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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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The women began to wail, tearing their clothes and cutting their own cheeks in the traditional displays of mourning, realizing that their husbands, brothers, and sons would never return from the southern borders. They were completely terrified since they had just lost a staggeringly large amount of their best, most capable warriors in a single crushing blow. It was not just a military defeat, it was a devastating demographic collapse.
The men who had marched out to form the great alliance were the absolute prime fighting force of their societies, the strongest, fastest, and most experienced veterans.
With them gone, leaving behind only the elderly, the wounded, the women, and the young boys who had not yet seen their first hunt, the tribes acutely realized they simply can't defend themselves now against the oncoming Hengyuan juggernaut.
They had thrown their absolute heaviest, sharpest spear at the Black Dragon, and the Dragon had merely swallowed it whole and continued its march.
But the external threat of the encroaching imperial army was only the spark that ignited the true, fatal powder keg within the nomadic societies.
Furthermore, internally, these five major tribes were not monolithic, unified nations. They were actually highly decentralized entities, consisting of a complex, fragile web of many big and small sub tribes, rival families, and distinct clans.
For centuries, these clans had been held together solely by the charismatic strength, military prowess, and brutal authority of powerful, dominant chieftains. A strong Khan could force rival families to ride under the same banner through sheer force of will and the promise of rich southern plunder.
But Lie Fan's highly calculated, surgical artillery strike on the main command pavilion had completely evaporated that binding force. The great Khans, the supreme warlords, and the most influential elders of all five tribes had been instantly vaporized, burned to ash, or crushed beneath falling timber in a single, devastating moment.
Because of the overwhelming, suffocating fear of impending annihilation and the sudden, chaotic vacuum of power from their dead chieftains, the fragile societal structures of the steppes violently imploded.
With the strongmen dead, there was no one left to enforce the laws. There was no one left to distribute the dwindling winter rations fairly. And most importantly, there was no one left to direct their collective terror toward the enemy. Nature, especially the brutal nature of nomadic politics, abhors a vacuum.
In the desperate, freezing camps of the Xiongnu, the Xianbei, the Wuhuan, the Fuyu, and the Yuezhi, the minor clan leaders and the surviving sub chieftains immediately became deeply embroiled in vicious internal debate and violent infighting. The sheer panic eroded any semblance of logic or brotherhood.
Inside a massive, crowded Xiongnu yurt, a minor chieftain of the eastern valleys stood up, his hand resting heavily on the hilt of his curved dagger, his eyes burning with accusation. He pointed across the fire pit at a rival sub chieftain from the western plains.
"This is the fault of your bloodline!" the eastern chieftain screamed, his voice raw and hysterical. "Your cousin was the one who negotiated the alliance with the Fuyu! Your family swore that if we joined the vanguard, the Han would break! You led our finest riders into the mouth of the demon to be slaughtered!"
"Do not dare speak of my cousin, you cowardly dog!" the western sub chieftain roared back, leaping to his feet and drawing his blade. "When the sky rained fire, it was your clan's riders who broke the line first! Your men turned their horses and trampled our foot soldiers in your desperation to flee! You abandoned the center! You are the reason the flanks collapsed!"
Their unity completely evaporated in a matter of hours. The remaining clan leaders furiously blamed each other for the devastating military losses.
It was a psychological defense mechanism, rather than face the terrifying, incomprehensible reality that the Han Dynasty had simply evolved beyond their capacity to fight, it was easier to blame their neighbors for cowardice, betrayal, or poor tactical leadership.
The arguments quickly escalated from shouting matches into drawn steel. The surviving warriors, traumatized, exhausted, and desperately looking for an outlet for their rage and grief, rallied behind their respective clan leaders.
They began pointing fingers and turning their weapons on one another. Across the vast, frozen expanse of the northern hemisphere, thousands of localized, brutal civil wars erupted simultaneously.
In the deep northeastern forests, rival Fuyu lords, desperate to seize control of the remaining hidden grain silos before the imperial army arrived, ordered their heavy infantry to slaughter their own countrymen in the snow. They burned each other's timber halls to the ground, fighting over scraps of food and leadership titles that had been rendered utterly meaningless by the advancing doom.
In the western deserts, the surviving Yuezhi noble families unleashed their elite horse archers upon rival oasis encampments, desperately trying to steal the remaining healthy warhorses so they could flee further into the unknown western territories, leaving the weaker clans behind to die.
In the central steppes, the infighting was the most chaotic and the most bloody. Xiongnu sub tribes ambushed Xianbei stragglers. Wuhuan clans turned on their own elders, executing anyone who suggested surrendering to the Han Emperor, while simultaneously executing anyone who suggested staying to fight.
Brother fought brother in the freezing mud, families severing ties that had held for generations, all driven by the blinding, unreasoning panic of a society facing its own extinction.
They were tearing their own societies apart from the inside, doing the Emperor's bloody work for him before the imperial army even reached their doorsteps.
Miles away, the massive, methodical leviathan of the Hengyuan Dynasty continued its steady, inexorable march northward. The Black Dragon Cannons rolled smoothly over the permafrost, the heavy infantry marched in perfect, silent unison, and the logistics trains hummed with industrialized efficiency.
Lie Fan rode at the center of his invincible machine, looking toward the dark, freezing horizon. He did not need to rush. He did not need to force his men into exhausting, rapid marches to hunt down the scattered remnants of the horde.
He knew exactly what was happening in the distant camps. He had studied the nature of power, fear, and human frailty for two lifetimes. He knew that by amputating the head of the nomadic leadership and inflicting a level of trauma that shattered their martial pride, the tribes would inevitably turn on themselves like starving wolves trapped in a pit.
The Black Dragon simply watched and waited, allowing the enemies of the Hengyuan Dynasty to bleed themselves dry on their own swords, preparing to casually sweep up the ashes of a fallen world.
The violent internal infighting inside the five fractured tribes continued to happen across the steppes, becoming even bloodier and more chaotic as ambitious warlords tore their own societies apart for dwindling power.
The sky above the northern plains remained a heavy, oppressive sheet of slate gray, but the ground below was a chaotic patchwork of fire and slaughter. The grand alliance had not merely been defeated, it had been shattered into a thousand jagged, venomous slivers.
With the supreme Khans and Chanyus vaporized or buried beneath the charred, smoking ruins of the main command pavilion, all semblance of structure had vanished from the nomadic world. The ancient, unwritten laws of the steppes were replaced by a feral, pack like desperation.
Every valley, every frozen riverbank, and every winter encampment became a stage for senseless, close-quarters butchery. Minor chieftains who had once commanded nothing more than a few dozen tents suddenly declared themselves the true heirs to the steppe, demanding absolute obedience from their neighbors.
They raided their own kin, torching the yurts of rival clans within their own tribes just to stamp out any competition for what little authority remained. They fought over the few remaining healthy warhorses, the last bundles of arrow shafts, and the rapidly dwindling stockpiles of winter grain that had survived the initial Han onslaught.
The smoke from burning nomadic settlements rose in thick, black plumes, choking the freezing air. It was a self-inflicted apocalypse; before the imperial legions could even break camp to resume their march, the horse lords were already doing the work of the executioner upon themselves.
Amidst this senseless slaughter, a splinter group of smaller, more pragmatic tribes inside each of the five major factions looked at the unfolding anarchy and decided to abandon the lost cause and run away.
These were the clans that had never shared the grand, blind arrogance of the high Khans. They were the herders, the artisans, the minor border clans who actually had to scrape a living from the hard earth rather than feasting on the hollow promises of southern plunder.
They stood on the peripheries of the screaming council circles, watching their self proclaimed leaders draw steel on one another over empty titles, and they realized with absolute clarity that staying meant absolute death.
They secretly harbored thoughts of actually surrendering completely to the Han Emperor, because they pragmatically felt it was much safer that way to ensure their families' survival.
To these pragmatic clans, the terrifying legends of the Black Dragon were no longer a distant threat to be defied, they were an undeniable, cosmic reality. They deeply, completely understood that their remaining military power was far too weak to ever fight against the demon like Han Emperor and his unstoppable artillery army.
They had seen the iron tubes that spat thunder, they had seen the sky rain fire that turned the snow into a boiling mire of mud and flesh. They knew that courage, horsemanship, and the favor of the Eternal Blue Sky meant absolutely nothing when faced with a million highly disciplined men encased in black iron who marched to the steady, mechanical beat of imperial drums. To continue the war was not an act of honor, it was an act of absolute madness.
Surrendering to the Emperor meant humiliation, yes, and it meant being bound to the iron ledgers of the southern scribes. But it also meant their children would have hot grain to eat, their wives would be sheltered from the freezing winter winds, and their bloodlines would not be wiped out from the pages of history.
Furthermore, a terrifying, immediate danger pressed against their backs. They knew they would inevitably be ruthlessly, savagely hunted down by their former brethren, who will undoubtedly see them as cowardly traitors due to them running away from the tribal infighting.
The fanatic warlords who were currently tearing the tribes apart would not tolerate dissent. If a clan attempted to stand aside from the civil war, or if they refused to send their remaining young boys into the frontline meat grinder, they were branded as turncoats.
Their neighbors would sweep down upon them in the night, slaughtering the elderly and stealing their remaining livestock to fuel their own desperate, doomed campaigns.
Finding themselves completely, terrifyingly trapped between a rock and a hard place, with the unstoppable imperial leviathan advancing from the south and their own rabid, bloodthirsty kin butchering them from the north, surrender was their only hope. It was the lone, narrow path that led out of the slaughterhouse.
So, with having more or less the exact same desperate thoughts for survival, these splinter groups of tribes from each of the five main factions broke away under the cover of chaos and headed directly toward the Hengyuan imperial army's direction.
The escapes were orchestrated with frantic, hushed urgency in the dead of the northern nights. While the major clans were distracted by a bloody skirmish over a winter granary or a midnight assassination of a rival chieftain, these pragmatic sub tribes quietly struck their tents.
They muffled the iron bits of their draft horses with rags, wrapped the wooden wheels of their supply carts in thick wool to silence the creaking against the frost, and gathered their weeping children and elderly. They abandoned their ancestral grazing grounds, turning their backs on the burning heart of the steppes, and slipped southward into the dark, freezing wilderness.
From the deep northeastern forests, a dozen minor Fuyu herding clans broke away from the civil war. From the far western wastes, a collection of Yuezhi merchant clans abandoned their oases. And from the central plains, splinter groups of the Xiongnu, Xianbei, and Wuhuan, containing thousands of families, moved in silent, desperate columns through the snow.
They were all walking toward the very demon they had been told to fear, carrying nothing but their lives and their desperate hope for mercy.
As they migrated across the vast, bleak plains, the scale of this silent exodus became visible. The northern wilderness was immense, but the pathways leading south toward the Great Wall were limited by geography and the positioning of the Han blockades.
When they suddenly saw each other's banners and sprawling caravans in the distance, rising like long, dark serpents against the white horizon, the travelers were of course highly surprised.
A Xiongnu chieftain leading his people stopped his horse on a frozen ridge, his hand instantly dropping to the hilt of his sword as he spotted a massive cloud of snow and dust kicking up from the eastern valley. He braced for a raid, assuming it was a Xianbei war party out to butcher his people for their cattle. His young men notched arrows to their bows, their chests heaving with panic.
But as the distance closed, the expected charge never came. Instead, through the freezing mist, the Xiongnu saw a sprawling, slow moving caravan of wooden carts, grandmothers wrapped in heavy furs, and crying infants, bearing the distinctive, white falcon banners of a Xianbei sub tribe.
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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