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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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It was time to open the Book of Knowledge. It was time to trace the bloodlines. It was time to hunt down the specific, microscopic genetic sparks that would one day threaten to burn the world to ash, and quietly, permanently snuff them out. The true, terrifying purpose of the grand northern campaign was finally about to be realized.
So, in the absolute, suffocating privacy of his isolated command tent, the true work that belongs to Lie Fan began.
Outside, the howling winds of the northern steppes battered against the heavy, treated canvas, carrying the distant, muffled sounds of a million man army resting in the freezing night. But inside the sprawling pavilion, the atmosphere was completely still, entirely divorced from the mortal world beyond its flaps.
Lie Fan stood alone in the center of the room. He had taken extreme, uncompromising measures to ensure his absolute secrecy. Before stepping into the tent, he had explicitly, sternly given out the strict order that absolutely no one was to enter without his direct, vocal permission.
He had stationed the members of the Yellow Ghost Bodyguards in a wide, impenetrable perimeter around his quarters, with orders to execute any man who stepped within twenty paces of the canvas.
He had even extended this absolute prohibition to his beloved wife. Lu Lingqi, clad in her dark silver armor, her halberd resting in her hands, was personally standing guard just outside the heavy flaps.
Despite her status as his fiercest confidante and partner in the vanguard, Lie Fan could not risk even her laying eyes upon the impossible, otherworldly artifact he was about to summon. She stood in the freezing cold, unquestioningly loyal, forming the ultimate, unbreakable seal between the Emperor and the rest of the universe.
Confident that he was entirely sealed away from prying eyes, Lie Fan approached the massive, heavy oak table that had been placed in the center of the room. Stacked high upon its surface were the sealed wooden chests delivered by Sima Yi and Xu Shu, the raw, physical harvest of the massive census.
Lie Fan unlatched the heavy iron clasps of the chests, throwing open the lids to reveal mountains of bound silk scrolls and tightly tied bundles of bamboo slips. Millions of names, spoken in terror and extracted in blood, were trapped within the ink.
Taking a deep, centering breath, Lie Fan closed his eyes and reached deep into his consciousness, connecting with the hidden, mysterious system that had guided his hand since his rebirth into this era.
With a silent, mental command, he accessed his hidden system inventory.
The air above the wooden table shimmered, the ambient temperature dropping slightly as the laws of physics were quietly, miraculously subverted. A soft, ethereal, and faintly glowing light materialized from the ether, slowly coalescing into a tangible form.
The Book of Knowledge manifested into his waiting hands. It did not look like a mundane tome of paper and leather, it pulsed with a faint, otherworldly luminescence, its pages appearing almost holographic, containing the absolute, unvarnished sum of all human history, past, present, and future.
Lie Fan set the glowing, ethereal pages of the Book of Knowledge down beside the mundane, blood stained ledgers of the Hengyuan scribes.
He pulled up a heavy wooden stool, trimmed the wick of the nearest oil lamp to provide a steady, mundane light to mask the glow of the artifact, and began the meticulous, agonizingly slow process of cross referencing the massive list of the tribes that had been gained through the intense interrogations.
The process of the cross referencing was quite long, incredibly tedious, and profoundly, intensely mentally exhausting.
Lie Fan opened the first silk scroll, reading the elegant, hurried calligraphy of a Han scribe documenting the confessions of a shattered Xianbei clan.
He then turned his eyes to the glowing, shifting text of the Book of Knowledge, mentally navigating through centuries of future sociological and demographic data, searching for the roots of the Mongol Empire.
He needed to carefully look into the names one by one and see the future genealogy of each tribe according to the Book.
It was a task that would have broken a lesser mind within an hour. The linguistic barriers alone were a nightmare. The names recorded by the Han scribes were phonetic approximations of harsh, guttural nomadic dialects. Lie Fan had to sound out the syllables, cross referencing the Han characters with the fluid, shifting phonetic translations within his system database.
Furthermore, the nomadic lifestyle was inherently chaotic. Tribes splintered, merged, took on the names of charismatic warlords, and discarded their ancestral titles based on the shifting tides of steppe politics.
Of course, Lie Fan quickly realized that not all of it was perfectly filled within the Book of Knowledge. The future history he was reading was written by the victors, compiled by scholars centuries after the fact.
The brutal reality was that not all nomadic tribes leave enough solid evidence behind to be accurately recorded in future history. Countless minor clans, broken families, and wandering splinter groups simply vanished into the dust of time, leaving absolutely no historical footprint.
This missing data made his task exactly like finding a needle in a colossal, continent sized haystack.
Hour after hour passed. The oil lamps burned low, casting long, dancing shadows against the canvas walls. Lie Fan's eyes burned with fatigue, his vision swimming as he poured over thousands upon thousands of names. Tuoba. Yuwen. Murong. Luandi. Huyan.
He discarded them one by one. He traced their lineages in the glowing book, watching as they rose to prominence in the Five Barbarians uprising, only to be eventually assimilated, slaughtered, or faded into obscurity.
They were threats, certainly, but they were not the threat. They were not the apocalyptic storm that would eventually ride under the banner of the Eternal Blue Sky. They were not the Khamag Mongol. They were not the ancestors of Temüjin.
He rubbed his temples, a dull, throbbing ache settling behind his eyes. He poured himself a cup of cold tea, drinking it down to shock his system awake, and opened the next heavy chest of ledgers. These contained the interrogations extracted from the deepest remnants of the Xiongnu forces.
He resumed the grueling research, refusing to yield to his physical exhaustion. The fate of the entire world, centuries from this exact night, rested entirely upon his bleeding eyes and his relentless focus.
It took all night of grueling, mind numbing research until, in the absolute darkest, quietest hour just before the dawn, Lie Fan finally found a small piece of evidence.
His finger traced a line of text on a bamboo slip. It detailed a relatively small, highly obscure sub tribe of the Xiongnu confederation, a deeply isolated group of herders and hunters who grazed their livestock in the harsh, unforgiving valleys near the distant Khentii Mountains. The translated name of their patriarchal lineage possessed a very specific, unique phonetic root.
Lie Fan immediately turned to the Book of Knowledge, his heart rate spiking with a sudden, icy adrenaline. He inputted the phonetic roots, cross referencing their specific migratory patterns and their marital alliances with the surrounding minor clans.
The ethereal pages blurred, the data shifting and calculating, before finally settling on a historical projection.
The match was not perfect. The clue was not enough to definitively know, with absolute, one hundred percent certainty, if these specific, obscure tribes from the Xiongnu remnants were the exact, direct ancestors that would eventually converge and give birth to Genghis Khan.
The fog of unrecorded history was too thick, and the genetic deviations over centuries were too vast to offer a flawless guarantee.
However, the geographical origins, the marital traditions recorded by the scribes, and the linguistic roots of their clan name were far, far too suspicious to ignore. The probability was terrifyingly high.
This was the seed. This was the proto lineage that, if allowed to fester and multiply in the deep northern forests, would eventually mutate into the Borjigin clan.
Lie Fan stared at the name on the bamboo slip. He felt a dark, chilling sensation wash over him. He was looking at the great great great grandfathers of the apocalypse.
He did not hesitate. He did not feel a shred of mercy.
Lie Fan immediately documented the specific names of the sub tribe, the chieftains, and their exact holding locations within the POW camps into his own personal, heavily ciphered scrolls. He marked them with a specific, completely innocuous looking administrative code, a code that he would personally hand to Chancellor Jia Xu the following morning.
The code meant that these specific families were to be permanently separated from the rest of the horde. They would not be conscripted into the auxiliary cavalry. They would not be settled on the borders.
They would be quietly, surgically transported in the dead of night to the most lethal, malaria infested labor camps deep within the southern jungles of Jiaozhi, where they would toil in the deep copper mines until the last man, woman, and child succumbed to the earth, entirely erasing their genetic code from the timeline forever.
After writing the damning execution orders down, Lie Fan let out a long, heavy exhale, the tension finally leaving his massive shoulders. The monumental, terrifying task was complete. He had reached his hand into the river of time and crushed the leviathan while it was still a minnow.
He stood up, his joints popping from hours of remaining hunched over the desk. He closed the ethereal Book of Knowledge.
With a mere thought, the glowing artifact dissolved into motes of pale light, safely storing the Book of Knowledge back into his hidden system inventory where no one, in this world or any other, could ever find it.
The secret was secure. The ledgers were just mundane ink once again.
After that was safely done, Lie Fan extinguished all but one of the oil lamps. He stepped away from the administrative section of his command tent, pushing aside a heavy velvet curtain to go into his private sleeping quarters.
The air here was warmer, heated by a large, smokeless charcoal brazier.
Lu Lingqi was there, having finally been relieved of her guard duty outside by the shifting rotation of the Yellow Ghosts. She had stripped off her heavy, dark silver plate armor, though she remained dressed in her soft, dark crimson arming tunic.
She was sitting on the edge of the large, fur lined cot, waiting for him. Her eyes were heavy with fatigue, but she remained awake, unwilling to sleep until her Emperor had rested.
Lie Fan walked over to her, the sheer, crushing exhaustion of the night's dark work finally catching up to his physical body. He sat down heavily beside her, leaning his head against her shoulder.
"The night was long, my husband," Lu Lingqi whispered softly, reaching up to gently run her fingers through his dark hair, untangling the knots left by the freezing wind.
"It was longer than you could possibly know, Qi'er," Lie Fan murmured, his voice incredibly soft, finding a profound, desperately needed solace in her grounding, mortal presence. He wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her close, burying his face in the crook of her neck, breathing in the scent of her skin.
He did not speak of the genocide he had just orchestrated on parchment. He did not speak of the centuries of history he had just manipulated. For the next few hours, he allowed himself to simply be a man, seeking the warmth of his wife in a freezing, hostile world.
They lay back upon the heavy furs, pulling the thick woolen blankets over themselves. Sheltered in each other's arms, the Warlord of the Earth and his fierce Valkyrie finally went to sleep, catching a few, precious hours of rest before the world demanded their blood once more.
When the next day arrived, the pale, gray light of the northern sun broke across the sprawling encampment. The atmosphere in the camp shifted entirely.
The quiet, meticulous administrative focus of the past few days vanished like smoke in a gale. The scribes packed away their brushes and ink, retreating to the rear of the logistical trains.
The heavy, armored infantry began to form their massive, perfectly ordered blocks. The cavalry handlers removed the blindfolds from the draft horses attached to the artillery trains, checking the traces and the powder barrels.
The attacks on the northern plains officially continued.
The imperial forces had rested and recuperated for several days. Their muscles were no longer burning with the fatigue of the long march. Their bellies were full of hot grain and salted meat.
The Cannons had been thoroughly cleaned, their bronze barrels gleaming dull and lethal in the morning light. The men were entirely refreshed, and their morale, fueled by the staggering success of the initial invasion, was at an absolute, fanatical zenith.
Miles away, spread across the freezing, rocky tundra, the battered remnants of the three tribes of Xiongnu, Xianbei, and Wuhuan were supposedly ready and braced for the assault now.
Over the past few days, driven by the sheer, existential terror of absolute annihilation, the surviving nomadic warlords had finally managed to hammer out a fragile, desperate alliance.
They had halted their bitter infighting, realizing that their ancient blood feuds were a luxury they could no longer afford. They had combined their remaining forces, forming a massive, desperate horde.
They thought they had used the Han's resting period effectively. They had dug deep, concealed trenches in the snow to break the charge of the heavy cataphracts.
They had positioned their remaining elite horse archers on the high ridges, planning to use the harsh, freezing terrain to bleed the Han infantry dry. They had rallied their courage, singing the ancient war songs of their ancestors, convincing themselves that the initial defeat was merely a surprise, and that now, facing a prepared steppe defense, the southerners would break against their resilience.
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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