Colonial Era: From Remnants to European Dominator

On the morning of the fifth day, the morning dew carried the cold air sweeping in from Siberia, causing the temperature in this mountain forest to drop rapidly. Even the right hands of the border soldiers holding knives trembled slightly under the threat of this nature.

On the grassland in the forest, the heads of border soldiers, along with their helmets and tied with wooden stakes, were stuck under the trees, telling the story of the Fire Rock tribe's resistance.

As the saying goes, you only see wolves eating meat, but you never see them being beaten. As the reputation of the border army's brutality spread, the first to take precautions were those fishing and hunting tribes who had lived in the mountains and forests for generations and had never even set foot on the plains. Although the tribes that were slaughtered before were also fishing and hunting tribes, there was actually a difference between the two. According to the regulations of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, tribes that migrated from Mongolia and the area near Liaodong were given priority to occupy the most fertile land. Next were those who had submitted earlier and paid more sable furs. Then came the mountain tribes that hid deep in the mountains and forests and had to submit for the sake of coarse salt, coarse cloth and other living supplies and living space.

Ironically, those tribes that considered themselves loyal to the Qing Dynasty were the first to suffer in this turmoil, while these unruly mountain people they had previously looked down upon are still alive. Perhaps the cruel joke of fate was predetermined from the very beginning, with everything and every gift having a price tag attached in secret.

The blade sliced ​​across the woman's soft neck, but stopped at the last moment. The eyes beneath the helmet gleamed with greed, and the lust was so blatantly obvious at that moment.

"You belong to me now."

With a simple, heavy breath and the pungent smell of blood, the woman wrapped in animal skins, her long neck outstretched, revealing her wild, dark yellow skin, stared intently at the demon before her with her brown eyes, issuing her final warning in the tribe's language, still belonging to the Turkic language family:

"You devils! Tengri will punish you! You will all die a horrible death!"

The look in his eyes beneath the helmet shifted from greed to cold-bloodedness in an instant, but was quickly replaced by lust. He muttered something, then kicked the woman to the ground, bent down, grabbed her ankle, and walked towards the thatched hut. With each step he took, the shouts and curses behind him grew louder.

And his answers were always so simple and honest:

"Your man is dead, you are my trophy, therefore you are mine!!"

When someone passed by the thatched hut and heard the sounds coming from inside, they would just grin and say a few words before rejoining the hunt.

If you look down at the entire Huoyan tribe's territory from the air, you will find that the east and west sides have been basically occupied by the border troops in cotton armor, while the resistance in the south and north is still ongoing.

"Whoosh—"

The arrows fired by the Qing bow were vastly different from those made by the volcano tribe. This difference stemmed from the manufacturing process and, more importantly, from the disparity in the level of their civilization's productivity.

Despite the frequent depictions of arrows piercing armor in later television dramas, in real classical warfare with cold weapons, armor was always the most important element, followed by bows and arrows, especially the arrows carried by bows.

The quality of Qing bows, if not the best, is at least among the top five in the entire history of feudal East Asia, not to mention the armor-piercing arrows equipped by the elite Qing border troops.

These armor-piercing arrows might not be effective enough to kill one enemy with one arrow in long-range combat, and due to the manufacturing process and the limitations of the Qing Dynasty's current pig iron production, even the most elite border troops actually received far fewer arrows per person than ordinary arrows. However, they showed an almost overwhelming effect against this volcanic tribe, who couldn't even afford to have a piece of leather armor for each of them.

Of course, this overwhelming advantage was more in ranged combat. In close combat, the unique ferocity and agility of the fishing and hunting tribes caused these elite border troops of the Qing Empire to suffer greatly.

"Bang!!"

The clash between the Qing sword and the crudely made iron spear, limited by forging techniques and refining levels, resulted in weapons from local fishing and hunting tribes often appearing rough and cumbersome.

Such cumbersome methods were almost unheard of in the war between the Qing Dynasty and the Dzungar Khanate, since both sides had complete iron forging techniques. The former had the long history of weapon development in the Central Plains to rely on, while the latter could obtain the craftsmen they wanted from Persia and even Tsarist Russia.

Therefore, the weapons used by both sides are often known for being lightweight and sharp.

This convenience is naturally invincible in large-scale battles, but in the mountains and forests, clumsiness is not a derogatory term, but rather an "internal injury".

With a "plop," blood flowed from the corner of the border soldier's mouth. His once sharp and brutal eyes became somewhat unfocused. Although his long sword was still being used instinctively to search for the weakness of the Turkic savage opposite him, as time passed, the churning in his internal organs almost reached a critical point.

"Go to hell!!"

The vocabulary is simple and easy to understand. With the final spear strike, the already overburdened border soldiers collapsed completely. Before they died, they could only see the yellowing and white leaves and the final darkness. This was their final farewell.

Then the helmet sank, and blood mixed with brain matter poured into the barren forest, becoming nutrients for numerous microorganisms and plants to survive.

The eagle's sharp eyes swept across the forest floor below. In its view, the bipedal creatures with strange feathers were fighting each other. Sometimes a bipedal would fall and then get up again, and sometimes a bipedal would never get up again.

The smell of blood in the air made it particularly restless. It flapped its wings many times before calming down. Its subconscious animal instincts, and even its genetic inheritance, told it not to get involved in the war between the two-legged creatures, or it would be the one to die.

But the hunger in its belly reminded it that it was time to eat, so it was reluctant to leave. It could only use its sharp eyes, like the scythe of death, to quietly watch everything below, waiting for the two-legged feast to come.

"Chieftain, they set fire to our home! Our home is gone!"

Not far away, white smoke drifted in the sky above the forest, dense and pungent. The remaining members of the Fire Rock tribe could only watch helplessly as their homes were burned down, their children were killed by these demons with rat tails, and then, in this battle for redemption, they sacrificed their own bodies, perishing together with evil.

Huoyan Azhun wiped away her tears, swallowed the last of the strong liquor, and as the fruity aroma filled her throat, she, as the eldest female clan leader, made up her mind:

"Burn the mink pelts; not a single one should fall into the hands of the enemy."

The brown bear's hide was spread out, and a dozen sable pelts, originally intended for this year's tribute to the Qing court, were now thrown into the fire, demonstrating its unwavering resolve to its enemies.

"I will go ahead to the land of Tengri, where I will find the way for you and protect you."

Huoyan Azhun looked around at the few remaining members of her tribe. Although there were still survivors elsewhere, at this moment, only so many remained in front of her.

She spoke very quickly, perhaps afraid that some of her people would forget, so she began to tell the Tengri myth, a legend of life and death passed down in the tribe, three times in a row. When she heard heavy footsteps and shouts of killing, she was completely plunged into despair and resolute despair.

According to tribal custom, Huoyan Azhun pointed the dagger at her chest, intending to offer her heart to Tengri, and then use her soul to curse these pig-tailed demons for generations to come, so that their entire lives, and even their descendants, would be tormented by the curse.

"So this is where these rats were all along—"

When the first few border troops found this forest, their first reaction was:

"There's a woman, there's a woman—"

"Maybe there will even be mink furs and gold and silver!!"

Greed circulated among all the assembled border troops, ultimately transforming into:

"Rob!!"

The border troops at this moment, compared with their five generations of counterparts hundreds of years ago, may have some differences in taste, but their methods are almost identical, except that they have a queue (braid) now.

But this barbarity had barely begun when it was stopped by several shouts:

"Enemy attack! Quickly regroup the troops! Regroup!!"

Their beast-like gazes paused instinctively, turning in unison to look behind them. There, a disheveled colleague, with bloody bite marks on his shoulder, a torn belt, and a somewhat unsteady gait, ran towards them, screaming pitifully:

"Talisman cavalry, it's talisman cavalry!!"

"We're surrounded. Anyone who went out was shot dead, their head still hanging from the gun barrel—"

With a deafening roar, it wasn't the sky that was uncooperative, but rather a thunderclap that reverberated in the hearts of the border soldiers. The greed in their eyes gradually faded, replaced by an unprecedented sense of unease.

They were supposed to be cats and the Turkic savages were rats, but now it's all reversed.

The Fire Rock Tribe, with only a hundred or so survivors, reacted quickly after them. Their wild sixth sense, honed from childhood in the mountains, told them that now was the best time to launch a counterattack.

"kill!!"

The sounds of battle rose like a tide, barely ending before starting again.

It was the same familiar formula and the same brutal fighting style, but unlike before, the border troops began to retreat and even started to withdraw on their own initiative.

This clearly aroused the wildness of tribes that relied on fishing and hunting for survival. In the mountains and forests, wild animals often judged strength by smell and movement, and retreating and avoiding were signals of fear.

This will only provoke a more ferocious retaliation from the other side. The so-called benevolence and righteousness in the Central Plains may be less likely to exist in the mountains and forests than the probability of winning the lottery.

Blood splattered across the forest, and the eagle on the treetop became even more restless. It couldn't understand how the relationship between prey and hunter could change. The prey from before was now the hunter. The complex relationships in the two-legged world were beyond the comprehension of its small brain.

All it knows is that the more dead two-legged creatures there are, the more hearts and livers it can eat, and it won't have to eat the slow-digesting flesh and bones anymore.

Eagles wait, two-legged creatures in the forest kill each other, and Turkic is the dominant language in the fighting. Even on the wasteland outside the mountains, many of the gray-armored knights on horseback speak Turkic.

However, in these Turkic languages, the first sentence was spoken in Northwestern Mandarin:

"Damn it, these bunch of damn Qing dogs are real beasts. But they look much fatter than the previous ones, so they've probably got a lot of meat on them!!"