Reborn In The Three Kingdoms

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Though their combined population across the massive territory was only about 30,000, their 6,000 tribal hunters were absolutely unmatched in brutal, silent guerrilla warfare and tracking. They wielded deadly, iron tipped hunting bows with terrifying accuracy. More importantly, though they barely utilized it for trade, they controlled massive, entirely untapped resources of iron sand and gold hidden deep within their freezing mountains. They were usually entirely isolationist, content to let the southerners slaughter each other while they hunted the great beasts of the north.

When the powerful warlords and tribal chiefs of these distinct, fiercely proud eastern factions heard of the Hengyuan invasion and the impending collapse of the center, they did not cower. They immediately did the exact same thing as Central Honshu had done: they hastily called a grand, unprecedented council.

Deep within the Kanto plains, beneath the shadow of a massive, ancient cedar tree, the leaders convened. Warlord Arahabaki of Musashi, the elders of Kōzuke, the pirate kings of Kazusa, and even the fur clad, silent chieftains of Mutsu and Dewa gathered around a massive roaring bonfire.

On the surface, they mirrored the actions of the center, agreeing to forge a massive Eastern Coalition to fight off the foreign invaders. They swore oaths by the fire, promising to unite their spears against the demons of the mainland.

However, unlike the desperate, terrified survival instinct that had driven the central clans to unite, these eastern lords secretly harbored incredibly dark, very ambitious, and deeply greedy ulterior motives.

Sitting in their grand war council, drinking fermented rice wine and listening to the crackle of the fire, the leaders of the coalition did not look at the situation with dread. Instead, with a staggering, almost suicidal level of arrogance, they decided that this apocalypse was actually a divine opportunity handed to them by the gods.

”The center burns,” Warlord Arahabaki declared, his voice booming over the flames, his eyes reflecting a terrifying greed. ”Chief Takeinawake is dead. The High Priestess is trapped like a rat in Shinano. The fertile plains of Nobi and the wealthy coasts of Suruga are currently bleeding out.”

”And the mainlanders?” asked a chieftain from Dewa, his voice low and gravelly. ”The survivors say they command thunder.”

”Thunder cannot strike forever!” Arahabaki scoffed, dismissing the terrifying reality of industrialized warfare with the blind confidence of a man who had never seen a cannon. ”They have marched across the ocean. They have fought through the west. They are currently exhausting their strength, wasting their ’thunder’ trying to break the Shinano mountains.”

The elders of Kōzuke nodded in agreement. ”They must be exhausted. Their supply lines are stretched thin. The center is weakened, and the invaders are distracted.”

Blinded by greed, they plotted a grand, treacherous betrayal. They did not intend to simply defend their eastern borders. They planned to swoop in while both the Hengyuan Army and the Central Honshu defenders were allegedly weakened and bleeding from their massive, ongoing battles.

Their true intention was to completely crush the exhausted foreigners in a surprise attack, and then, with the central powers already decimated, ruthlessly carve up the incredibly wealthy, fertile lands of Central and Western Honshu for each power in the coalition. The farmers of Musashi would claim the Nobi plains; the hunters of Mutsu would take the iron mines of the west.

And so, the Eastern Coalition mobilized for war.

They aggressively gathered every single able bodied soldier, every mountain hunter, and every peasant militia they could find. Blacksmiths worked frantically to tip arrows with iron, women wove thick armor from bamboo and leather.

They amassed a surprisingly large army, numbering over twenty five thousand warriors. However, because it was cobbled together from disparate tribes who rarely fought alongside one another, it was an incredibly undisciplined, chaotic force, lacking the rigid command structure of the Hengyuan legions or even the centralized coordination of Owari.

Yet, filled with visions of conquest and plunder, they proudly began to march.

They descended from their highly defensible, freezing mountains, and marched out from the dense, protective forests of the Kanto plains. They began this massive military campaign moving westward, under the noble, heroic public guise of looking to actively relieve and save Central Honshu from the foreign invaders. They sent fast riders ahead, shouting to the terrified villagers that the true warriors of the east had come to liberate them.

But all of it was a wicked and deeply cynical ruse, they were coming to conquer, not to save. They intended to let the Hengyuan forces finish slaughtering the Shinano defenders, and then strike the victors in the back.

However, in a brilliant, devastating twist of fate, this deceitful ruse was also their absolute, ultimate downfall.

The eastern lords, for all their tribal cunning, were playing a geopolitical game against grandmasters who had unified a continent. By choosing to march, it was their sheer, unadulterated greed that caused them to foolishly abandon their impenetrable natural terrain. They willingly gave up the choking, narrow mountain passes of Kōzuke that would have negated cavalry. They abandoned the dense, freezing forests of Mutsu where guerrilla warfare could have bled the invaders for decades.

They voluntarily marched their entire combined, undisciplined military power right out into the open plains, believing they were the predators stalking wounded prey.

Instead, they were walking directly into the blood soaked, patiently waiting jaws of Zhang Liao and the Hengyuan war machine.

Miles away, at the base of the besieged Shinano mountains, Zhang Liao was not exhausted. His army was not depleted. His supply lines, masterfully managed by Xi Zhicai, were overflowing with grain seized from the central plains.

He was standing inside the grand command pavilion, casually reviewing a logistics report, when a high-ranking Oriole Agent entered. The agent did not speak; he simply handed a small, decoded silk cipher to Sima Yi.

Sima Yi read the cipher, his usually stoic face breaking into a wide, genuinely amused smile. He walked over to the massive topographical table and placed a wooden marker representing a massive enemy force right in the middle of the open plains leading to the east.

”Generals,” Sima Yi announced, his voice dripping with dark irony. ”It appears the east has decided to save us a tremendous amount of time. Warlord Arahabaki and his grand eastern coalition have abandoned their mountains. They are marching twenty five thousand men across the open plains, directly toward our rear.”

Guo Jia let out a sharp bark of laughter, a sound that held no humor, only the anticipation of slaughter. ”They think we are exhausted from the siege? They think they can strike the tiger while it is hunting the deer?”

”They are marching in a loose, tribal formation,” Jia Kui noted, reading the rest of the cipher. ”No unified command structure. Heavy reliance on light infantry and archers. They left their chokepoints completely undefended.”

Zhang Liao looked at the map, his eyes cold and calculating. The eastern warlords had made the most fatal mistake in military history, they assumed their enemy fought like they did. They assumed that a siege depleted an army, failing to realize that the Hengyuan artillery corps was doing all the work in Shinano, while tens of thousands of elite Hengyuan cavalry and heavy infantry were currently sitting in reserve, fully rested, fed, and eager for battle.

”We will not interrupt the bombardment of Shinano,” Zhang Liao commanded, his voice a low, terrifying rumble. ”Let the trebuchets continue to choke the mountain. The trap here remains closed.”

He turned to his lieutenants, the brutal, seasoned cavalry commanders who had ridden with him across the northern steppes of the mainland.

”Take the heavy cavalry. Take the repeating crossbow divisions and the mobile field artillery,” Zhang Liao ordered, his eyes locked on the wooden marker representing the eastern coalition. ”Swing around the southern ridges. Conceal your movements using the river valleys. When they reach the open plains of Suruga, expecting to find our vulnerable rear guard...”

Zhang Liao clenched his heavy, steel plated gauntlet into a fist.

”...you will crush them. You will show them that the Black Dragon does not bleed; it only consumes. Leave no warlord alive to retreat to those mountains.”

Three days later, the grand Eastern Coalition marched proudly onto the sprawling, open plains of Suruga. The sun beat down on them, reflecting off their bronze spear tips and the bone ornaments woven into their armor. Warlord Arahabaki rode at the front in a captured chariot, a confident, arrogant sneer on his face.

They had encountered no resistance. They believed their brilliant, treacherous plan was working flawlessly. They could see the distant smoke rising from the Shinano mountains, assuming the Hengyuan army was hopelessly bogged down in a brutal siege.

As they marched deeper into the flat, open expanse, the terrain offering no cover, no trees, and no high ground, a strange, rhythmic vibration began to tremble through the soles of their sandals.

Arahabaki held up his hand, signaling the massive, chaotic column to halt. The tribal hunters of Mutsu crouched low, pressing their ears to the dirt.

It was a sound they had never heard before. It was not the chaotic, screaming charge of a rival clan. It was a deep, mechanical, terrifyingly synchronized thrumming.

Suddenly, over the low southern ridges, the horizon turned black.

The Hengyuan heavy cavalry appeared. They did not crest the hill in a disorganized mob, they appeared in perfect, rigid, terrifying geometric formations. Thousands of massive mainland warhorses, clad in interlocking steel barding, ridden by silent, faceless demons in dark lamellar armor.

Arahabaki’s arrogant sneer vanished, replaced instantly by the cold, paralyzing grip of absolute terror. He realized, in one horrifying heartbeat, that the enemy was not exhausted. The enemy was waiting for them.

Before the warlord could even scream an order to form a defensive line, the Hengyuan mobile field artillery, positioned expertly on the flanks, opened fire.

The crack of the black powder cannons tore the morning air in half. Grapeshot, thousands of lethal, jagged iron balls, shrieked across the open plain at terrifying speeds, ripping directly into the tightly packed, unarmored ranks of the eastern coalition.

The devastation was instantaneous and catastrophic. Entire companies of Musashi spearmen were simply erased, turned into a red mist before they could even lower their pikes. The tribal hunters of Mutsu, masters of the forest, found their stealth completely useless in the open plain as explosive shells detonated in their midst, throwing their broken bodies into the air.

Panic, absolute and primal, instantly gripped the eastern army. The fragile, greedy coalition shattered in seconds. Men dropped their weapons and turned to run, trampling their own allies in a desperate, screaming bid for survival.

But there was nowhere to run.

With a deafening blast from the bronze war horns, the Hengyuan heavy cavalry charged. It was an unstoppable avalanche of steel and muscle. They crashed into the fleeing, disorganized mob with world-ending force, their heavy lances impaling three men at a time, their warhorses trampling the wounded into the bloody mud.

Warlord Arahabaki, the man who had dreamed of carving up the center, desperately tried to turn his chariot around. He was intercepted by a Hengyuan cavalry captain, who effortlessly swung a heavy broadsword, decapitating the arrogant warlord in a single, brutal stroke.

The battle was not a contest of arms, it was an execution. In their greed, the eastern lords had marched their people out of their impenetrable fortresses and into the open jaws of the greatest military machine in human history.

By sunset, the sprawling plains of Suruga were carpeted with the dead. The grand Eastern Coalition was entirely annihilated. The rugged, untamed east, having foolishly sacrificed its entire military strength on a gamble born of greed, was now completely defenseless, leaving the path wide open for the Hengyuan Dynasty to swallow the rest of the island whole.

High up in the jagged, mist shrouded peaks of the Shinano mountains, the world was no longer measured in seasons, days, or hours, but in the relentless, earth shaking concussions of the Hengyuan artillery. The siege had transformed the once sacred highland sanctuary into a smoking, pulverized crater of ash and shattered stone.

The bitter mountain wind bit like iron teeth, freezing the sweat and blood on the faces of the remaining Central Honshu defenders, but the deepest frost they felt was not meteorological, it was the freezing grip of psychological despair.

For days, Warlord Suwa and High Priestess Otohime had watched their proud highland warriors, men who had never known defeat, who had boasted that the mountains were an impenetrable shield, reduced to cowering in damp caves and behind shattered boulders.

They could not use their obsidian tipped arrows or their legendary bravery against an enemy that fought from miles away with thunder and fire. The constant, deafening roar of the heavy black-powder cannons and the sky darkening Hwachas had cracked their eardrums, leaving them in a surreal, permanent state of ringing deafness and bone deep exhaustion.

Yet, as brutal as the physical bombardment was, the true weapon that shattered the spine of the Shinano resistance was forged not in the foundries of the mainland, but in the dark, calculating minds of the Hengyuan strategists. It was a weapon of pure, unadulterated information.

Zhang Liao and the four peerless strategists understood that breaking a fortress from the outside required iron, but breaking an alliance from the inside required greed. Through the invisible, omnipresent network of Oriole Agents who prowled the mountain passes like ghosts, a carefully orchestrated campaign of psychological warfare was quietly unleashed upon the desperate defenders.

The agents did not attack the guards, instead, they deliberately ”lost” highly classified documents along the narrow mountain paths. They allowed captured Eastern scouts to slip away from prison camps with ”intercepted” supply manifests and secret correspondences.

These leaked papers fell directly into the hands of Warlord Suwa’s scouts. When the documents were brought before the central command, the contents struck the remaining leaders like a physical blow to the chest.

The manifests and letters, bearing the authentic seals of Warlord Arahabaki of Musashi and the elite council of the Eastern Coalition, did not speak of brotherhood, relief, or salvation. Instead, they revealed a dark, treacherous reality. The Eastern Coalition had never intended to save Central Honshu.

While the brave warriors of Shinano and Mikawa were bleeding and dying in the snow trying to hold the mountain passes against the mainland demons, Arahabaki and the eastern lords had been plotting a grand, predatory betrayal. The documents laid out explicit, greedy plans, the eastern armies were marching west not to rescue their countrymen, but to wait until the Hengyuan artillery had finished slaughtering the central defenders, after which the eastern coalition would sweep in to backstab the exhausted victors and carve up the wealthy Nobi plains, the coastal ports of Suruga, and the iron mines of Shinano among themselves.

The betrayal was absolute, cold, and calculated.

When the news of the Eastern Coalition’s true intentions spread through the freezing mountain camps, a heavy, suffocating wave of shock and bitter fury rippled through the ranks. The exhausted soldiers, who had endured starvation, freezing temperatures, and relentless bombing under the noble belief that they were fighting a heroic last stand for their homeland, suddenly realized the horrifying truth. They were not being protected by their countrymen; they were being used as sacrificial meat, a disposable shield while their so called kin of same island sharpened knives for their backs.

Whispers of surrender, once considered a treasonous whisper muttered only in the darkest corners of the caves, spread through the ragged camps like wildfire.

”Why do we die here?” a young Shinano spearman shouted openly around a dying campfire, his voice cracking with exhaustion and raw emotion, tears carving clean tracks through the soot on his face. ”We bleed in the snow, and the cowards of Musashi wait to steal our fields! The mainland demons offer us death from afar, but our own blood in the east offers us a knife in the dark! What is left to fight for?”

No officer struck him down. The officers themselves were broken.

Inside the central command cave, illuminated by the flickering, weak light of a single oil lamp, a fierce, agonizing debate erupted among the remaining, haggard warlords. The air was thick with the stench of unwashed bodies, stale sweat, and despair.

High Priestess Otohime sat slumped against the damp stone wall, her pristine white robes stained with mud and blood. Her divine visions, once her greatest source of authority, now felt like a cruel mockery. She looked at the blood stained documents scattered across the dirt floor, her eyes hollow.

”We trusted them,” Otohime whispered, her voice barely audible over the distant, concussive boom of a Hengyuan cannon. ”We called them brothers in the sacred shrine of Fuji. And all the while, they measured the width of our graves to fit their plows.”

Warlord Suwa, the giant of a man who had worn the pelt of a bear and boasted of the unbreakable highland spirit, slammed his massive fist against the stone wall, causing a cascade of loose dirt to fall from the ceiling. His face was twisted in a mask of grief and blinding rage.

”Arahabaki... that arrogant bastard!” Suwa roared, his voice thick with fury. ”To sell our blood for a share of the Nobi paddies! I should have marched my highland hunters into Musashi years ago and burned their halls to the ground!”

”And yet, Warlord, you did not,” a pragmatic clan elder muttered bitterly, staring into the flickering flame. ”And now, we are trapped between the thunder of the mainland and the greed of the east. If we fight on, we die here in the snow, forgotten and betrayed. If we surrender... at least our people might live.”

”Live as slaves to the mainland?” another warlord challenged, drawing his dagger half an inch from its scabbard. ”To bow before a foreign leader who knows nothing of our gods?”

”What gods, general?” Otohime interrupted softly, her voice carrying a profound, crushing weight that silenced the room instantly. ”Do you hear them answering our prayers? Do you see the mountains shielding us from their fire? The age of our gods has ended. These powerful enemies has swallowed the sun. We are fighting a ghost.”

The silence that followed was heavy, absolute, and suffocating. The proud warlords of Central Honshu looked at one another, seeing the reflection of their own defeat in each other’s hollow eyes. Broken by the relentless artillery fire, exhausted by the starvation of the siege, and utterly shattered by the knife in the back betrayal of their eastern countrymen, the unbreakable will of the coalition finally snapped.

______________________________

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

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