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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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"Take this. Refine the language. Integrate it into the curriculum of every academy, every village school, and every military training camp from the northern snows to the southern jungles," Lie Fan commanded, his voice echoing with absolute finality. "Let the fire be lit. We will forge the people of Hengyuan, and we will trust them to carry the weight of the future."
Hearing that profound and honest warning and the strict, unyielding order from their Emperor, all five venerated state elders looked at each other in solemn expression and full of understanding. The heavy, philosophical air of the teachers' room felt charged with the gravity of a new epoch. These were men who had dedicated their entire lives to deciphering the ancient moral codes of the land, and they realized that they had just been handed the responsibility of forging a completely new one.
Sima Hui, Pang Degong, Lu Zhi, Cai Yong, and Zhuge Xuan firmly nodded their heads at one another. The silent consensus was reached without a single word of hesitation. Acknowledging the monumental, world altering heavy burden placed upon their aging shoulders, they formally received the task from their Emperor.
They rose from their mats, bowing deeply, and sincerely promised him that they would meticulously, obsessively revise the texts.
"We shall weave the safety of the realm directly into the fabric of this philosophy, Your Majesty," Cai Yong stated, his voice trembling slightly with the weight of his duty as he clutched the heavy silk scroll to his chest. "We will mandate that true devotion to the 'Nation' requires justice, compassion, and the mutual protection of its people. We vow to make absolutely sure that the dangerous pitfalls held by this powerful ideology, such as blind, unthinking fanaticism, or the potential for it to be twisted by demagogues to rebel against the state, wouldn't ever happen under our careful throughout revision."
Lu Zhi, his martial spirit flaring, added, "The people will be taught that true patriotism is not a weapon to be drawn against their neighbors in paranoid hunts, but a shield meant to guard the innocent and uplift the impoverished."
Satisfied that the soul of his empire was in the hands of the most capable, morally incorruptible scholars in human history, Lie Fan offered them a deep, respectful bow, a sovereign honoring his teachers. After that incredibly productive, historically defining meeting, Lie Fan took his respectful leave from the academy, walking out past the terrified, awestruck crowds of kneeling students, leaving the elders to their monumental task.
Time quickly passed, turning from a handful of crisp spring days into several bustling weeks, and a monumental logistical effort began to sweep across the continent like a tidal wave of human ambition.
Under the meticulous, joint oversight of the cunning Chancellor Jia Xu and the peerless economic genius Mi Zhu, the grand migration to the newly conquered northern steppes officially begun. It was an administrative undertaking of such staggering, unprecedented scale that it dwarfed the ancient construction of the Great Wall.
They had previously conducted a massive, empire wide census, utilizing the sprawling networks of the newly expanded ministries. This census deliberately and specifically targeted the poorer families of the realm, the landless peasants, the starving urban laborers, the second and third sons with no inheritance, and those who desperately needed a much better life.
These were the forgotten masses who no longer had any capabilities or resources to improve their living situations in the fully crowded cities, towns, and ancient villages of the central plains.
Imperial heralds rode through the slums and the impoverished farming hamlets, reading the Emperor's edict. They promised vast, fertile lands, total tax exemptions for a decade, and unconditional government support including winter grain, livestock, and iron plows. The response was overwhelming. There were now around hundreds of thousands of willing, deeply hopeful Han people undertaking the massive, historic migration northward.
Endless, sprawling caravans of wooden carts and marching families choked the major northern highways. They left behind their lives of squalor and debt, their eyes fixed on the northern horizon, driven by the intoxicating promise of property and a future for their children.
But Lie Fan's demographic engineering did not stop with simply populating the empty snows. To ensure complete, irrevocable integration of the newly conquered lands, one hundred thousand of the captured prisoners from the northern nomadic tribes were brought back there as well.
However, they were not brought back to recreate their old lives. The grand strategy, brutally effective in its sociological design, was to forcibly spread them out. Sima Yi's logistics officers ensured that no two nomadic families from the same clan were placed in the same grid. They were deliberately made to mingle and live peacefully side by side with the Han migrants.
A hardened Xianbei warrior found himself assigned a plot of land directly adjacent to a former tenant farmer from Xu Province. They were forced to share the same irrigation ditches, rely on the same imperial granaries, and trade at the same markets. The Emperor was literally forcing a cultural merge.
As this happened, entirely new, heavily fortified towns and highly structured agricultural hubs were being rapidly constructed there from the ground up, erasing the chaotic, wandering nature of the steppes and replacing it with the rigid, prosperous order of the Hengyuan Dynasty.
As for the rest of the two hundred thousand nomadic prisoners, the remnants of the proud Xiongnu, Fuyu, Wuhuan, and Yuezhi, they faced a completely different, yet equally absolute fate. They were deliberately spread far and wide across the entire mainland's interior provinces.
They were sent in tiny, fractured groups to the humid rice paddies of Jing Province, the dense jungles of Yang Province, and the isolated, towering mountains of Yi Province. Surrounded by millions of Han citizens, vastly outnumbered, and entirely disconnected from their ancestral grazing grounds, they had no choice but to adapt.
They were forced to completely assimilate into the dominant southern culture, learning the dialects, adopting the clothing, and intermarrying with the locals, dissolving their old, volatile tribal ties forever. The blood of the horde was being seamlessly absorbed into the veins of the Dragon.
Meanwhile, far from the agrarian restructuring of the north, the sharp, aggressive focus of the imperial court was firmly set on the eastern horizon.
On the other hand, answering the urgent, top secret imperial summons from Lie Fan, the naval admirals of the empire, Gan Ning, Jiang Qin, Huang Zu, and Zhou Yu, all finally arrived at the capital of Xiapi.
They did not arrive in ornate, gilded carriages like the civil ministers. They rode hard on horseback, their skin deeply tanned by the ocean sun, their hands calloused from rigging ropes and sea salt. Walking with the undeniable, predatory swagger of seasoned sailors, they proudly entered the opulent halls of the palace.
The juxtaposition was striking, amidst the heavily perfumed scholars and the polished jade floors, the admirals brought the harsh, unforgiving reality of the crashing tides directly into the heart of the empire.
They were immediately escorted by the Yellow Ghost Bodyguards into the secure war room, joining the ongoing high level military meeting for the grand Eastern Expansion.
Inside the dim, torch lit war room, the atmosphere was thick with strategic tension.
Zhuge Liang, Sima Yi, Guo Jia, Xun Yu, and Zhang Liao, made room around the massive stone map table for the masters of the sea.
The admirals listened intently as Lie Fan and Guo Jia outlined the overarching strategy, using the pacified Goguryeo peninsula as a logistical anvil to strike the islands of Yamato, aiming not for a grinding occupation, but a psychological decapitation of their military elite.
When it was their turn to speak, the admirals gave their peerless naval insights on navigating the treacherous eastern seas.
"The distance from the tip of Goguryeo to the main islands of Wa is shorter, yes," Zhou Yu stated, his sharp, incredibly handsome features illuminated by the candlelight as his finger traced the churning waters on the map. "But the currents there are violent. The ocean does not flow predictably, it is a chaotic maelstrom of hidden reefs and sudden, catastrophic pressure drops. To supply an army of this magnitude, we would need a fleet of at least a thousand heavy transport galleys."
Huang Zu crossed his thick, scarred arms, grunting in agreement. "And galleys require more power to sail through. The soldiers would also consume massive amounts of grain and fresh water. Half of our cargo space would be entirely dedicated just to keeping the oarsmen alive long enough to make the crossing. And if we hit a dead calm, or worse, the legendary typhoon winds that plague that region in the late summer... our wooden fleets will be scattered, starved, or smashed to splinters against the rocks before a single soldier draws his sword."
Gan Ning leaned over the table, a feral, eager grin on his face. "It's a suicide run, Your Majesty. But if you give me enough men and enough wine, I'll lead the vanguard through the storms myself."
Lie Fan chuckled, holding up a hand to stall Gan Ning's bloodlust. It was here that the land bound scholars unleashed the technological bombshell.
Zhuge Liang stepped forward, waving his feather fan with a confident, knowing smile. He smoothly explained that the traditional limitations of rowers, wind, and sails were no longer variables they needed to fear.
He spoke of a revolutionary new type of warship that could possibly be powered entirely without wind, utilizing an endless, tireless, and massively powerful mechanical heartbeat using this mysterious new technology called "steam."
The admirals were completely stunned.
The war room fell into a heavy incredulous silence. Zhou Yu's brilliant eyes widened in sheer disbelief, his mind frantically trying to process the physics of a ship moving against the wind without human muscle. Huang Zu scoffed loudly, while Gan Ning stared at Zhuge Liang as if the pristine scholar had just claimed he could breathe fire.
"A ship that moves itself without wind?" Jiang Qin finally spoke, his voice dripping with veteran skepticism. "A boiling pot of water that pushes a heavy war galley through a typhoon? With all due respect, Minister Zhuge, you have spent too much time reading ancient mythology and not enough time bleeding on a pitching deck."
Being highly practical, unyielding military men who valued survival over theory, they immediately pushed back against the scholars. They refused to bet the entire eastern conquest, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of their sailors, on a philosophical concept.
They immediately requested to see these vessels, or at the very least, their functional prototypes first. They firmly stated that before they could accurately calculate the specific maritime logistics even further, and before they could give any more concrete strategic suggestions on how this massive naval invasion to Yamato could actually be done, they needed undeniable, physical proof that this "steam" was not just a scholar's pipe dream.
Lie Fan smiled, deeply appreciating their stubborn pragmatism. He nodded to Zhuge Liang, silently giving the order. It was time to show the sea wolves the fire that would conquer their oceans.
While this grand, skeptical strategy was being debated in the cool, stone halls of the palace, deep inside the heavily guarded, highly classified sectors of the Imperial Workshop, the atmosphere was scorching, deafening, and relentlessly busy.
The workshop was a sprawling complex of reinforced brick, towering smokestacks, and massive iron foundries located on the outskirts of the capital. The air inside was a suffocating, incredibly dense mixture of coal dust, sulfur, and the overwhelming, ambient heat of a dozen roaring blast furnaces.
Here, the complex prototypes for the steam based technology were currently being rigorously tested for the umpteenth time. Teams of muscular, soot stained engineers and blacksmiths were pushing the forged metal to its absolute, structural limits.
In the center of the massive main hall, chained heavily to the stone floor, a colossal, iron cast steam boiler roared like a trapped dragon. Thick, reinforced copper pipes hissed violently, venting excess pressure in blinding clouds of white, scalding vapor.
The massive iron piston, the heart of the future Water Dragon pump and the naval propulsion systems, slammed up and down with a rhythmic, earth shaking CRACK HISS, CRACK HISS, effortlessly driving a massive flywheel that spun with terrifying, unstoppable momentum.
But the steam engines were not the only revolutionary terrors being forged in the heat.
With the sudden, highly classified addition of the handheld firearms, the intricate flintlock pistols and the devastating, wide barreled blunderbusses, that Lie Fan had recently requested to be developed and tested, the workload inside the massive workshop had become incredibly strict and demanding.
In a specialized, heavily ventilated wing of the workshop, shielded by thick sandbags to absorb accidental shrapnel, the firearms testing was underway. The sharp, explosive CRACK of black powder detonating in confined iron barrels echoed endlessly, a sound completely alien to the ancient world.
Overseeing all of this chaotic, fiery brilliance, moving like conductors in a symphony of iron and fire, are Liu Ye, Huang Yue Ying, the venerable Huang Chengyan, and Zhuge Liang, who divided his time between the war room and the foundries.
They worked day and night, surviving on minimal sleep and sheer, intoxicating adrenaline.
Liu Ye was currently covered in dark grease, his fine scholars' robes ruined as he meticulously inspected the airtight seals on the steam cylinders. He shouted orders over the deafening roar of the pistons, ensuring that the pressure valves were calibrated to exact mathematical specifications to prevent a catastrophic boiler explosion.
Nearby, Huang Chengyan was managing the massive metallurgical challenge of the firearm barrels. He stood before a roaring forge, his white beard tied back, inspecting the red hot iron tubes as they were repeatedly folded, hammered, and bored out.
"The steel must be flawless!" he shouted to his apprentices, his voice strained. "If there is a single imperfection in the cast, the pressure of the black powder will split the barrel and take the soldier's hands with it! Fold it again!"
Huang Yue Ying, her sharp eyes magnified by specialized glass lenses, sat at a brightly lit, highly organized workbench covered in tiny, intricate metal components. She was obsessively, meticulously inspecting every gear, every spring, and every locking mechanism of the flintlock prototypes.
Her delicate, calloused fingers adjusted the tension of a mainspring with a pair of fine iron tweezers.
She loaded a small charge of fine powder into the flash pan of a prototype pistol, snapped the frizzen shut, and pulled the trigger. CLICK CLACK FSHHH. A brilliant, instantaneous shower of sparks ignited the powder perfectly. She nodded in deep satisfaction, rapidly writing down the spring tension ratios on a bamboo slip before moving instantly to the next weapon.
And moving between them all, synthesizing the raw mechanical data into overarching logistical applications, was Zhuge Liang. He meticulously checked every steam pipe, every barrel tolerance, and every production ledger. He was ensuring that these prototypes were not just functional, but capable of being mass produced by the tens of thousands without a drop in quality.
They were surrounded by the deafening noise, the blinding heat, and the suffocating smoke of industry. But in their eyes, there was no exhaustion, only a fanatical, unyielding devotion to the Emperor's vision. Through their relentless, obsessive labor, they were guaranteeing that Hengyuan's technological supremacy would soon tear through the archaic traditions of warfare, effortlessly crossing oceans and shaking the very foundations of the world.
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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