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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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Lie Fan set the silk scroll down onto the tactical map, right over the territories belonging to the Fuyu and the Yuezhi. He looked up at his brilliant council.c"It seems the dying wolves have finally learned how to howl together," Lie Fan said, his voice entirely calm, devoid of any anxiety. He looked at Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun, and delivered a tactical command that completely contradicted the brutal momentum of their invasion.
"We are going to deliberately slow down the pace of our attack for now," Lie Fan ordered smoothly. "Halt the vanguard's advance. Order General Zhang Liao and General Ma Chao to pull their forward scouting units back by twenty miles. We will hold our current positions and fortify. We are not pushing deeper into the steppes today."
The four advisors blinked, genuinely taken aback. For a brief moment, they were momentarily confused.
"Your Imperial Majesty," Sima Yi began cautiously, his brow furrowing as he processed the order. "If we halt the advance now, we surrender the momentum we paid in blood to achieve. The Xiongnu and Xianbei are broken and routing. If we give them time to rest, they will consolidate their survivors. Worse, if we wait, those envoys might actually succeed. The Fuyu and the Yuezhi possess tens of thousands of fresh, heavily armored cavalry. If they ride south and merge with the horde, we will be facing an army twice the size of the one we just shattered."
"Exactly, Zhongda," Lie Fan smiled, leaning forward, resting his powerful hands on the edge of the map table.
He looked at his advisors, his mind operating on a geopolitical scale that transcended a single battlefield. He was not just fighting a war, he was engineering a permanent, continental cleansing.
He explained to his confused advisors the true, terrifying depth of his logic.
"If we ride out tomorrow and slaughter the starving remnants of the Xiongnu and the Xianbei, we win the war of the central steppes," Lie Fan detailed, tracing a line across the map. "But the Fuyu in the northeast and the Yuezhi in the west will remain safe behind their borders. They will stay in their deep forests and their distant deserts, watching our borders, breeding their horses, and waiting for a century to pass before they become the next great threat to our grandchildren."
Lie Fan tapped the markers representing the outer tribes.
"I do not want to fight a border war every fifty years. I want to eradicate the threat from the entire northern hemisphere," Lie Fan declared, his voice dropping into a register of absolute, cold blooded ambition. "Therefore, we need to give them time. We need to let the desperate envoys speak. We need to let the Fuyu and Yuezhi kings convince themselves that they can break the Hengyuan Dynasty. We must give them the time they need to gather their armies, leave their highly defensible, fortified homelands, and march south to join the three tribes' alliance in the open field."
The brilliant minds of Xun You and Lu Xun instantly grasped the sheer, apocalyptic genius of the strategy. The realization hit them like a physical blow.
By doing this, Lie Fan smoothly reasoned, his eyes locking onto his advisors with predatory satisfaction, they were solving a massive, future geopolitical nightmare before it even started.
"If we were to conquer the central steppes, and then turn our armies toward the Fuyu or the Yuezhi without provocation, history would record us as mindless, bloodthirsty tyrants," Lie Fan explained, the intricate, ruthless pragmatism of his mind fully on display. "The scholars would say we stretched our supply lines to attack peaceful neighbors. We would have to waste time to fabricate a fake reason, a false border dispute, or a flimsy excuse for a future attack on their sovereign lands."
Lie Fan picked up a small, red wooden marker representing a Hengyuan legion and placed it directly in the center of the massive, combined tribal territories on the map.
"But," Lie Fan smiled, his eyes gleaming in the lantern light, "if we wait... if we let them formally ally with our sworn, bleeding enemies... if we let those outer tribes willingly march their armies across the snow to raise their weapons against the imperial banner..."
Lie Fan looked at his four advisors, the true, horrifying scale of his trap finally revealed.
"Once they commit that act of war, Hengyuan will have all the legitimate, undeniable justification it needs," Lie Fan concluded, his voice ringing with the finality of a death sentence. "They will bring their armies out of their deep forests and unassailable deserts, and they will march them right into the firing arcs of our Black Dragon Cannons on the open plains. We will completely conquer them all, entirely and permanently, in one fell swoop."
The command tent descended into a profound, heavy silence as the four titans of intellect fully absorbed the magnitude of the Emperor's vision. He was using the desperate survival instincts of his enemies as a weapon against them, baiting the hidden powers of the world out into the open so he could annihilate them all simultaneously.
Sima Yi swallowed hard, deeply awed by the sheer, terrifying brilliance of his sovereign. He bowed his head. "It is a flawless, divine strategy, Your Majesty. We shall issue the orders to halt the advance. We will let the horde gather."
The trap was set, not with iron, but with patience. The Black Dragon sat quietly in the snow, waiting for the rest of the world to bring their throats to his teeth.
As Lie Fan's calculating, chillingly precise strategic order was formally dictated, sealed, and handed to the aviary masters, the invisible web of imperial command snapped tightly across the vast northern front.
The trained ravens flew through the freezing night, delivering the Emperor's mandate to the three Imperial Armies to strictly obey the deliberate slowing direction that was given.
In the west, Taishi Ci read the ciphered silk scroll by the light of a watchfire, his brow furrowing for a mere fraction of a second before his absolute discipline took over. He ordered his buglers to sound the recall, pulling his heavy shock cavalry back from the throats of the fleeing Xiongnu.
In the east, the veteran Huang Zhong lowered his massive war bow, commanding his repeating crossbowmen to stand down and fortify their captured ridges.
And in the center, Zhang Liao, whose blood was singing with the intoxicating momentum of the slaughter, gritted their teeth and obeyed instantly, yanking hard on their reins to pull their forward scouting units back by a full twenty miles.
The colossal, million man machine of the Hengyuan Dynasty ground to a synchronized, grinding halt. The Black Dragon Cannons were draped in heavy, waxed canvas to protect them from the snow. The heavy infantry drove thick wooden palisades into the permafrost, converting their forward momentum into an impenetrable, static wall of iron.
A brief, eerie lull fell over the bloody battlefield. The unending roar of artillery and the screams of dying horses faded, replaced only by the desolate, howling winds of the northern steppes. To the casual observer, it appeared as though the Han army had exhausted its supply lines or simply lost its nerve in the face of the encroaching, brutal winter.
But during this crucial, deliberately engineered window of silence, the geopolitical tectonic plates of the known world violently shifted.
Deep within the distant, snow choked forests of the northeast, and far across the freezing, arid deserts of the west, the Xianbei, the Xiongnu, and Wuhuan's unified envoys finally had a massive, historic breakthrough in convincing the still internally debating Fuyu and Yuezhi leadership.
For days, the foreign courts had been paralyzed by a tense impasse. The conservative factions of elders had argued passionately against drawing the ire of the Han, insisting that the deep snows and their historical isolation would protect them.
But the silence that suddenly fell over the central steppes did not bring them comfort, it brought absolute terror. The sudden halt of the Hengyuan army did not look like weakness to the seasoned, paranoid warlords of the outer tribes. It looked like a predator pausing to swallow its meal before looking for the next.
The aggressive factions within the Fuyu and Yuezhi seized upon this terrifying silence.
"Do you hear that?" a young, heavily scarred Yuezhi warlord shouted in the grand yurt of his chieftain, pointing toward the eastern horizon. "The thunder has stopped! That means the Xiongnu and Xianbei lines have completely collapsed! The Han Emperor is resting his beasts! If we do not ride now, while the central tribes still have men who can hold a spear, we will be fighting this demon alone when the spring thaws the ground!"
In the great timber halls of the Fuyu, a similar realization dawned. The proud, stubborn kings looked at the frostbitten, weeping envoys of the Wuhuan, men who had once been their arrogant rivals, now reduced to begging on their knees. The undeniable reality of the threat finally shattered their isolationist illusions.
After hearing the undeniable threat and processing the apocalyptic consequences of inaction, finally, the opposing sides within the two outer tribes agreed to swallow their hesitations. The elders slammed their heavy wooden staffs against the floorboards, bowing to the grim necessity of survival.
They officially decided to join the massive war and send their fierce, unbloodied armies to help the three shattered central tribes.
The mobilization was staggering. In the deep northeast, the war horns of the Fuyu echoed through the ancient pines, summoning tens of thousands of armored infantry and sturdy, cold resistant cavalry. They were men who wore thick lamellar armor woven with hardened leather and iron, wielding heavy axes designed to shatter shields.
In the far west, the Yuezhi unlocked their massive armories, bringing forth their terrifying, armored shock troops and elite horse archers whose wealth was displayed in the gold and silver inlays of their scale mail.
They marched out from their safe, unassailable borders, stepping willingly into the jaws of the trap Lie Fan had so masterfully laid for them.
In the future, centuries after the blood had frozen and the snow had melted, this monumental and desperate gathering will be vividly remembered in the history books of the empire. Imperial scholars would write of this exact moment with a mixture of awe and grim satisfaction, officially recording it as the Grand Stand of the Five Barbarian Tribes Against the Hengyuan Dynasty.
It was the singular, defining moment when the entire northern hemisphere threw its collective weight against the dragon of the south, a clash of civilizations that would dictate the genetic and political makeup of the continent for a millennium.
And so, the elite forces of the five big tribes gathered at the massive main headquarters camp they had decided on together, located deep in a sprawling, frozen valley far beyond the immediate reach of the Han artillery.
The sight of the encampment was both magnificent and deeply tragic. Hundreds of thousands of tents dotted the valley floor, creating a temporary city of leather, fur, and desperation. The banners of the five tribes, the wolf of the Xiongnu, the falcon of the Xianbei, the bear of the Fuyu, and the crescent markers of the Yuezhi and Wuhuan, snapped furiously in the biting wind, flying side by side for the first and only time in recorded history.
At the very center of this massive, sprawling horde stood the grand command pavilion. It was a massive structure constructed from the hides of a hundred oxen, heavily guarded by the elite Kheshigs of all five factions, their eyes darting suspiciously at one another even as they stood shoulder to shoulder.
Inside the sprawling command tent, the atmosphere was thick with the smoke of braziers and the heavy, musky scent of armored men. The strongest, most ruthless, and most influential representatives of each of the five tribes took their seats on heavy piles of furs arranged in a wide circle. There were no kings here, only survivors and the doomed.
They began to seriously discuss what they should do now that their forces were combined.
The arithmetic of the war was laid bare before them. Even with the massive influx of fresh troops from the Fuyu and the Yuezhi, the warlords looked at each other and grimly acknowledged the reality of their situation.
Their combined numbers would never reach the overwhelming, endless size of the coming Han people. Lie Fan had brought a million men to the Great Wall, and the logistical trains of the Hengyuan Dynasty were ensuring that those million men were fed, armed, and completely unbothered by the freezing temperatures.
But the men in this tent were proud. They were the apex predators of the most unforgiving environment on earth.
Despite the numerical disadvantage, they fiercely believed that the combined steppe survival experience and the raw, unparalleled martial power of the five tribes could definitely face the southerners in a prolonged war.
"The Han are farmers playing at war in the snow," a proud Fuyu chieftain declared, his voice booming with arrogant confidence. He was a massive man, wearing a cloak of white bear fur over his iron armor.
He had not yet seen the Black Dragon Cannons, he only knew the Han armies of fifty years ago. "They rely on their supply lines. They march in slow, heavy blocks. This is our land. The winter is our greatest ally. We will not fight them in a pitched battle. We will use the deep snows to our advantage. We will bleed them in the passes, cut their supply wagons, and watch them starve in their iron armor!"
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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