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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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Hengyuan engineers reinforced the timber gates with thick iron plating. As the imperial soldiers rested around massive, roaring bonfires, drinking hot broth and celebrating the absolute, crushing victory of the initial assault, the sheer scale of their conquest became apparent. They had not just captured empty grass. They had captured people.
Tens of thousands of surviving nomadic warriors, along with their massive civilian encampments, women, children, the elderly, and the artisans, had been cut off from their retreat by the swift movements of Taishi Ci in the west and Huang Zhong in the east. Surrounded by an impenetrable wall of Han steel and staring down the muzzles of the Black Dragon Cannons, these remnants had thrown down their weapons and surrendered.
The three imperial armies were now in possession of an astronomical number of prisoners of war.
During this vital rest period, Emperor Lie Fan did not sit idle in his heavily guarded command tent. He was not a man who simply basked in the glory of a battlefield victory; his mind was already operating decades and centuries into the future.
The prisoners of war presented a massive logistical burden, but to Lie Fan, they presented something far more important, an unparalleled opportunity for surgical, generational control.
He summoned his absolute top, most brilliant advisors to his command tent.
Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun entered the heavy canvas structure, bowing deeply to their sovereign. The air inside the tent was warm, but the Emperor's eyes were cold, sharp, and focused entirely on the massive ledgers of captured enemy populations currently being compiled by the quartermasters.
"Sit," Lie Fan commanded softly, gesturing to the heavy wooden stools arranged around the tactical map table.
As the four titans of Hengyuan intellect took their seats, Lie Fan gave them a highly specific, strict, and incredibly massive administrative task.
"The vanguard has broken their bodies. Now, the scribes will break their history," Lie Fan declared, his voice carrying the heavy, unyielding weight of absolute imperial authority. "I want you four to begin deeply coordinating a massive, unprecedented inspection and census."
He leaned forward, tapping his gauntleted finger against the ledgers representing the captured Xiongnu, Xianbei, and Wuhuan populations that were currently shivering in the heavily guarded POW encampments.
"I do not just want a headcount of how many mouths we have to feed," Lie Fan stressed, his gaze locking onto each of his advisors to ensure they understood the gravity of his words. "I want every single individual documented. You are to drill down into the very marrow of their societies. I want this census to categorize every single one of the smaller sub tribes, every extended family, and every minor clan inside those captured populations."
Sima Yi's eyes widened slightly, his mind instantly calculating the staggering amount of ink, parchment, and interrogators required for such a monumental task. "Every family, Your Majesty? The nomadic lineages are incredibly chaotic. They rely on oral traditions, not written ledgers."
"Then you will write it down for them," Lie Fan ordered strictly. "You will deploy every scribe, every Oriole agent, and every literate officer in this camp. You will begin this thorough documentation as soon as possible, starting before the sun sets today. You will meticulously, obsessively record their bloodlines, their family trees, and their specific clan names. I want to know who their fathers were, who their grandfathers were, and what specific tents they were born in."
The four advisors listened in profound, awe struck silence.
To the brilliant minds of Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun, the Emperor was displaying a level of administrative genius that bordered on the divine. They looked at each other, their minds instantly recognizing what they believed to be the tactical purpose of this grueling task.
First is to break up the Hordes, by categorizing the nomads into individual families rather than massive tribes, the Emperor was mathematically dissolving their unity. A man fights to the death for the 'Xiongnu', but he submits to feed his specific wife and children.
Second is preventing rebellions, if the state knows every clan name and family tree, collective punishment becomes surgical. If a chieftain rebels, the Censorate knows exactly which cousins, uncles, and nephews to arrest, paralyzing any uprising before it begins.
The third is to start forced assimilation, meticulous documentation is the first step to taxation and conscription. The nomads would no longer be wild riders, they would be registered, taxable subjects of the Hengyuan Dynasty, tied to a piece of paper in the capital.
The advisors simply thought their Emperor was being incredibly, ruthlessly thorough in establishing absolute, unbreakable bureaucratic control over the newly subjugated barbarians.
"It is a masterful stroke of governance, Your Imperial Majesty," Xu Shu praised, his voice thick with genuine admiration. "By stripping away the anonymity of the horde and documenting their exact bloodlines, we erase their capacity to hide within the masses. They will be bound to the imperial registries forever."
"I will requisition three thousand scribes from the central column immediately," Sima Yi added, his calculating mind already moving to execute the order. "We will begin establishing the interrogation tents within the POW camps. We will cross reference their oral histories to ensure no clan name is falsified."
"See that it is done without a single error," Lie Fan nodded, his expression an impenetrable mask. "Dismissed."
As the four brilliant advisors bowed and exited the tent to unleash an army of scribes upon the defeated nomads, Lie Fan remained seated in the quiet warmth of his command center.
He poured himself a small cup of hot wine, staring into the dark red liquid.
His advisors were geniuses of their era, but they were entirely confined by the linear progression of time. They believed the census was a tool of administrative subjugation. They believed he was simply securing the borders for the next fifty years.
They did not know. They could not possibly comprehend the terrifying truth that he is hiding form the start.
After all Lie Fan's inner thoughts were far more profound, and infinitely darker, than mere tax registries and border control.
He leaned back in his chair, his mind flashing forward through centuries of a history that he had already lived, a timeline he was currently tearing to shreds with his own bare hands. He closed his eyes, and he did not see the defeated, shivering Xiongnu or Xianbei outside his tent.
He saw the Mongol Empire.
He saw the horizon turning black with millions of mounted archers. He saw the skies choked with the ash of burning cities stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the borders of Europe. He saw the absolute, unmitigated destruction of the Jin and Song dynasties, the rivers of the central plains running thick with the blood of tens of millions of Han people, slaughtered like livestock by a force of nature that could not be bargained with.
He saw Genghis Khan.
'Temüjin,' Lie Fan thought, the name tasting like ash and iron in his mind.
The Great Khan was not born from nothing. He was the product of centuries of harsh steppe evolution, the terrifying culmination of specific, hardened bloodlines converging in the harsh valleys of the Mongolian plateau.
Lie Fan urgently, desperately needed to know and track the specific, microscopic tribes that currently existed in the mud and snow outside his tent. He needed the scribes to map the chaotic web of the steppe genealogies because he was hunting for the ancestors.
He needed to track the specific tribes that would eventually intermarry in the future. He needed to find the roots of the Khamag Mongol.
He needed to locate the ancestral lines that would eventually form the Borjigin clan, the very lineages that would, if left unchecked by the tides of history, result in birthing the specific tribes that will give birth to the terrifying world conqueror.
If Lie Fan simply slaughtered the nomads indiscriminately, he risked missing the specific families entirely. Some might escape deep into the Siberian forests, preserving the genetic spark that would eventually ignite the world.
But with a flawlessly executed, obsessive census, Lie Fan was turning the massive, anonymous haystack of the steppes into a perfectly categorized grid.
Once Sima Yi and Xu Shu compiled the master ledgers, identifying every clan and sub tribe, Lie Fan would secretly consult the Book of Knowledge hidden within the recesses of his system. He would cross reference the ancient, recorded genealogies of the Mongol founders with the names written by his scribes in the camps outside.
He would find the great great great grandfathers of the apocalypse.
And when he found them, he would not make a grand public spectacle of their execution. He would not turn them into martyrs for the steppes to rally around.
He would quietly, surgically, and permanently erase their entire bloodline from the face of the earth. He would separate the specific families, scatter their men to the deepest, most lethal labor camps in the southern jungles, and ensure that the specific genetic combination required to birth Temüjin was physically, biologically impossible to ever occur.
Of course, only Lie Fan himself knew the true nature of this dark work. Only he understood the apocalyptic future reasoning as to why he desperately wanted to document and potentially neutralize these specific tribes before they could ever become a threat to the world.
To the scribes, it was a ledger of names. To the advisors, it was the ultimate tool of bureaucratic control.
But to Lie Fan, the Black Dragon sitting alone in his tent, it was the quiet, methodical assassination of a god of war, centuries before he could ever draw his first breath.
Lie Fan drank the hot wine in a single swallow, the warmth spreading through his chest as the howling winds of the north battered against his tent. The world was utterly oblivious to the true scale of his salvation.
And so, with Emperor Lie Fan's strict, non-negotiable order having been given within the suffocating warmth of his command tent, the great, terrifying bureaucratic machinery of the Hengyuan Dynasty was aggressively unleashed upon the frozen north. The massive census on the captured populations across the three sprawling imperial armies officially began.
This was not a mere military occupation, it was a total, methodical dissection of an entire civilization, orchestrated under the meticulous, unyielding oversight of the four brilliant administrative minds of Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun.
The moment the four advisors exited the Emperor's presence, they moved with a terrifying synchronization. They did not celebrate the battlefield victory. Instead, they immediately requisitioned thousands of scholars, scribes, and logistical quartermasters from the ranks of the central column. Within hours, the landscape of the imperial encampment was fundamentally transformed.
Amidst the towering siege engines and the rows of armored infantry, dozens of massive, heavily fortified canvas structures were hastily erected specifically for this monumental task.
These were the interrogation tents, illuminated by rows of oil lamps that burned long into the freezing night, furnished with nothing but long wooden tables, stacks of blank parchment, mountains of fresh bamboo slips, and oceans of dark ink.
However, the Central Command was only one piece of the leviathan. Given the sheer, staggering scale of the northern frontlines, coordinating this effort manually was a geographical impossibility.
The Hengyuan vanguard had pushed so deeply into the steppes that hundreds of miles of hostile, freezing, snow choked terrain separated Lie Fan's central anvil from Taishi Ci in the arid western deserts and Huang Zhong in the mountainous eastern passes.
To overcome this, Sima Yi and Xu Shu heavily utilized the empire's elite aviary corps. They used highly trained, winter hardened ravens to quickly coordinate the complex logistics of this census with the east and west imperial armies due to the vast distances separating their camps.
Deep in the night, the heavy flap of obsidian wings broke the silence of the high-altitude winds. Sima Yi had drafted dozens of identical, highly ciphered micro scrolls, detailing the exact formatting of the census ledgers, the specific questioning protocols, and the absolute necessity of tracing every single bloodline down to the lowest newborn infant.
The ravens shot across the bruised, cloudy skies of the steppes, completely bypassing the ruined, burning remnants of the nomadic encampments below.
When these black birds finally descended upon the armored shoulders of the beast masters in the western and eastern camps, the commanders there, Taishi Ci and Huang Zhong, immediately read the decoded missives and ordered their own thousands of embedded scribes to mirror the exact same interrogations taking place in the center. The continent spanning net of ink and parchment was pulled perfectly taut.
Meanwhile, trapped within the massive, heavily guarded wooden palisades that had been rapidly constructed to serve as prisoner of war camps, the captured nomadic tribes were experiencing a psychological whiplash so severe it bordered on collective madness.
The remnants of the once mighty Xiongnu, Xianbei, and Wuhuan confederations sat huddled together in the freezing mud, shivering beneath their tattered furs.
They had just survived an apocalyptic onslaught of explosive rockets and solid iron cannonballs. They had watched their legendary Khans and Chanyus be pulverized into red mist, and their invincible heavy cavalry decimated by disciplined Han halberdiers.
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.
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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