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Xun You's finger hovered over the map, specifically targeting the fractured but fertile central regions. "Likely one of the ambitious Brahmaputra rajas, or perhaps a pragmatic, wealthy Bengal king from Samatata who desires to crush Vanga. We will find a ruler whose ambition outstrips his current military capacity."
"And when we find him?" Huang Zhong asked, though he already knew the brutal answer.
"Once chosen," Xun You said, his voice dropping to a cold, ruthless whisper, "we will unleash the 420,000 strong Hengyuan army to brutally, utterly crush their local enemies. We will forcefully elevate this chosen faction, handing them the crowns of their rivals, to ensure they become an absolutely loyal and protected tributary for the expansion plan."
Xun You looked directly at the veteran general, the grand scope of the proxy war fully realized between them.
"And then, General, we gradually, secretly strengthen them. We arm them with Hengyuan steel. We teach them our infantry tactics. And, when the time is right, we hand them the secret of gunpowder. We will transform this puppet into a massive, unstoppable, kingdom that is entirely capable of independently dominating and controlling the Brahmaputra and Bengal frontier."
Huang Zhong smiled, a fierce, predator's grin showing through his white beard. "We build a wall out of their own people."
"Precisely," Xun You concluded, gazing toward the western horizon. "We form an impenetrable, eternal meat shield against the looming Guishuang Empire. The Guishuang's will break their tusks against our puppet, and the Hengyuan Dynasty will rule the east in absolute, undisturbed peace. Now, General... let us decide which of these kings is about to receive the blessing of the Black Dragon."
With a cold, calculating gaze, Huang Zhong and Xun You began to systematically go down the exhaustive list provided by the Oriole Agents, ruthlessly comparing the strengths and weaknesses of every single frontier power.
"The Kirata peoples and the Naga chiefdoms," Huang Zhong began, his heavy, calloused finger tracing the jagged, mountainous ridges on the far western edge of the map. "Fierce warriors, absolute masters of their treacherous terrain. But they are completely wild. They have zero centralized administration government or experience, no grand agricultural base, and no capacity to project power onto the plains. If we vassalize them, they will remain nothing more than mountain bandits. They cannot form the massive, industrialized buffer state His Majesty envisions."
Xun You nodded in agreement, slowly waving his crane feather fan to ward off the stifling heat and the persistent jungle insects. "Exactly, General. A buffer state must be an anvil, not a scattering of pebbles. The same applies to the Manipur area powers and the Tripura area tribes. They are excellent gatekeepers of the valleys and bamboo forests, but their populations are simply too small, and their economies rely entirely on localized trade. They lack the imperial infrastructure needed to challenge a superpower like the Kushans. We need a true kingdom. One with sprawling cities, organized ledgers, and a massive tax base."
Xun You then pointed his fan toward the fertile northern plains, near the Himalayan foothills. "What of Pundravardhana? They have a massive population of three hundred and fifty thousand and forty thousand elite troops. They sit directly on the Kushan border."
"Too dangerous for a rapid campaign," Huang Zhong immediately countered, his tactical mind instantly assessing the brutal military reality of such an endeavor. "Pundravardhana is already a heavily centralized, battle hardened bastion. They spend every single year fighting brutal, grinding border wars with the Kushan peripheries. Their entire society is completely militarized. If we attack them, they will not break easily. It will inevitably turn into a long, bloody, grinding war of attrition. That would give the Kushan Empire ample time to realize our true intentions and intervene directly. Our objective is a short, overwhelming campaign that is finished before the enemy even knows they are at war."
"Then we look to the delta and the great rivers," Xun You murmured, his sharp eyes scanning the incredibly wealthy eastern territories near the Bay of Bengal. "The Brahmaputra Valley chiefdoms hold the legendary, ancient legacy of the Pragjyotisha. The land is unfathomably fertile. But it is a chaotic, bloody mess of dozens of warring kings or what they called rajas. To conquer it, we would have to fight twenty different sieges against twenty different kings in twenty different swamps. The political consolidation alone would take years. That leaves us with the two maritime titans, Vanga and Samatata."
Huang Zhong frowned, looking at the sprawling coastal dominance of Vanga. "Vanga has four hundred and fifty thousand people and absolute naval supremacy in these waters. But they are too coastal, too deeply proud of their maritime heritage. If we make them a puppet, their seafaring monarchs could easily use their massive fleets to rebel, harass our maritime silk routes, or simply flee to distant shores where our land armies cannot march. They are too hard to corner, too slippery to hold."
"Which brings us to the crown jewel," Xun You said, a cold, predatory smile forming on his lips as he tapped the muddy, sprawling territory of Samatata.
"Samatata," Xun You breathed, outlining the kingdom with the tip of his fan. "A massive delta kingdom with a population exceeding four hundred thousand. They possess immense agricultural wealth, a highly sophisticated bureaucracy, and a highly strategic position that seamlessly connects the ocean trade to the inland river networks. More importantly, the Oriole Agents report that their internal political landscape is incredibly fragile."
Xun You pulled out a separate silk scroll detailing the royal court. "The royal court of Karmanta is bitterly, violently divided between powerful Brahmanical priests, wealthy Buddhist merchant lords, and rival, ambitious noble clans. Their leadership is arrogant, heavily reliant on paid mercenaries rather than loyal levies, and currently blinded by their ancient, petty rivalry with Vanga. They have the exact economic and population base we need to build our buffer state, but their deep internal fractures make them perfectly controllable. They are a glass sword, General. Sharp, but easily shattered."
After careful, meticulous consideration, the two men unanimously selected Samatata as the absolute ideal target. It offered the absolute best combination of military strength that could be repurposed, an irreplaceable strategic location, boundless economic resources, critical political weakness, massive expansion potential, and ultimate controllability under the Emperor's grand, shadowy design.
Once the monumental decision was firmly made, Xun You immediately began to formulate the grand invasion strategy. His brilliant plan was designed to flawlessly exploit Samatata's internal political divisions, their incredibly poor frontier intelligence, and their extreme, fatal overconfidence.
"The King of Samatata believes the dense eastern jungles and the Tripura tribes will act as an impenetrable, natural wall against any large scale land invasion from the east," Xun You explained, placing small wooden markers across the map to represent their forces.
"He is entirely overconfident in his outer border forts. We will feed false intelligence to their merchants who cross our lines, making them believe our massive army is actually marching north to pacify the chaotic Brahmaputra Valley. Meanwhile, we will brutally exploit the rival clans within Samatata itself. The Oriole Agents have already bribed several key river barons who despise the current King. They will look the other way, dismiss their sentries, and leave the vital supply routes and inner river networks completely vulnerable."
Huang Zhong enthusiastically contributed the hardcore military perspective, seamlessly refining Xun You's political manipulations into a devastating, highly practical military campaign.
"To prevent them from assembling their massive forty five thousand strong army and their fearsome war elephants, we absolutely cannot march as one slow, massive column," the veteran general ordered, drawing three distinct arrows in the dirt floor of the tent. "We will split the vanguard into three lightning fast, highly mobile armies. We will utilize deception, heavily disguising our forward elements as massive trade caravans and fleeing refugees to get right up to the gates of their border forts without raising alarms."
"Once across the frontier, we will execute rapid, forced marches through the night. We will seize the major river crossings and vital settlements before their garrisons can even light the signal fires. We will completely sever their lines of communication. By the time the King of Samatata even realizes he is under attack, our armies will already be isolating his capital. This will not be a long, drawn out war. It will be a short, overwhelming, apocalyptic campaign designed to forcefully break their spirit and force the kingdom's unconditional surrender before Vanga or Pundravardhana can even mobilize their forces to intervene."
With the strategy perfected down to the hour, the apocalyptic invasion officially began.
It started under the deafening, torrential cover of a massive tropical monsoon. The sky tore open, unleashing a deluge of water that turned the jungle floor into a river of mud, completely masking the sound of hundreds of thousands of marching boots and the heavy, grinding iron axles of rolling wagon wheels. The Hengyuan Imperial army silently, relentlessly crossed the western frontier.
The entire campaign was carefully, meticulously concealed until the absolute final moment. Disguised Oriole Agents and elite advance scouts flawlessly eliminated the Samatata watchtowers and border sentries, sliding out of the muddy underbrush to cut their throats in the pouring rain before a single warning horn could be blown or a single signal fire could be lit.
When the morning sun finally broke through the heavy, gray monsoon clouds, illuminating the humid delta, the initial battles erupted with terrifying, overwhelming suddenness.
The frontier garrisons of Samatata woke up, shaking off the sleep of a rainy night, to find themselves entirely surrounded by an endless, silent ocean of crimson Hengyuan banners and gleaming steel. The confusion among the enemy forces was absolute and paralyzing. Massive, heavily fortified stone and timber border positions, which the Samatata generals arrogantly believed could hold out for months against any siege, fell far faster than expected, often in a matter of mere hours.
The Hengyuan commanders did not just rely on their massive numerical superiority, they demonstrated a terrifying, highly disciplined coordination rather than simply overwhelming the enemy with chaotic human waves. The heavily armored infantry advanced in perfect, unbreakable shield walls, entirely ignoring the frantic, disorganized arrow fire from the battlements.
Behind them, heavy trebuchets and heavy ballistas surgically dismantled the enemy gates, shattering ancient timber and stone with devastating kinetic force. The campaign immediately felt like an unstoppable, divine combination of superior intelligence, flawless preparation, endless logistics, peerless leadership, and absolute, paralyzing surprise.
Hundreds of miles away, deep inside the opulent, heavily gilded palace of Karmanta, the grand capital of Samatata, a scene of sheer, suffocating panic was rapidly unfolding.
Inside the grand, incense filled council chamber, the King of Samatata, draped in priceless, vibrantly colored silks and wearing heavy gold jewelry that weighed down his neck, sat on his jewel encrusted throne. Initially, when the very first exhausted, mud covered messenger burst into the hall, collapsing in a pool of rainwater and screaming about an invasion from the east, the King and his arrogant ministers completely struggled to understand what was happening. They laughed it off, sipping from golden goblets, assuming it was merely a large scale, desperate border raid by the barbaric Tripura tribes looking for plunder.
But then, the illusion of safety shattered. Within a single, horrific hour, a flood of increasingly alarming reports poured into the council chamber.
Bleeding cavalrymen, their horses ridden to death, and terrified local magistrates rushed in, collapsing on the pristine marble floors. They reported the impossible. The impregnable eastern frontier forts had completely fallen. Their most veteran border commanders had been effortlessly defeated and captured in their sleep.
All major roads, trade routes, and vital river crossings were already under the absolute control of foreign soldiers who marched in impossible, rigid formations and wielded weapons that sounded like the wrath of the thunder gods. Most terrifying of all, the communications to their northern and southern armies had been entirely severed, and multiple massive, highly disciplined enemy armies were currently advancing at an impossible speed directly toward the capital.
Showcasing the absolute collapse of their political reality, the King's face drained of all color. His mocking arrogance evaporated, replaced instantly by paralyzing panic. He dropped his golden goblet, the sweet wine spilling across the marble like blood.
The grand council chamber erupted into absolute, deafening chaos. The carefully balanced factions of the court began furiously arguing and screaming at one another, abandoning all royal decorum.
The wealthy Buddhist merchant lords violently demanded that they immediately send envoys to negotiate, offering massive tributes of gold, spices, and slaves to the invaders to save their lucrative trade empires from the torch. The proud, martial Brahmanical generals roared in fury, striking the marble pillars with their fists, demanding that they forcefully mobilize whatever army they had left in the capital and immediately call upon the neighboring powers of Vanga for an emergency military alliance.
Some cowardly ministers wept openly, suggesting they immediately pack the treasury onto barges and flee deep into the impenetrable delta marshes. Some foolish, arrogant nobles still stubbornly underestimated the Imperial army, claiming the monsoon mud would soon stop their advance and rot their supply lines.
But the oldest, most experienced generals in the room, men who had fought in the brutal river wars of their youth, fell to their knees in despair. Looking at the rapidly updated maps, they realized that the geopolitical situation was already completely and utterly hopeless. The enemy had systematically, brilliantly cut their throat before they even knew they were in a fight. There was no army left to mobilize; the invaders were already here.
Returning to the sprawling, humid battlefield, the narrative of the war portrayed the rapid, spectacular collapse of the entire kingdom through several brilliant, highly connected military engagements.
The Hengyuan Imperial army relentlessly captured strategically important cities, completely bypassing the heavily fortified ones that offered no tactical value to maintain their terrifying, unstoppable speed. In the dense, tropical river valleys, they engaged Samatata's hastily assembled, disorganized field armies. Avoiding making every battle identical, Huang Zhong and Xun You showcased different, highly adaptable tactical masterclasses.
In one major engagement near a vital, wide river crossing, a massive Samatata army attempted to make a final, desperate stand, using their legendary war elephants to smash the Hengyuan lines. The massive beasts, adorned in bronze armor and carrying archers in wooden howdahs, were a terrifying sight, capable of breaking the morale of any normal army.
But Lie Fan's foresight proved divine. The highly secretive Qinglong Unit stepped forward, their formations crisp and their faces devoid of fear. As the massive, armored beasts charged, shaking the muddy earth with their immense weight, the twenty thousand elite soldiers calmly leveled their weapons.
They unleashed a devastating, coordinated volley of flintlock fire and heavy blunderbusses, supported from the rear by the screaming, explosive rockets of the Hwachas. The deafening, unnatural thunder of the gunpowder weapons, a sound never before heard on the Indian subcontinent, tore through the humid air. The sheer kinetic impact of the lead balls shredded the elephants' thick hides and shattered their bronze plating. But it was not just the pain; it was the blinding, sulfurous smoke and the terrifying noise that completely shattered the elephants' morale.
The massive beasts panicked entirely. Blinded by smoke and terrified by the thunder, they turned around and violently trampled their own Samatata infantry in a horrific, bloody rout. The pride of the delta's military might was crushed beneath the feet of their own weapons, clearing the river crossing in less than an hour.
In another crucial engagement further inland, Xun You used brilliant, bloodless deception to seize the kingdom's largest granaries and arsenals without a fight. He had a vanguard of Hengyuan soldiers dress in captured Samatata armor and uniforms. Marching under the pouring rain, they seamlessly walked through the city gates alongside retreating Samatata forces, blending in perfectly before violently turning on the guards and seizing the armory from the inside out.
The rapid, flawless execution of these connected battles led to a growing, crushing realization among the Samatata defenders that they were being systematically, intellectually, and militarily outmaneuvered at every single turn. Their swords were useless against thunder; their walls were useless against deception.
Even the ordinary civilians and native peasants watched the invasion in sheer awe and terror. They cowered in their thatched roof homes, expecting the horrific pillaging, rape, and burning that accompanied ancient warfare. Instead, they watched as massive, orderly columns of Hengyuan troops bypassed their farms without looting a single grain of rice or burning a single hut.
The invaders were completely, ruthlessly focusing their terrifying wrath purely on military targets and royal garrisons, punishing only those who raised weapons. This strict, unfathomable imperial discipline only deepened the psychological submission of the populace, as they realized their kingdom was collapsing in a matter of days not to barbaric raiders, but to a highly civilized, invincible empire.
The devastating, lightning fast campaign ended with the grand kingdom of Samatata completely conquered at an unexpectedly, almost impossibly fast rate.
Within mere weeks of crossing the border, the massive 420,000 strong Hengyuan army, complete with thousands of cannons and heavy siege engines, had entirely surrounded the grand capital of Karmanta. A ring of steel and artillery aimed directly at the opulent palace walls choked the city.
With his field armies annihilated, his granaries captured, and his potential allies entirely cut off by Hengyuan cordons, the terrified King of Samatata was forcefully compelled to unconditionally surrender before the war could ever become the prolonged, bloody conflict he had desperately hoped for.
The massive bronze gates of the capital were thrown open. The King, stripped of his crown and his arrogant silks, crawled on his knees through the mud before the imposing, armored figure of Huang Zhong, weeping for his life.
However, as the dark Hengyuan banners were raised over the conquered delta, Huang Zhong and Xun You made it incredibly clear through their subsequent political decrees that their Emperor did not have any intend to just simply destroy the kingdom or massacre its people. This rapid, brutal conquest was merely the first, highly calculated stage of a much larger, continent spanning political master plan.
______________________________
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