"Ali, the spring after next—is that when your Harman Guard makes its once-every-three-years trip to Kaiyuan in Great Ming's Liaodong vassal state to pay tribute to the God-descendant Great Emperor? Just how long is this tribute route? And over such a distant, difficult road, with plundering, migrating Wild tribes everywhere along the way, how do you even get there?..."
"Ancestor Shaman, Liaodong is a 'military garrison,' not a vassal state. Kaiyuan is not the 'capital city' of the Liaodong Regional Military Commission. The seat of the Liaodong Regional Military Commission was originally in Liaoyang City, but later, to guard against the Mongol Three Guards of Duoyan, it moved west to Guangning City. Liaoyang and Guangning are the two most important strongholds the Great Emperor has in Liaodong, and both are garrisoned by armies of several thousand to over ten thousand men! As for the God-descendant Great Emperor, he lives in the grandest Shuntian Prefecture capital, more than a thousand li from the Liaodong Garrison, twenty times the size of Kaiyuan! Ordinary Jurchen tribal tribute envoys cannot meet the Great Emperor. As for the specific tribute route, it goes like this, then like this..."
Inside the collapsed temple stood the shamanic altar of the Jurchen tribes. The Main God's emblem looked like an eagle, like a bird, while ethereal Divine Smoke coiled around it without end. And before the emblem and the altar, an ancestral wild boar-hide map, covered densely in markings, was being matched against a newly drawn birch-bark map.
Harman chief Ali looked moved and rueful as he stroked the ancestral map, gazing at the abstract yet practical terrain markings on it. His finger traced south from the mighty great river, passing guard post after guard post that either still existed or had vanished, until it reached the Liaodong