds of small, insidious bureaucracy crimes, the quiet, invisible sins that bleed an empire dry a single copper coin at a time, were dragged out of the vaults.
All of this was, of course, meticulously written down by the frantic censors. Brushes flew across blank parchment, recording every name, every date, and every missing coin.
The physical evidences, the altered bamboo scrolls, the suspiciously stamped silk letters, the ledgers with deliberately smeared ink, were immediately seized, bound in thick twine, and secured in locked iron strongboxes guarded by the Censorate's own heavy infantry.
Standing near the grand entrance, just outside the massive doors, Lie Fan kept his back turned to the city, his gaze fixed on the heavy wood separating him from the chaos. Even through the thick oak, he could clearly hear the commotion.
He could hear the sharp, unforgiving bark of Pang Tong's voice, the frantic shuffling of hundreds of boots, and the desperate, panicked pleas of senior directors begging for mercy, swearing upon their ancestors that the missing funds were a mere clerical error, not a malicious theft.
Lie Fan closed his eyes, tilting his head back slightly to feel the warmth of the autumn sun on his face.
He let out a long, slow, inward sigh.
He was not naive. He possessed the mind of a modern man trapped in the violent crucible of antiquity, and he understood the fundamental, inescapable flaws of human nature. He knew that no matter how flawlessly clean he wanted his newly unified government to be, no matter how many terrifying Oriole agents he deployed into the shadows to root out treason, human greed was an eternal, unyielding constant.
'Bureaucratic cockroaches,' Lie Fan mused silently, a cold, pragmatic acceptance settling over him. They will never die completely. You can burn the house down, and they will simply hide in the ashes. The moment the light of the throne looks away, they crawl back out to feast on the crumbs of the empire.
He knew that Jia Xu's network of spies was unparalleled when it came to hunting down genuine threats, rebellious warlords, foreign assassins, and ambitious generals plotting coups. But even if the Orioles could be everywhere, they could not reasonably be expected to monitor every single mid level clerk skimming three copper coins off a provincial grain requisition.
That mundane, petty greed required a different kind of weapon. It required the harsh, blinding, daylight terror of the Censorate.
When the Ministry of Personnel inspection was finally done, after six grueling hours of relentless interrogation, seizing of assets, and the immediate, weeping arrest of twelve mid level directors and three dozen clerks, the green robed censors marched out of the building. They carried their heavy iron strongboxes of evidence, their faces grim and victorious.
Pang Tong emerged last, looking exhausted but deeply, profoundly satisfied. He bowed to the Emperor, confirming the rot had been excised. Lie Fan offered a single nod of approval, turned on his heel, and marched back toward the inner palace, leaving the Ministry of Personnel a hollowed out, trembling shell of its former arrogance.
But the true impact of the day was not confined to a single building.
Words of this terrifying, utterly ruthless imperial audit immediately spread out like wildfire, tearing through the administrative districts of the capital faster than a galloping horse. Minor clerks who had witnessed the Emperor's arrival whispered the tale to their friends in the teahouses, guards gossiped with the palace maids.
By mid afternoon, the terrifying news had reached the entire sprawling network of ministries, bureaus, and departments within Xiapi.
The Emperor was hunting. And he was not sending his spies; he was kicking the front doors down himself.
Soon, the news reached the highest, most fortified echelons of power. It reached the desks of the Ministers, the men who formed the absolute apex of the Hengyuan government.
Deep within the heavily guarded walls of the Ministry of Intelligence, Chancellor Jia Xu sat behind his desk, reading a hastily scribbled note from one of his daytime informants regarding the raid on the Ministry of Personnel.
The master of shadows did not panic. He did not rush to double check his own ledgers. Instead, a slow, raspy, deeply appreciative chuckle vibrated in his chest.
Across the capital, in the opulent halls of the Ministry of Revenue, Mi Zhu received the same frantic report from a breathless junior accountant. Mi Zhu simply smiled, waved the terrified accountant away, and calmly returned to sipping his premium imported tea. Within the Ministry of Work, Liu Ye heard the rumors from his structural engineers, and he merely nodded, returning his focus to the blueprints of the steam engine.
All of these men were part of Emperor Lie Fan's most trusted, elite inner circle of advisors. They had bled with him, starved with him, and built the world alongside him. They possessed minds of unparalleled strategic brilliance.
Hearing the exaggerated, terrified accounts of the Emperor standing like a god of death on the steps of the Personnel building, they of course immediately understood the true, multifaceted intention behind their sovereign's sudden theatricality.
They saw the brilliant psychological warfare at play. Lie Fan was achieving three massive objectives simultaneously.
First, he was actively instilling a profound, visceral dread for the official Censorate, elevating Pang Tong's authority so that the mere sight of a green robe would make a clerk's blood run cold. Second, by conducting such a loud, public, and terrifying daylight raid, he was masterfully keeping the Oriole Agents entirely in the dark, maintaining the illusion that the Emperor relied heavily on his official channels, thereby allowing Jia Xu's spies to operate even deeper in the unobserved shadows.
And third, he was effectively keeping every single mid to low level official in the empire dancing nervously on their toes, absolutely terrified into compliance.
Understanding the grand design flawlessly, the High Ministers sent out quiet, strictly worded directives to their own immediate deputies. They ordered their departments to simply follow along calmly, to offer absolute transparency, and to provide zero resistance when, not if, the green robed censors arrived at their doors.
The ministers knew their own hands were clean, they were too invested in the survival of the empire to steal from it. But they also knew that the cockroaches scurrying beneath their boots needed to be crushed.
The Emperor had started a fire, and he had no intention of letting it burn out after a single day.
The scenes of intense, suffocating inspections continued, escalating into a relentless, exhausting campaign of bureaucratic purification. It did not just happen in a single, terrifying day, but stretched out over several long, nerve wracking days, plunging the entire capital into a state of perpetual, vibrating anxiety.
On the morning of the second day, the heavy boots of the Yellow Ghost Bodyguards echoed across the polished marble courtyards of the Ministry of Law.
This was the domain of Chen Gong, the austere, fiercely intelligent minister tasked with upholding the absolute legality of the Emperor's will. The Ministry of Law was a fortress of rigid discipline, where the air smelled of stale ink and the heavy bamboo slips of the penal code. To the outside world, it was the unimpeachable bastion of justice.
But when the massive wooden doors were thrown open, and Emperor Lie Fan stepped over the threshold with Pang Tong and his swarm of green robed inquisitors, the iron facade of the lawmakers immediately began to rust.
Lie Fan stood silently by the towering statue of Xiezi, the mythical beast of justice, his arms crossed, his presence casting a long, terrifying shadow over the main judicial hall. He watched as Pang Tong tore through the case files and the sentencing ledgers with the ruthless precision of a butcher carving a carcass.
The irony was as thick as blood. The men tasked with punishing the corrupt were found to be entirely susceptible to the exact same mundane greed. The censors, operating with absolute impunity under the Emperor's silent gaze, exposed the rot.
They found evidence of heavy bribes taken from wealthy merchant families in the central plains to quietly lessen the sentences of their delinquent sons. They unearthed complex, heavily codified paper trails showing favored, expedited legal treatment for local Xiapi landlords, while the land dispute paperwork for their less wealthy rivals was mysteriously 'lost' in the archives for months on end.
By sunset, twenty magistrates of the law had been stripped of their official robes, bound in rough hemp ropes, and dragged out of their own ministry, weeping as they faced the very penal codes they had manipulated. The Ministry of Law, surprisingly, possessed the exact same amount of petty problems and small corruptions as the Ministry of Personnel. The cockroaches wore different robes, but they fed on the same filth.
On the third day, the storm broke over the Ministry of Work.
This was the beating, industrialized heart of Liu Ye and Huang Yue Ying's domain.
The halls here were not quiet, they echoed with the sounds of shouting foremen, the clatter of raw materials, and the constant unrolling of massive architectural blueprints. When Lie Fan arrived, he did not stand in a pristine entry hall. He stood amidst towering piles of cut limestone, raw iron ingots, and massive timber beams destined for the new wagonway expansions. He looked like a god of the forge, his dark eyes taking in the sheer, monumental scale of the empire's infrastructure.
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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