This strange young man was choosing identity as one might choose clothes.
Inwardly, the emperor thought. He may be insane. Luo He laughed suddenly.
"Many think so." he said confidently.
The emperor nearly choked. Then he laughed as well. "Never," he said aloud.
Though it was exactly what he had thought. That same night, Luo He requested a post in court. "I would like to serve as personal advisor to your majesty."
The emperor leaned back. "Why?" The emperor asked. "I enjoy difficult problems." Luo He said. "That is not normal." The emperor said. "I know." He answered. The emperor studied him carefully.
"You cannot simply be appointed. Resolve one or two matters troubling the court first. Then we shall speak of titles."
Luo He smiled faintly. "Reasonable."
So on the following morning, Luo He attended court for the first time.
He left Jin Mulan and little Lin behind in the residence. Fei alone accompanied him as a bodyguard. The blacksmith walked one pace behind, broad shouldered and silent.
While Luo He entered the halls of power with the relaxed expression of a man going to watch entertainment. And perhaps create some.
The court was divided from the moment Luo He entered. He saw it before a single word was spoken. Not in banners. Not in open declarations.
But in the way men stood beside certain pillars. In whose eyes met whose in the pauses before applause. In which ministers spoke boldly and which ones weighed every syllable.
Power announced itself long before titles did. Luo He's gaze swept the chamber once, calm and unreadable. So this is why the emperor is drowning, he thought.
If a man chose to sleep among venomous creatures, then he could hardly complain when one day he woke with fangs at his throat.
That, in Luo He's view, was the emperor's greatest mistake. He had allowed too many ambitions to grow beneath one roof.
Over the next several days, Luo He listened more than he spoke. He spoke casually with clerks in side corridors. Questioned guards while pretending to make idle conversation. Drank tea with minor scholars. Watched who visited whose estates at night. Studied tax ledgers, military dispatches, supply records, marriage alliances, old grudges, and current gossip.
From a thousand fragments, he built one clear picture. The capital was not ruled by one throne. It was ruled by factions pretending loyalty. The first and strongest force within the city was the Crowned Prince's faction.
Most of the capital's offices, administrators, record keepers, city guards, licensing officials, warehouse overseers, and tax collectors were tied directly or indirectly to him.
If a permit was needed, if grain moved through the city, if soldiers were stationed at gates, if messages passed through bureaucracy his hand was somewhere on it. He controlled the machinery of the capital. Not openly.
But thoroughly.
Luo He almost respected it. The dullest form of power, he thought. But one of the most reliable. The second major force belonged to the Second Prince.
At first glance, his influence seemed smaller. That was deceptive. He was backed through marriage ties by the Gin family. Yes, that Gin family who rules the Gin nation. Whose name carried weight beyond borders.
Yet even that alliance was more complicated than most understood.
The Gin family itself was divided into two towering branches. The elder brother, Gin Jia, ruled formally as king of the Gin nation. Lawful, polished, diplomatic.
The younger brother, Gin San, had chosen another road entirely. He lived like a warlord on the frontier. Commanding five hundred thousand cavalry and hardened riders who answered to loyalty more than law.
Where Gin Jia ruled with seals and courts, Gin San ruled with iron, speed, and fear. The Second Prince was connected to Gin San through the warlord's only grand-daughter, who has a romantic relationship with the second prince.
That meant if succession ever turned violent and in courts like this it always will. The Second Prince could potentially summon a half-million horsemen.
That possibility alone made men polite to him. Even when they hated him.
The third great faction centered around the Third Prince. He was supported by the Nang family, the most entrenched power in the capital. If the Crown Prince controlled administration, then the Nang family controlled corruption.
Its elder patriarch, now in his sixties, still moved with the vigor of a man half that age. He served publicly as a minister, but his true strength lay elsewhere in debts owed, secrets buried, judges bribed, contracts steered, gangs tolerated, rivals ruined, and fortunes quietly redirected.
He was the spider in the ceiling no one admitted to seeing. And through him, the Third Prince possessed money, networks, leverage, and the dangerous support of men who profited from instability.
Luo He found that one interesting.
Rot that learned to dress itself in silk.
Then there was the Sixth Queen Consort.
By law, royal consorts were forbidden from court affairs. By reality, law was often decorative. She was bold enough to ignore custom and clever enough to do so indirectly.
Servants loyal to her whispered into officials' ears. Eunuchs were bought. Lesser ministers rose under her favor. Certain petitions reached the emperor while others vanished. She did not hold formal power. Which made her harder to strike.
Luo He disliked unseen hands. He made a note of her. All of it these princes, these houses, these hidden networks was held in tense balance by one exhausted man.
The emperor.
Not because he was all-powerful.
Because everyone still feared what chaos would come after him. That fear was the last pillar under the palace roof.
And if factional poison were not enough, the treasury was collapsing.
Through ledgers Luo He quietly obtained, and numbers he trusted more than speeches, he learned the royal treasury carried nearly four million gold in debt to the trade societies.
Another two million was owed to the Golden Bank. Even interest on such sums was enough to choke a dynasty.
The empire's annual income no longer matched its expenses.
Military upkeep, palace spending, provincial losses, corruption leakage, unpaid tariffs, noble exemptions, failed harvest relief, road repairs, and ghost salaries for nonexistent officials had hollowed the state from within.
To compensate, the emperor had imposed harsher taxes. Predictably, it achieved the opposite of stability. The nobles hated it. The merchants evaded it. The peasants cursed it. Many simply refused to pay. And in provinces far from the capital, officials falsified records rather than enforce it. So the empire was resented and still unpaid.
Luo He almost laughed when he understood the elegance of the disaster.
The borders were no kinder. The Wu Kingdom and the Eastern Kingdoms had begun probing weak points raids, pressure, border seizures small enough to deny, large enough to hurt. Not full war.
The kind of harassment meant to test whether a lion had grown old. Worse still, a self-proclaimed warlord calling himself the Bizarre Barbarian had raised forty thousand men and openly challenged imperial authority.
A bold move. Which usually meant he believed someone inside the empire wanted him alive. On paper, the Yu Kingdom could muster between three hundred thousand to three hundred fifty thousand troops. But only on paper.
Reality was harsher. Many counts delayed summons. Old noble houses offered excuses instead of men.
Powerful families waited to see which way fortune leaned before committing.
Provincial commanders guarded their own borders first.
The emperor, despite the size of his realm, struggled to rally even eighty thousand reliable soldiers quickly.
That was the true measure of decline.
Not how many men a kingdom claimed.
How many would actually march when called.
When all the fragments had settled into one complete picture, Luo He stood at a balcony overlooking the capital streets below. Merchants shouted. Children ran.
Bells rang from distant towers. The city looked prosperous. Alive. Orderly.
Yet beneath it lay debt, faction, ambition, cowardice, and hunger. A polished vase filled with cracks. Fei approached from behind. "You've been smiling to your self," the blacksmith said. "That usually means trouble." Luo He kept watching the city. "No," he said softly. "It means opportunity."
Unlike most, he was confident in his own abilities. He knew he could repay the debt, resolve the succession crisis, and increase the trust level, ensuring that two to three hundred thousand troops would answer the call to war.