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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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"The order was recently sent to me through a highly classified, secret raven messenger directly from Xiapi, General Zhang," Li Wei explained, pulling a small, tightly rolled scroll bearing the Emperor's personal wax seal from his sleeve. "His Majesty wishes for the vassals to bleed for the empire. The local contribution would be around twenty thousand auxiliary soldiers to assist the main army in securing the beachheads and managing the native topography."
Hearing that sudden addition of twenty thousand men, the four naval admirals, Zhou Yu, Gan Ning, Huang Zu, and Jiang Qin, of course, immediately raised severe, highly pragmatic logistical concerns. Zhou Yu, always the elegant perfectionist of naval warfare, set his wine cup down with a sharp clack.
"Governor Li," Zhou Yu began, his voice cold and analytical. "Twenty thousand men is not a small hunting party. We have spent months calculating the exact weight displacement of our armada. We explicitly stated in our reports to the capital that our ships are currently loaded to maximum safe capacity with our own troops, black powder, and steam engines."
Gan Ning leaned forward, his scarred face twisted in an aggressive scowl. "He's right. These additional men would require many more transport ships to be brought into the tight naval formation. We simply don't have much extra capacity in the current Hengyuan fleet to be used to safely carry the Goguryeo soldiers and their accompanying supplies without risking capsizing in a typhoon."
Li Wei did not flinch under the intimidating, combined glare of the empire's greatest admirals. He smoothly responded with a reassuring, politically practiced smile, saying that they need not worry about the displacement of the imperial fleet at all.
"The Emperor's foresight already anticipated that, Admirals," Li Wei explained, gesturing toward the harbor outside. "Goguryeo has its own fleet of transport ships that could be used for the transport. They will not take up a single inch of deck space on your galleons."
He proudly noted that he had anticipated this requirement months in advance. "These native ships have been completely refitted and heavily upgraded by local shipwrights under my strict, personal watch. I ensured that they were rebuilt to strictly meet the exact same structural requirements, the heavy hull reinforcements, and the deep water safety standards as His Majesty's own imperial ships. They are sturdy, and they are ready to sail."
Hearing that incredibly thorough, highly competent preparation, the tension in the room immediately dissipated.
Zhang Liao, sitting at the head of the table and acting with absolute authority as the supreme commander of the entire expedition, exchanged a quick, knowing glance with Sima Yi.
Sima Yi, acting as the brilliant Head Strategist, gave a subtle, calculating nod. The addition of twenty thousand expendable auxiliary troops to absorb the initial arrow fire on the beaches was a tactical advantage they could not deny.
Furthermore, and most importantly, since it is the explicit, unquestionable orders of their Emperor, they both knew there is absolutely nothing they could do to refuse it anyway. To defy a direct order bearing the Black Dragon's seal, even on the edge of the world, was a guaranteed death sentence.
"We accept the auxiliaries, Governor Li," Zhang Liao formally agreed to the integration, his voice carrying the heavy, unyielding tone of a warlord. "Have them form up on the rear flank of the armada. But tell their commanders this: if they break formation, or if they flee when the fighting starts, my crossbowmen will sink their ships before the enemy does."
Li Wei, entirely accustomed to the brutal pragmatism of the Hengyuan military, heard their official acceptance and respectfully bowed. He thanked the generals for accepting the auxiliary force without issue.
Before the strategic banquet could conclude, Li Wei had one final, absolutely critical asset to deliver. He clapped his hands sharply twice.
The flaps of the command pavilion opened, and he called for the specialized Goguryeo translators to enter the pavilion.
A group of twenty men walked in. They were not dressed as soldiers, but wore the simple, pragmatic robes of scholars and merchants. These were the meticulously trained, highly prized assets that Lie Fan had specifically demanded back in the capital.
They were men who had spent years trading across the treacherous eastern straits, surviving pirate raids and negotiating with the insular warlords of the Wa islands.
They, of course, could fluently speak both the refined Han Chinese of the empire and the strange, mysterious, and guttural language of Yamato.
Li Wei formally presented them to the high command of the army. "These men, General Zhang, are your keys to the island. They are here to assist your strategists in future interrogations, to translate intercepted messages, and to conduct any necessary diplomacy before the cannons fire."
Guo Jia's eyes lit up with a chaotic, brilliant delight. He immediately stood up, walking around the table to inspect the translators as if they were fine weapons. "Excellent. A man who cannot speak is a man who cannot lie. And I intend to catch the islanders in many lies."
Time quickly passed after that grand, highly successful strategic meeting. The staging grounds of Jeju-Do became a hive of hyper-focused, final preparations.
After the massive navy ships and their exhausted, salt stained crews managed to rest, resupply, and thoroughly refit the complex steam engines for three solid days in the safety of the Goguryeo peninsula, the colossal fleet was finally ready to execute the Emperor's ultimate ambition.
The morning of the departure broke with a heavy, ominous gray sky, the wind whipping off the ocean with a cold, biting ferocity. It was perfect sailing weather for men who intended to bring a storm.
The mobilization was a terrifying, awe-inspiring spectacle. With the deep, resonant blowing of massive, brass-bound war horns echoing for miles across the choppy ocean, the armada began to move.
More than five hundred towering, heavy warships, the absolute pinnacle of Hengyuan engineering, bristling with black powder cannons, Fire Oil Cabinets, and hissing steam vents, moved to the absolute front of the formation, acting as the main vanguard and the impenetrable command ships.
Behind them, a seemingly endless, terrifying forest of wooden masts and sails followed. They brought the endless armada of hundreds of thousands of heavily armed, highly disciplined soldiers out of the safety of the deep water harbor. The sea itself seemed to groan under the sheer, unprecedented weight of the invasion force.
Leaving the familiar, conquered shores of the mainland behind, the leviathan fleet turned its massive, iron plated prows toward the east. They finally set sail eastward, tearing through the white capped waves, heading straight toward the known, misty, and heavily guarded location of the Yamato Kingdom.
The ocean, which had protected the island nation from mainland interference for thousands of years, was no longer an impenetrable shield.
The tense, perilous sailing across the unpredictable eastern seas lasted for quite a while. The colossal Hengyuan armada, a terrifying leviathan consisting of thousands of massive warships and heavy, lumbering transport vessels, cut through the crashing, white capped waves. The sheer volume of the fleet turned the horizon into a moving forest of wood and iron.
They strictly navigated according to the specific directions and maritime charts that they had meticulously gathered over the past year. This vital, life saving navigational knowledge of the Wa archipelago's exact location, the hidden reefs, and the volatile seasonal currents was heavily compiled from the veteran Goguryeo merchants.
These were hardened, pragmatic men who had braved these treacherous waters for decades, and who had frequently come into direct, sometimes violent, but often highly lucrative contact with Yamato's own seafaring merchants for trade.
Guided by the fixed positions of the stars at night, the magnetic compasses designed by Huang Yue Ying, and these invaluable, heavily annotated merchant maps, the four admirals, Zhou Yu, Gan Ning, Huang Zu, and Jiang Qin, proved their absolute mastery of the ocean.
They stood on the decks of the massive command ships, their voices hoarse from shouting orders over the roar of the wind and the hissing of the steam engines. They kept the massive, unwieldy fleet in a tight, impenetrable formation.
The steam powered vanguards pushed through the worst of the swells, creating a calmer wake for the traditional sailing vessels to follow. Through sheer, unrelenting discipline and peerless seamanship, the admirals ensured that not a single ship carrying the heavily armored, violently seasick soldiers was lost to the unforgiving ocean. They were an unstoppable force of iron and flesh, steadily closing the distance to a kingdom that believed itself untouchable.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles back on the mainland, entirely removed from the crashing waves and the salty air, Emperor Lie Fan was tirelessly overseeing a completely different kind of conquest.
From his quiet, incense-filled imperial study in the capital city of Xiapi, he managed the monumental mass migration project. Through the constant, daily flow of Oriole Agent reports and the heavy, densely packed bureaucratic ledgers delivered by Chen Qun and Mi Zhu, Lie Fan proudly watched as his geopolitical masterpiece unfolded.
The massive logistical undertaking, which had seen hundreds of thousands of people uprooted from their ancestral homes in the central plains, finally entered the crucial, incredibly delicate phase of permanent settling and active construction.
The hundreds of thousands of Han migrants, the landless peasants, the starving urban poor, and the desperate second sons, having endured the long, exhausting, and often tragic trek to the newly conquered northern steppes, were finally putting down their roots.
They stepped off the steam wagons and out of the marching columns, looking out over a vast, freezing landscape that promised them something they had never possessed: ownership.
Under the strict, organized guidance of the state, overseen by thousands of newly appointed magistrates from the Ministry of Domestic Development, they did not just pitch tents. They began rapidly building.
The sound of chopping wood, ringing hammers, and shouting foremen replaced the howling of the northern winds. They constructed bustling towns with wide, paved streets, heavily fortified villages surrounded by thick timber palisades to ward off wolves and lingering resentment, and sprawling trading outposts directly over the abandoned, blood-soaked campsites of the former nomadic tribes.
These specific areas of settlement were not chosen at random. They were brilliantly chosen by imperial surveyors, men who had spent the winter mapping the topography under heavy cavalry escort, because they were highly defensible strategic locations that also contained the most fertile, dark soil.
The permafrost was deceiving, beneath it lay a nutritional richness that made them exceptionally good for growing a massive variety of agricultural produce.
The Han farmers, armed with the new, steam-forged iron plows provided by the imperial treasury, immediately began tilling the cold earth. They didn't plant delicate southern rice, but instead sowed the seeds of hearty vegetables, dense root crops, and resilient, cold weather fruits that could survive and thrive in the harsh northern climate.
Furthermore, the agricultural revolution extended beyond mere crops. Massive swaths of the rolling, endless grasslands, territories where the Khans had once freely grazed their war ponies, were officially fenced off with thousands of miles of heavy timber. The Hengyuan Dynasty was bringing absolute, rigid order to the wild.
They established expansive, highly organized animal farms, specifically dedicated to breeding the heavy warhorses required for the imperial cavalry, alongside massive herds of cattle and sheep to feed the rapidly growing, increasingly wealthy empire.
But Lie Fan's vision for the north was not just about agriculture, it was about the complete, permanent eradication of a historical threat.
To completely break the political and cultural power of the defeated nomads, and to ensure they could never again unite to threaten the central plains, Lie Fan had decreed a ruthless but brilliantly calculated assimilation strategy.
The 300,000 surrendered barbarian prisoners who were spared the executioner's blade and brought back to the steppes were not allowed to reform their ancient clans. They were deliberately, surgically split into numerous, isolated groups. The massive, terrifying horde that had once threatened to burn the capital was fractured so that each designated group now rigidly contained exactly 30,000 of them.
These smaller, manageable groups were then forcibly scattered across the vast new agricultural zones. They were explicitly forbidden from living in traditional, roaming encampments.
Instead, they were forced to mingle, live in permanent wooden houses, and work the fields directly alongside the incoming Han settlers. Lie Fan was weaponizing proximity, forcing a cultural merge by making the survival of the nomad entirely dependent on cooperation with the Han farmer.
This monumental rebuilding and assimilation process was heavily assisted by the very men who had conquered the land. The battle hardened Hengyuan soldiers, the veterans who had survived the freezing trenches and the artillery barrages, were not allowed to simply return south to enjoy their spoils.
Hundreds of thousands of infantrymen and cavalrymen were permanently assigned to lay down their halberds and pick up hammers and saws. They worked shoulder to shoulder with the migrants, using their incredible physical strength and military discipline to actively help build the infrastructure, erecting the palisades, digging the deep wells, and paving the wagonways.
Furthermore, these soldiers were strictly ordered by Zhang Liao's deputies to constantly patrol the new, expanding borders. They heavily guarded the mass migration project until the very end, effectively transitioning from a screaming, conquering army into permanent, highly lethal garrison troops.
They built massive stone citadels overlooking the new towns, establishing a presence that will be stationed there forever to protect the new northern frontier from any external threats, and, more importantly, from any internal uprisings.
Naturally, this forced, aggressive integration did not go completely smoothly. Human nature, especially the pride of a conquered people, violently resisted being chained to a plow.
The proud barbarian tribes, the former chieftains, the elite horse archers, and the shamans, at first protested fiercely. They raged against the Han magistrates about the ancestral lands that were being arbitrarily split up, fenced off, and rigidly assigned to them by bureaucrats who had never even ridden a horse bareback.
They hated the very idea of being tied down to one specific plot of farming land instead of roaming free beneath the open sky, following the herds as their ancestors had done for thousands of years.
However, their fiery protests were ultimately impotent. They couldn't protest much, since their complaints were firmly and swiftly rejected by the overseeing magistrates, who simply pointed to the newly established imperial law codes. And more importantly, the nomads knew the brutal reality of their situation. They looked up at the stone citadels and saw the heavily armed Hengyuan garrisons surrounding their camps.
They knew that the men standing on those walls with loaded repeating crossbows could, and absolutely would, annihilate them in an instant if they drew a blade. But of course, the cunning Hengyuan officials, acting on Chancellor Jia Xu's strict, incredibly perceptive psychological instructions, didn't pressure or punish them too much either for these initial verbal protests. Jia Xu knew that a cornered, desperate wolf was far more dangerous than a hungry one.
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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