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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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He waited for the deafening crack of the perfected flintlock pistols that would render the swords of his enemies obsolete. And he waited for the naval admirals to finalize the apocalyptic invasion plans that would shatter the islands of Yamato and bring the rising sun under his dominion. The quiet night eventually began to fall over the capital of Xiapi once again. Lie Fan sat upon his chair in the flickering candlelight, an undisputed sovereign surrounded by a sea of paperwork, silently listening to the distant, rhythmic turning of the gears.
After that quiet, reflective night in the Emperor's study, time steadily passed by. The days bled into weeks, and the turning of the seasons brought with it a completely different kind of storm, not of iron and black powder, but of ink, paper, and human thought.
The monumental Nationalism ideology, under the strict, meticulous, and ruthlessly efficient oversight of the five venerable state elders alongside the bureaucratic titans Lu Su, Chen Qun, and Xu Shu, finally begun to be aggressively introduced. It did not merely trickle into society, it flooded the continent. Millions of freshly printed bamboo slips and bound silk scrolls were churned out by the imperial printing presses.
The doctrine was systematically distributed to all of the local village schools, the grand provincial academies, the sprawling public libraries, and deeply ingrained into the mandatory reading lists for the ranks of government personnel across the entire mainland domain of the Hengyuan Dynasty first.
The sudden, unprecedented appearance of this powerful new ideology, of course, immediately sparked a huge surprise and profound shock that caused the political and cultural landscape of the land to violently shake.
For the common peasants, the shift was subtle at first, a new song taught to their children, a new oath sworn by their local magistrates. But for the educated elite, it was a philosophical earthquake.
This was primarily because the traditional Confucianism ideology had been so deeply rooted in the minds, laws, and customs of the people for hundreds of years, strictly serving as the absolute moral compass due to the fallen Han Dynasty ruling by it for such a long, uninterrupted time.
To suddenly elevate the concept of the 'Nation' and the State above the strict familial pieties and the abstract 'Will of Heaven' was seen by many as a complete upending of the natural order of the cosmos.
Consequently, this immediately became a massive, heated topic of debate, of course, within the elite scholar's circle. In the opulent teahouses of Xiapi, the shaded pavilions of Jing Province, and the grand lecture halls of the academies, the air grew thick with passionate arguments, flying spittle, and the slamming of fists on wooden tables.
The academic world quickly fractured into two fiercely opposed camps.
On one side, there were many progressive thinkers, younger magistrates, and pragmatic military scholars who strongly supported the new Nationalism ideology. They argued with fiery conviction that it doesn't actually erase or disrespect the revered Confucianism ideology. Instead, they posited, it rather acts as a greater banner and absolute unifier for all local beliefs.
"Is the Nation not simply the family writ large?" a young scholar would passionately debate in the courtyards. "Confucius taught us to honor our fathers. His Imperial Majesty is the Patriarch of the realm! By serving the Nation, we are practicing the ultimate, highest form of filial piety. This doctrine does not destroy our past, it evolves it so that we may survive a future surrounded by hostile empires!"
However, on the other side of the courtyard, there were also many stubborn traditionalists who vehemently didn't like it. These were the gray bearded patriarchs, the wealthy land owning nobles, and the rigid moralists who clung to the old texts like a drowning man to a raft. They firmly believed that they should strictly stick and adhere to the time tested way of the ancestors, which was pure unchanged Confucianism.
They angrily questioned the necessity of this radical overhaul. "Why should we change something that was perfectly good for hundreds of years?" an elder would shout, his face purple with indignation. "It had essentially become our absolute way of life! To place the State above the ancestral spirits is arrogance! It is a dangerous usurpation of the Heavenly Mandate! A man's loyalty belongs to his bloodline first, his local lord second, and the distant throne third. This 'Nationalism' is a manufactured illusion designed to strip us of our heritage!"
Of course, this widespread, increasingly volatile public debate was deliberately allowed to happen by Emperor Lie Fan.
He did not immediately ban the arguments or shutter the teahouses. Instead, he sat in the shadowed, quiet halls of his palace and flawlessly heard and saw everything through the vast, invisible eyes of the Oriole's intelligence network.
The Grandmaster of the Orioles, Jia Xu and Wang Yi ordered their thousands of undercover agents, disguised as barmaids, traveling merchants, and junior scholars, meticulously recorded every impassioned speech, every whispered complaint, and every name of those who spoke against the throne.
Lie Fan allowed the debate because he needed the progressives to publicly defeat the traditionalists in the arena of ideas, giving the doctrine legitimacy. But whenever there was any dangerous sign of extremist traditionalists that wanted to make a bigger problem, taking their grievances from mere academic debate to plotting sedition, or actively attempting to incite rebellion over this matter, they were immediately and quietly silenced by Lie Fan's hidden agents.
There were no grand, public executions to create martyrs for the old ways. Instead, an extremist noble plotting to fund a localized uprising would simply suffer a sudden, fatal heart attack in his sleep. A radical scholar attempting to wrote seditious, anti Nationalism pamphlets would mysteriously disappear on a dark road, never to be seen again, his printing press burning to the ground due to a "tragic accident."
Lie Fan was entirely ruthless in this silent, shadow war, since he desperately wanted this unified ideology to be deeply rooted into the impressionable minds of the common people as soon as possible. He understood the brutal mathematics of societal change. If he could protect the ideology long enough for a single generation of children to grow up reciting it every morning, it would become indestructible.
He knew that after the uneducated, laboring masses fully accepted it, finding immense pride and a sense of shared belonging in being 'Citizens of Hengyuan' rather than mere peasants of a specific province, the proud nobles, the stubborn scholars, and the wealthy merchant class wouldn't have any choice but to eventually follow along.
If the very people who tilled their fields and served in their local militias fervently believed in the Nation, the elite could not afford to oppose it without risking being torn apart by their own workforce. And then, trapped by the overwhelming populist tide, they will be effectively forced to live up to the new ideology, publicly demonstrating their 'patriotism' just to maintain their social standing.
The sheer, terrifying genius of this sociological trap was not lost on the elite. Lie Fan, of course, knew the educated upper class could clearly see that this was just another brilliant, calculated way of Lie Fan making absolutely sure that his ruling Clan and the Hengyuan Dynasty stay permanently on top of the hierarchy.
By tying the survival of the 'Nation' directly to his bloodline, he was making his family legally and philosophically untouchable. But despite realizing they were being entirely outmaneuvered and systematically stripped of their independent, regional power, there was absolutely nothing they could do to actively go against him. The military loved him, the commoners worshipped him, and the shadows were filled with his assassins.
Predictably, the tension from the streets eventually boiled up into the daily Imperial Court.
Inside the massive, golden pillared throne room, there were many conservative voices, older officials who had survived the transition from the Han Dynasty and still held onto their ancient aristocratic pride, that loudly protested against this new ideology. During the morning assemblies, they would throw themselves to their knees, weeping loudly, desperately hoping and petitioning that Lie Fan, as the emperor, would immediately ban this dangerous doctrine from being taught in the imperial academies.
"Your Majesty! It disrupts the harmony of the classes!" an elderly minister would cry out, his forehead pressed to the jade floor. "It teaches the peasant that he shares the same 'National Soul' as a Duke! It will breed arrogance in the lower castes and destroy the rigid hierarchy that the ancestors built! We beg of you, withdraw these texts before the natural order is broken!"
But, of course, Lie Fan just sat on his towering golden dragon throne and stayed completely silent. His face was a mask of unreadable, terrifying calm. He did not yell, he did not argue, and he did not justify his actions to men who were stuck in the past.
Instead, he let his loyal inner circle of advisors, all of whom are the high-ranking Ministers, Vice Ministers, or Heads of Departments like Jia Xu, Zhuge Liang, Sima Yi, and Guo Jia, brilliantly debate and ruthlessly quell the panicked traditionalists for him.
Sima Yi would step forward, his voice dripping with cold, flawless logic. "Harmony? The 'natural order' you speak of resulted in four hundred years of warlords burning our fields and barbarians raiding our borders. His Majesty's doctrine is the ultimate order. It binds the peasant's strength to the Duke's wisdom, forging a weapon that cannot be broken. Are you suggesting, Minister, that your personal pride is more important than the impenetrable defense of the empire?"
Jia Xu would add a thinly veiled, chilling threat, his dark eyes locking onto the trembling conservatives. "To oppose the unification of the people's spirit is to invite fracture. And those who invite fracture into His Majesty's realm are often found to be harboring treasonous intent. Are you quite certain you wish to continue this line of petitioning?"
Faced with the impenetrable wall of Lie Fan's silence and the razor sharp and devastating counter attacks from the greatest administrative minds in history, the conservative voices in the court were systematically crushed, humiliated, and forced into submission. The ideological conquest of the mainland was proceeding flawlessly.
Meanwhile, far away from the exhausting, venomous political battlefield of the capital, the empire's technologies development was making terrifying strides.
Down on the eastern coastlines, where the smell of salt and sea breeze mixed with the heavy, suffocating scent of burning coal and sulfur, the Imperial Shipyards were a hive of relentless, frenzied activity. The era of the wind dependent navy was rapidly coming to a violent end.
The powerful, hissing steam engines that had been successfully tested in the capital were currently beginning to be put into the standard wooden Hengyuan boats. The engineering corps had reinforced the internal keels of the massive wooden galleons, installing the heavy iron boilers deep within the bowels of the ships.
When the first wooden steam ship was launched into the coastal waters, its massive side mounted paddlewheels churning the water into white foam without a single sail being unfurled, the watching sailors and admirals wept in sheer disbelief. The ship moved against the prevailing winds, a mechanical leviathan tearing through the waves, proving that the concept was a complete, undeniable success.
However, Lie Fan's ambition was never satisfied with merely 'good enough.' While the wooden steamships were a marvel, the revolutionary, armor plated steel boats are heavily in progress, being developed and tested day and night in a highly classified, heavily guarded drydock.
These were to be the true monsters of the Eastern Expansion, massive warships with their wooden hulls entirely plated in thick, interlocking sheets of forged steel, designed to be completely impervious to enemy arrows, grappling hooks, and even light artillery.
But turning a mountain of iron into a floating fortress was pushing the era's understanding of physics to its absolute breaking point. It is proving very hard for the master engineers to find the exact right weight distribution and proper hull materials to make sure the heavy metal stays afloat.
Time and time again, the prototypes failed catastrophically. A massive, steel plated hull would be launched from the drydock, only to groan under its own immense weight, tilt violently to one side as the water rushed over the gunwales, and sink straight to the muddy bottom of the harbor like a dropped anvil.
Yue Ying, Huang Chengyan, Liu Ye, and Zhuge Liang spent weeks covered in grease, mud, and saltwater. They argued furiously over displacement theories, constantly redrawing their blueprints, trying to balance the immense weight of the steam boilers, the steel plating, and the heavy artillery without compromising the ship's buoyancy.
Interestingly, despite receiving the frustrated reports detailing the sunken prototypes, Lie Fan purposely doesn't give them any hints or help from his modern knowledge regarding buoyancy, water displacement, or the Archimedes principle. He possessed the knowledge of the future within his reincarnated mind, and he could have easily sketched out the exact mathematical formulas required to make the steel ships float perfectly on the first try.
But he deliberately held his tongue. He deeply wanted the brilliant minds of Yue Ying, Huang Chengyan, Liu Ye, and Zhuge Liang to be the ones who founded and solved the complex engineering physics themselves. He knew that if he simply handed them the answers from a future they didn't understand, they would remain mere mechanics following a recipe.
But if they fought through the failure, if they cracked the secrets of the physical world through their own rigorous testing, observation, and intellectual breakthroughs, they would become true, peerless scientists.
By withholding the answer, he was forcing the era itself to evolve, ensuring that Hengyuan's technological supremacy would be self sustaining long after he was gone. He wanted them to truly advance the era's knowledge, and the only way to do that was through the crucible of failure.
While the steel hulls remained a frustrating puzzle, the offensive capabilities of the navy were seeing unprecedented success. As for the devastating Water Dragon and the Fierce Fire Oil Cabinet, they are also currently being mounted onto the prows and broadsides of the successful wooden steam warships.
The admirals, including Gan Ning and Zhou Yu, demanded that these weapons not just be tested in the safety of a stone courtyard, but so they could be properly combat tested on the open water.
Out on the choppy, unpredictable swells of the eastern sea, the tests were a terrifying spectacle. The warships, belching black smoke from their steam stacks, maneuvered flawlessly against the tides. The pressurized Water Dragons fired massive, solid columns of seawater across the waves, demonstrating their ability to sweep an enemy deck clean of boarding parties even while the ship was pitching violently in the swells.
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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