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"Exactly," Fa Zheng nodded. "Tianshui is not Tong Pass. It is a vital artery, but it is not manned by Cao Cao's personal guard or his most seasoned front. line troops. Their morale is brittle. We will find the crack and pour fear into it."
By noon, the siege of Tianshui began. It lacked the apocalyptic destruction scale of Tong Pass, but it was no less serious. Zhang Ren and Yan Yan, the two veterans and marshalls, led disciplined, sharp thrusts against the gates and walls.
They fought fiercely, but with a controlled intensity, disengaging at Fa Zheng's signal from the command platform before the Wei defenders could fully envelop them. It was a maddening, bloody dance of attack and retreat, designed to frustrate and exhaust.
The message to Tianshui's defenders was clear, all of you are not being overrun today. You are being put on a slow, inescapable spit to roast over the fire of our patience.
Back at Tong Pass, as the evening sky draped its bruised purple cloak over the corpse littered battlefield of Tong Pass, the day's brutal clash wound down to an uneasy, exhausted halt.
The Hengyuan troops held more of the outer walls than ever before, but the cost had been palpable. Lie Fan, his armor streaked with grime and other men's blood, stood in his command tent.
The aura of immense power still radiated from him, but it was now layered with the cold focus of a commander reviewing a day's butcher's bill.
He was in counsel with Sima Yi, Chen Deng, Zang Hong, Pang Tong, and Xu Shu, the strategists' faces grim as they tallied gains and losses. The conversation was interrupted by a soldier who entered bearing a sealed tube.
The soldier's bearing was slightly too erect, his eyes a fraction too keen for a common infantryman. He bowed and presented the tube directly to Lie Fan. "A report from the west, Your Majesty. Urgent."
Lie Fan took it, recognizing the subtle signet of the Orioles pressed into the wax. He broke the seal and unrolled the slender parchment.
His eyes, which had moments before been scanning casualty lists, now scanned lines of concise, devastating intelligence. He read it once, then again, his expression not changing, but the temperature in the tent seemed to drop several degrees.
He looked up, his gaze finding Sima Yi. "Zhongda. It seems Cao Cao is not merely planning to die on these walls."
He handed the report over. "He has ordered a total scorched earth withdrawal from all his western territories. Xiping, Wuwei, the Qinghai garrisons, the Gansu outposts, everything is to be stripped bare and pulled back to Chang'an. He intends to turn his capital into a 'hedgehog,' as he so quaintly puts it. To make us choke on the final, concentrated core of his kingdom."
Sima Yi's eyes flew over the report, his mind racing ahead of the words. "He sacrifices his periphery to save his heart. A brutal, logical move. It gives us all the western lands for free… but it concentrates every remaining loyal soldier, every arrow, every grain of rice inside Chang'An's walls. A siege there would be against a garrison swelled to bursting point, fighting with the desperation of cornered rats."
Pang Tong sniffed. "A hedgehog is still just a small animal. It can be picked up carefully… or crushed under a boot."
"But it takes time," Xu Shu interjected pragmatically. "Time we would spend besieging a city packed with men who have nowhere left to run. Every day we spend reducing Chang'An is a day for discontent to grow elsewhere on his former domain we conquered, for the sheer logistical strain of our campaign to tell."
Lie Fan listened to his advisors, but his mind was already synthesizing the new data with the day's brutal progress. The report from Tianshui, when it arrived, would tell of a different kind of pressure being applied.
He looked at the map. Tong Pass was a crumbling jaw. Tianshui was soon to be a clenched fist blocking the throat. And Chang'an was the heart, now frantically calling all its blood back for one last, congested beat.
"Cao Cao seeks to trade space for time, and time for a chance to make our victory so costly we might reconsider," Lie Fan said, his voice that new, disturbing blend of calm and immense resonance. "He hopes the hedgehog's spines will puncture our ambition."
He placed a finger on the map, right on the representation of Tong Pass, then dragged it slowly, decisively, westward to Chang'an.
"Then we must not give him time. We must take Tong Pass faster than he expects. We must ensure Tianshui falls before his western garrisons can even reach the capital. And when we stand before Chang'an…"
He looked at each of his advisors, his marshals who had just entered, their armor still stained with the day's work.
"…we will not merely besiege the hedgehog. We will bring a mountain down upon it. Prepare the armies. Tomorrow, we do not adjust our tempo. We increase it. The bombardment will be heavier. The assaults will be continuous, in shifts. We will give them no rest, day or night. Their week ends in three days. Let Cao Cao see that his calculations, like his walls, are built on sand."
Sima Yi's cupped hands lowered slowly, a subtle sign of his mind whirring behind a mask of deference. The other advisors, Chen Deng, Zang Hong,Pang Tong, and Xu Shu, all murmured their assent, but the air in the tent remained thick with the unspoken weight of the decision. To escalate now was to commit to a path of maximum violence, a final, crushing solution.
"Your Majesty," Sima Yi began, his voice measured but threaded with a strategist's keen edge. "If I may be permitted a further suggestion regarding the… implementation of this accelerated tempo."
Lie Fan's gaze, which had been fixed on the map as if visualizing the crumbling of stone and will, shifted to his chief strategist. A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. "Speak freely, Zhongda. A clear mind sees many paths. I value yours. You know I have never punished a man for the thoughts in his head, only for failures of action or loyalty."
That was a honest truth. Lie Fan's court was a place of fierce debate, where the sharpest minds were honed against each other, not silenced.
Sima Yi allowed a dry chuckle, a rare crack in his composed façade. "Of course, Your Majesty. Your tolerance for frank counsel is well known, and the foundation of our successes."
He stepped closer to the map, his slender finger tracing the thick, defiant line representing the left flank of Tong Pass's main wall. "My suggestion is one of pure, focused physics. We have spent days chipping at the entire structure. Now, we must become a spear, not a hammer."
He looked up, meeting Lie Fan's eyes. "Concentrate all our artillery, every cannon, every trebuchet, every hwacha battery, on a single, sustained bombardment of one section. The left flank, here. We return to the volume of fire from the first seven days, but we focus it like sunlight through a lens. We do not seek to kill defenders, we seek to erase the wall itself. We pound it, hour upon hour, until the stones forget they are a wall and become merely a landslide waiting to happen."
He paused, letting the image sink in, the relentless, concussive annihilation of a single point. "If Your Majesty is not concerned with preserving the infrastructure," Sima Yi continued, his tone becoming almost clinically detached, "we can reduce a hundred yard section to a ramp of rubble in a day. A breach of that magnitude is not something Cao Cao can plug with bodies and bravery. It is an invitation for our entire army to walk into his fortress. He would have no choice but to order a full retreat or witness the total annihilation of his remaining force within Tong Pass."
The implications hung in the smoky air. Chen Deng was the first to break the silence that followed, his practical mind seizing on the consequence. "The cost of rebuilding such a breach… it would be astronomical. We would be essentially dismantling a strategic treasure we are about to capture, only to spend years and a fortune reconstructing it. It would be like shattering a priceless vase to retrieve the coin inside."
Xu Shu nodded, his expression sober. "Chen Deng speaks true. The logistical strain of such a project, while simultaneously supplying an army driving on Chang'an… it is a formidable burden. We would win the battle but mortgage the peace."
Pang Tong, however, waved a dismissive hand, his eyes gleaming with a different kind of calculus. "Mortgages are paid with the wealth of victory. A ruined pass is a problem for tomorrow's administrators. A prolonged siege that allows Cao Cao to fortify Chang'an into an impenetrable hedgehog is a disaster for today's emperor. Sometimes, you must burn the bridge you wish to cross, trusting you can swim or build a better one later."
Lie Fan had listened to them all, his expression inscrutable. He had been looking at the map, but his vision seemed to stretch beyond it, into a future only he could see. The debate about cost and reconstruction swirled around him, but it was as if he heard it from a great distance.
Finally, he spoke, his voice that same unsettling blend of deep calm and resonant power. "I agree with the principle of concentrated demolition."
He looked at Chen Deng and Xu Shu, not with dismissal, but with an acknowledgment of their valid concerns. "Your pragmatism is noted, and it is vital. But you think of rebuilding as a mere restoration." He placed his own palm flat on the map, over the symbol for Tong Pass. "I do not intend to rebuild Tong Pass as it was. I intend to build it as it should be."
He lifted his gaze, and for the first time, he shared a fragment of the vision that guided him beyond the war.
"The passes of this land, Tong Pass, Hulao, all of them, they are chokepoints, yes. But they are also tombs for the spirits of the men who garrison them. Isolated, austere, places of duty and boredom. My vision… is for them to become something else. Keystones. I will have them rebuilt, not just sturdier and taller, but as fortified towns. With barracks that are more than hovels, with markets, with space for families, with purpose beyond waiting for war. A soldier who guards a community, who is part of a life, is a soldier with a soul still intact. He is not just a tool of empire; he is its living, breathing manifestation."
The revelation struck the tent with the force of a quiet thunderclap. Sima Yi's eyebrows arched minutely, the greatest sign of surprise he ever allowed. Chen Deng and Zang Hong exchanged a look of dawning comprehension. This was not the short term thinking of a warlord, but the long range planning of a true sovereign, a builder of civilizations.
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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