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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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By all the ancient, blood soaked laws of the steppes, they knew exactly what was supposed to happen next. When a tribe was broken this completely, the victors would ride through the survivors, executing the men who were taller than a wagon wheel, and dragging the weeping women, children, and skilled artisans away by the neck to serve as chattel slaves for the rest of their miserable lives. That was the way of the world. That was the brutal arithmetic of northern survival.
Therefore, the captured nomadic warriors were deeply surprised and highly suspicious of these sudden, intense interrogations being done about them.
They were completely, utterly baffled as to why the victorious Han officials, dressed in pristine robes and carrying delicate writing brushes, were relentlessly asking for specific details about their family origins, their clan lineages, and their exact tribe names, instead of just taking them as slaves or executing them where they sat.
"Why does the southern Emperor care what my grandfather's name was?" an aged Xianbei warrior whispered to his kin, his breath pluming in the freezing air, his eyes darting nervously toward the glowing interrogation tents. "Does he wish to curse our ancestors? Are they using dark magic to steal our souls on those pieces of paper?"
To a people who relied almost entirely on oral traditions, songs, and memory to preserve their history, the sight of a thousand scribes furiously writing down their spoken words was profoundly alien and terrifying. To the nomads, the ledgers looked like tools of dark, bureaucratic witchcraft.
When the heavily armored Hengyuan guards stepped into the holding pens and began dragging individuals into the brightly lit interrogation tents, the true friction of the census began.
Naturally, the steppes had bred men of unbreakable pride and savage defiance. Some of the proud, stubborn steppe warriors, men whose bodies were covered in the scars of a hundred raids, fiercely did not want to answer. They viewed the scribes with absolute, venomous disdain.
When asked to recite their lineage, they spat bloody phlegm onto the pristine parchment. They hurled guttural curses in their native tongues, demanding to be given a sword so they could die with honor in combat, rather than be cataloged like livestock.
They expected the Han scholars to recoil in fear. They expected the soft men of the south to break.
They were fatally mistaken. The scribes of the Hengyuan Dynasty did not flinch, they simply gestured to the shadows standing at the edges of the tent.
The Han soldiers needed to use heavy, brutal interrogation tactics, and they executed them with a cold, terrifying, mechanical efficiency. This was not the passionate, chaotic violence of a battlefield; this was the calculated, surgical violence of an empire extracting data. The guards stepped forward, their faces entirely devoid of emotion.
They pushed the interrogations borderline to physical violence and outright torture, just to force the stubborn nomads to spit out the truth.
A Xiongnu warlord who refused to name his cousins would find his fingers placed one by one upon the wooden table, and an armored guard would systematically, calmly shatter the joints with the heavy iron pommel of a dagger until the names began to flow.
Xianbei chieftains who attempted to lie about their tribal affiliations were dragged outside, stripped of their furs, and chained to wooden posts in the freezing, sub zero winds, periodically doused with buckets of icy water until the threat of agonizing frostbite overrode their ancestral pride.
The screams that echoed from the interrogation tents were not the screams of battle, but the pathetic, broken wails of men having their very identities ripped from their throats by the relentless gears of the state. The scribes sat calmly through it all, their brushes hovering patiently over the inkstones, waiting for the screaming to subside into the sobbing recitation of genealogies.
On the other hand, the horrific sounds of this systematic breaking had a profound effect on the rest of the captive population.
Some of the more terrified or pragmatic prisoners immediately gave in. Mothers, desperate to shield their freezing, weeping children from the terrifying men in black armor, minor clan leaders who saw the writing on the wall, and wounded warriors who had lost all will to fight, they broke almost instantly.
When they were seated before the scribes, they practically tripped over their own words. They rapidly, frantically spilled their entire family histories, desperately trying to appease the cold eyed scholars.
They quickly said whatever the imperial scribes questioned them about to avoid any harsh punishment. They recited the names of their fathers, their grandfathers, the specific valleys where their tents were pitched, and the exact names of the sub tribes they belonged to.
"I am of the Luandi clan!" a broken Xiongnu sub chieftain babbled, his hands trembling as he stared at the scribe's brush. "My father was Chuge, son of Modu the lesser! My cousins graze their herds near the frozen river! I have told you everything! Please, do not give me to the men in iron!"
The scribes recorded it all. The ink flowed in endless rivers. Hour by hour, day by day, the massive, anonymous, chaotic haystack of the nomadic confederations was being painstakingly separated, categorized, and bound into massive, heavy silk bound ledgers. The Emperor's mandate was being fulfilled. The horde was being mathematically dissolved.
However, organizing this massive undertaking presented a towering, immediate logistical hurdle, language.
Because of the vast cultural differences and the geographical isolation of the steppes, the Han scribes and the nomadic prisoners did not share a common tongue. The dialects of the Xiongnu were guttural and harsh, the Xianbei spoke with rapid clicking cadences, and the Wuhuan utilized a heavily accented localized dialect.
If a scribe misheard a name, or if a clan title was improperly recorded due to a misunderstanding, the entire purpose of Lie Fan's obsessive census would be compromised. The genetic map he was trying to build would be fundamentally flawed.
Therefore, there were, of course, highly skilled translators present in every single interrogation camp to help bridge the heavy communication gap and ensure the names were written down perfectly.
These translators sat on small wooden stools beside the scribes. They wore the plain, unadorned, coarse brown robes of lowly civilian laborers. They kept their heads bowed respectfully, their hands tucked into their wide sleeves. They looked entirely unassuming, iust poor, educated border scholars or bilingual merchants who had been conscripted by the army to facilitate the paperwork.
When a screaming nomad hurled a curse in his native tongue, the translator would calmly turn to the scribe and politely translate the lineage information hidden within the insult.
They were the invisible, essential grease that kept the bureaucratic machine running smoothly.
However, there was a terrifying, incredibly dark, hidden layer to this massive administrative operation, a layer known only to the Emperor and his Master of Shadows, Chancellor Jia Xu.
All of these seemingly ordinary, unassuming translators were not civilian scholars at all. They were actually elite Oriole Agents.
Years ago, long before the central plains had even been fully unified, Jia Xu had recognized that the northern steppes would eventually become the ultimate battleground. Acting on Lie Fan's earliest, most secretive directives, the Chancellor had taken hundreds of his most capable, deeply fanatical orphans and operatives, and he had cast them out into the freezing wilderness.
These elite operatives had secretly infiltrated the steppes over the years. They had endured unimaginable hardships. They had lived in the freezing, dung smelling tents of the barbarians. They had eaten raw, bloody horse meat. They had suffered through the brutal winters, passing themselves off as wandering outcasts, runaway slaves, or ambitious traders. They had completely immersed themselves in the hostile culture, abandoning their Han identities entirely.
And in doing so, they had perfectly learned the diverse, complex, and highly localized languages of these northern tribes. They knew the slang. They knew the colloquialisms. They knew the specific, subtle differences between a Xiongnu dialect from the eastern mountains and a Xiongnu dialect from the western deserts.
Right now, sitting in the warm glow of the oil lamps, these hardened, lethal spies perfectly acted like they were just regular, lowly civilian translators and merely part of the scribes' mundane entourage.
They maintained their submissive postures, their faces blank and unintimidating. They projected an aura of absolute insignificance.
And this flawless, masterful deception allowed them to execute their true, secondary mandate.
It allowed them to secretly listen in on the nomads' private whispers and gather even more hidden, vital intelligence while facilitating the formal interrogations.
The nomadic prisoners, assuming the Han guards were entirely deaf to their native tongues, and assuming the lowly translators were only paying attention when directly spoken to, often made the fatal mistake of whispering to each other in the holding pens or while waiting their turn at the scribe's table.
Two terrified Xianbei warriors, kneeling in the mud outside a tent, might lean their heads together.
"Did you tell them about the hidden cache of winter grain in the weeping valley?" one would whisper in his rapid, clicking dialect, his eyes darting toward the armored guards who stood like uncomprehending statues.
"No, fool," the other would hiss back. "And I did not tell them that my uncle, the chieftain of the gray wolf clan, escaped the encirclement. He rides north to the deep forests. When the snow melts, he will return for us. Let these southerners think they have captured our entire bloodline."
A few feet away, a plain robed translator carrying a stack of blank parchment would slowly walk past them. The translator would not break stride. He would not look at the warriors. His face would remain perfectly, beautifully blank.
But beneath the coarse brown hood, the elite Oriole agent cataloged every single syllable.
When the translator returned to the interior of the tent, he would not just provide the scribe with the phonetic spelling of the prisoner's name.
He would take a separate, specialized piece of dark parchment, and using a complex, miniaturized cipher, he would document the exact coordinates of the hidden grain cache and the specific physical description of the escaped chieftain.
The intelligence gathered by these shadow translators was staggering. They uncovered the locations of buried weapon caches. They identified specific, high ranking nomadic nobles who had stripped off their ornate armor and smeared themselves with mud in a desperate attempt to pass themselves off as common laborers to avoid execution.
They listened to the weeping mothers whispering the true, ancestral names of their sons, names they had deliberately lied about to the scribes in an attempt to protect their bloodlines.
Every hidden truth, every desperate lie, and every secret hope of the captured horde was effortlessly, flawlessly extracted from the air itself.
The Oriole agents funneled this massive, secondary stream of hyper classified intelligence directly into the hands of Sima Yi and Xu Shu. The advisors, their minds operating at peak efficiency, immediately deployed specialized, fast moving hunter killer cavalry units to the coordinates whispered in the mud.
Hidden grain silos were burned before the sun rose. Escaped chieftains who thought they had found safety in the deep forests woke up to find Hengyuan crossbowmen surrounding their campfires. Nomadic nobles attempting to hide among the commoners were quietly, suddenly pulled from the crowds in the dead of night and never seen again.
The psychological devastation this inflicted upon the POW camps was absolute.
The nomads could not comprehend how the Han armies knew everything. They could not understand how their deepest secrets, spoken only in the faintest whispers in their native tongues, resulted in immediate, surgical retaliation. Paranoia consumed the camps like a plague.
Brother stopped trusting brother. Families stopped speaking to each other entirely, terrified that the very wind itself was reporting their words back to the terrifying Emperor of the South.
They did not know that the unassuming translators, the men who patiently helped them spell their grandfather's names, were the eyes and ears of the Black Dragon.
Through the brutal physical pressure of the armored guards and the invisible, omniscient espionage of the Oriole agents, the ledgers grew thicker by the hour. The mountains of bamboo slips and silk scrolls piled up in the administrative tents, a physical manifestation of a civilization being mathematically dismantled.
And as the master ledgers were finally compiled, sorted, and bound, Sima Yi and Xu Shu, believing they had just secured the ultimate bureaucratic subjugation of the north, proudly ordered the heavy, sealed chests of documents to be carried directly to the Emperor's private command tent.
The raw data had been harvested. The names, the bloodlines, the exact familial branches of hundreds of thousands of nomadic people were now trapped in ink.
Inside his heavily guarded, isolated tent, Lie Fan waited. He dismissed his guards, locked the heavy canvas flaps, and stood alone before the massive chests of ledgers.
The agonizing screams of the stubborn, the frantic whispers of the pragmatic, and the silent, lethal espionage of his shadows had all culminated in this moment. He reached out, his gauntleted hand resting on the smooth wood of the chest.
It was time to open the Book of Knowledge. It was time to trace the bloodlines. It was time to hunt down the specific, microscopic genetic sparks that would one day threaten to burn the world to ash, and quietly, permanently snuff them out. The true, terrifying purpose of the grand northern campaign was finally about to be realized.
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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