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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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When the rhythmic, thundering sound of thousands of marching boots approached their settlements, the villagers panicked. They frantically gathered their children, locked their flimsy bamboo and paper doors, and hid their families in root cellars, caves, and deep within the surrounding bamboo forests. They fully expected to be brutally slaughtered, their crops burned to ash, or to be rounded up in chains and enslaved by the foreign demons.
But as the occupation progressed over the following weeks, and as the dust of the marching columns settled, the terrified locals slowly began to understand a shocking, completely unexpected truth.
The highly disciplined Hengyuan soldiers absolutely do not plunder them.
This was a profound revelation that completely shattered the islanders' understanding of warfare. In their own history, when a rival Yamato clan conquered a territory, the victorious warriors would inevitably pillage the villages, seizing rice, livestock, and women as the spoils of war. The peasantry always suffered the most.
But the soldiers of the Black Dragon operated under a completely different, infinitely more terrifying set of laws. Lie Fan had instilled a discipline so rigid that it bordered on fanaticism. The troops did not steal their crops. They did not burn their homes. They did not lay a single, harmful hand upon their women. When a Hengyuan quartermaster needed rice or fish to feed his men, he did not take it by the sword, he approached the village headman with a Goguryeo translator and paid for the supplies in pure, minted imperial silver or copper coins.
In fact, the locals soon realized that the imperial army actively worked to keep secure control of their regions, establishing a level of safety they had never experienced.
The island of Kyushu had been deeply fractured by endless, petty clan warfare for centuries. Bandits roamed the mountain passes, and rogue samurai terrorized the farming villages. But when the Hengyuan garrisons arrived, they brought the absolute, uncompromising law of the mainland with them.
When a group of local bandits attempted to raid a rice caravan, a squad of Hengyuan repeating crossbowmen hunted them down within the day, leaving their arrow riddled bodies hanging from the trees as a grim warning.
When a rogue, deeply proud Yamato warlord hiding in the mountains tried to take advantage of the chaos and launched a guerrilla attack on a Hengyuan supply line, Zhang Liao simply diverted a heavy artillery unit. The warlord's mountain fortress was reduced to rubble by explosive Hwacha rockets in less than an hour.
By ruthlessly crushing any source of instability, the invaders inadvertently became protectors. They brought an unprecedented, deeply peaceful stability to the fractured, bleeding lands. The farmers realized they could plant their crops without fear of them being burned by a rival clan next month.
The merchants realized the roads were suddenly completely safe from bandits. Slowly, tentatively, the people of Yamato emerged from their hiding places and returned to their lives, finding that life under the shadow of the Black Dragon was surprisingly safe, so long as they remained absolutely obedient.
Meanwhile, while the peasantry was being won over by the iron peace, a massive, island wide disarmament campaign was ruthlessly enacted against the former ruling class.
The Hengyuan leadership knew that a conquered people could never truly rebel if they had nothing to fight with. The prized weapons, the beautifully crafted katanas that had been passed down through generations of samurai families, the longbows made of laminated bamboo, and the distinctive, intricately laced traditional armors of Yamato's warriors were systematically confiscated.
Heavily armed Hengyuan patrols, guided by the local magistrates and the intelligence gathered by the Oriole Agents, went from estate to estate, village to village. They did not ask politely. They demanded the surrender of all martial equipment. If a samurai refused to hand over his ancestral blade, he was immediately executed for treason against the Emperor, and his family's lands were seized.
The collected weaponry was piled high in the center of the conquered towns. To ensure they could never be used again, the Hengyuan engineers built massive, roaring smelting furnaces on site. The beautiful, folded steel of the Yamato swords was unceremoniously melted down into raw iron ingots, which were then shipped back to the mainland to be recast into Hengyuan cannonballs and steam engine parts.
By stripping the native military class of their fangs, Guo Jia and Sima Yi were ensuring no rebellion could ever spark. The once proud Yamato's warriors, stripped of their armor and their swords, were reduced to commoners. They were forced to take up farming tools, tilling the very fields they used to rule over, their martial pride completely broken by the relentless, grinding bureaucracy of the empire.
But while the island was being physically subdued by the army and the disarmament patrols, a silent, far more devastating conquest was happening behind the closed doors of the conquered capital.
The physical destruction of the walls was only the beginning. The entire ancient, deeply ingrained government structure of Yamato was being brutally torn down and completely restructured from the ground up by the peerless political minds of Guo Jia, Xi Zhicai, Sima Yi, and Jia Kui.
They sat within the repaired wings of the royal palace, working late into the night by the light of oil lamps, surrounded by mountains of translated local scrolls and ledgers. They were not just occupying the island, they were completely restructuring it.
They flawlessly replaced the old, decentralized tribal laws, which relied heavily on bloodlines, local customs, and shamanistic omens, with the highly efficient, rigidly structured, and centralized bureaucracy of the Hengyuan Dynasty.
Jia Kui implemented a completely new taxation system, directly tying the agricultural output of Kyushu to the imperial treasury in Xiapi. Xi Zhicai established a network of paved imperial roads and standardized courier stations, ensuring that information and troops could move across the island at terrifying speeds. Sima Yi orchestrated the integration of the local economy into the mainland trade network, effectively making Yamato entirely economically dependent on Hengyuan merchants.
And Guo Jia, the master of psychological warfare, oversaw the implementation of the Nationalism ideology. He ordered the construction of imperial schools in every major town, where the children of Yamato would be taught the Han language, the history of the Hengyuan Dynasty, and the absolute, divine supremacy of the Dragon Throne. They would learn to view themselves not as subjects of a defeated island king, but as citizens of the greatest empire the world had ever known.
Through this relentless, perfectly executed combination of overwhelming military terror, iron fisted pacification, and brilliant bureaucratic restructuring, the four strategists were forever binding the island of Wa to the absolute will of Lie Fan.
Meanwhile, trapped within the gilded cage of his own ancestral home, Governor Tarashihiko, no longer a king, but a highly monitored subject, watched the changing of his world from the high, lattice wood windows of the inner keep.
The sprawling capital city below, once a chaotic, vibrant hub of competing samurai clans and disorganized local markets, was transforming before his very eyes. He watched the meticulous, almost mechanical restructuring of the streets, the aggressive, perfectly organized distribution of grain, and the rapid consolidation of Hengyuan's influence across the entire island of Kyushu.
Standing by the window in his simple, unadorned robes, having been stripped of his royal silks, Tarashihiko was completely shocked and in utter awe. He had spent his entire life believing that military might and administrative capability were entirely separate entities. In Yamato, the strongest warrior ruled, and the scribes merely recorded his decrees.
He didn't expect that the foreign nation who had so brutally defeated him not only possessed a terrifyingly advanced, apocalyptic military, but was also governed by a highly efficient, peerless bureaucracy that operated with the precision of a finely tuned clock.
He watched in stunned silence as the Hengyuan magistrates, flanked by Goguryeo translators and unarmed, politely authoritative guards, went from door to door. They were not demanding tribute with swords drawn, they were conducting an exhaustive, highly organized census, recording every name, every profession, and every plot of arable land. He saw the newly established courier stations operating flawlessly, dispatching fast riders along the coast with a speed and regularity that his own messengers could never achieve.
Most importantly, he was amazed that they actually knew exactly how to consolidate their massive political and cultural influence without putting any more unnecessary trauma, bloodshed, or suffering upon his defeated people. He had fully anticipated that his surrender would merely delay a mass slaughter.
But instead, the common people were being fed, the streets were clean, and the rampant banditry that had plagued the outer districts for decades had been eradicated in a matter of weeks by the iron fisted Hengyuan patrols.
Tarashihiko realized, with a profound, bitter mixture of shame and awe, that Emperor Hongyi was not just a conqueror of land, he was a master of human civilization. The Hengyuan Dynasty was simply a superior, more highly evolved entity, and resisting them had been as foolish as trying to stop the tide with a wooden shield.
However, although the peaceful, administrative consolidation of Kyushu was going smoothly for some time, bringing a strange, ordered quiet to the southern island, it absolutely doesn't mean that the brilliant minds of the expedition were resting on their laurels.
Behind the heavily guarded, closed doors of the commandeered command pavilion, the intellectual core of the invasion was already looking northward and eastward. Guo Jia, Xi Zhicai, Sima Yi, and Jia Kui were aggressively preparing the grand, highly detailed tactical maps to invade the massive, fiercely independent northern island of Honshu, and also the heavily fortified eastern island of Shikoku, where the mysterious, powerful Yamatai kingdom lay.
They knew that Kyushu was merely the beachhead. The true, grueling war for the archipelago was yet to come. Sima Yi plotted the naval blockades required to isolate Honshu's fractured warlords, while Guo Jia coughed into his silk handkerchief, outlining a dozen different psychological traps designed to shatter the spiritual authority of Queen Himiko before a single shot was fired.
While the strategists plotted the future, Supreme Commander Zhang Liao ruthlessly managed the present. He made sure the massive army was at peak, unyielding readiness. He aggressively oversaw the stockpiling of the endless logistics, the thousands of tons of salted grain, and the highly volatile black powder supplies needed for the next brutal step of the campaign. He ran his infantry through daily, exhausting drills on the beaches, ensuring the men did not grow soft during the occupation.
Simultaneously, down at the massive, newly constructed wooden harbors, the atmosphere was one of intense, organized maritime labor. The four veteran admirals, Zhou Yu, Gan Ning, Huang Zu, and Jiang Qin,bmeticulously made sure that the thousands of transport ships were seaworthy once more. They oversaw the patching of hulls, the replacement of rigging, and the intricate maintenance of the complex steam engines.
They ensured that their battle hardened naval marines, men who had just conquered one sea, were more than ready to brave the treacherous, whirlpool infested straits once again. The Black Dragon had merely paused to digest its first meal, its jaws were already opening to consume the rest of the rising sun.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles back on the peaceful, infinitely wealthy mainland of the Hengyuan Dynasty, far removed from the smoke and mud of the island campaigns, a deeply personal and historic moment was taking place at the capital of Xiapi.
Lie Fan had momentarily stepped away from the crushing, endless bureaucratic weight of the throne. He was enjoying some rare, precious quality time with Muchen, his beloved eldest son and the official, highly anticipated heir to his grand throne as the Crown Prince.
They were standing in a highly secured, private outdoor courtyard of the inner palace. The area was surrounded by high stone walls and meticulously guarded by a ring of silent, completely loyal Yellow Ghost Bodyguards, ensuring absolute privacy.
The spring air was warm, carrying the scent of blooming plum blossoms, but Lie Fan's focus was entirely on the terrifying, dark steel objects resting on a heavy oak table. He was proudly showing the newly perfected, mass produced flintlock pistol and the heavy, flared blunderbuss to the 13 year old Muchen.
The young prince, dressed in high quality, practical silk training robes, looked at the weapons with a mixture of intense curiosity and healthy apprehension. He had been tutored by the greatest martial artists and scholars in the empire, but these weapons defied everything he had been taught about combat.
Lie Fan did not just hand the weapon to the boy; he carefully, methodically taught his son the deadly mechanics of the new era. He showed Muchen how to properly load the precise, measured amount of black powder from the brass flask, how to securely pack the wadding, and how to safely use the heavy iron ramrod to push the lead ball down the oiled steel barrel. He explained the intricate, high tension spring mechanism of the flintlock, demonstrating exactly how the striking flint generated the spark that ignited the flash pan.
"This is not a sword, Muchen," Lie Fan explained, his voice low and serious. "A sword requires your physical strength. A bow requires your breath. This... this requires only your will. It is the absolute, concentrated destruction of the elements, placed into the palm of your hand."
To demonstrate the terrifying, destructive power it has, Lie Fan stepped up to the firing line. Fifty paces away, a thick, solid oak target had been set up, covered in the heavy iron chainmail of a western barbarian.
Lie Fan raised the sleek flintlock pistol, aiming down the polished steel barrel with a cold, steady eye. He pulled the hammer back until it clicked, took a breath, and squeezed the trigger.
BANG!
The deafening, thunderous roar of the gunshot shattered the tranquility of the palace gardens. The sharp, concussive crack of the explosion was entirely unlike the deep, distant booming of the siege cannons, it was a violent, ear splitting report that seemed to tear the very air apart. A thick cloud of white sulfurous smoke instantly erupted from the barrel, momentarily obscuring the Emperor.
The sudden, incredibly violent noise of course completely shocked the young Muchen. The boy jumped backward, his hands instinctively flying to cover his ears, his eyes wide with absolute, primal surprise as the heavy lead ball punched a perfectly round, jagged hole straight through the iron chainmail and deep into the oak behind it.
The echoing, explosive sound violently vibrated through the sprawling corridors of the inner palace.
Within seconds, the serene domestic harmony of the royal household was completely shattered. The sudden, unnatural explosion immediately attracted all of his panicked wives, Empress Ying Yue, and the Imperial Concubines Diao Chan, Cai Wenji, Lu Lingqi, and Zhen Ji.
They rushed into the courtyard in a flurry of beautiful, high-quality silk, surrounded by a dozen heavily armed, deeply panicked palace guards. Their faces were pale, their eyes wide with genuine, heart stopping terror, genuinely thinking that there was a massive bomb exploding within the palace walls, or that a desperate assassination attempt was actively taking place against the Emperor and the Crown Prince.
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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