When Luo He eventually stepped forward, he did not give a grand speech. He simply spoke about courage, sacrifice, and the responsibility of the living to remember those who had fallen beside them.
"Those who died defending our homes did not die as numbers in a report. They died as defenders, heroes, comrades, husbands, fathers, and sons.
Their names will remain here, and their families will never be forgotten.
The best we could do is to keep our hearts warm for them. We can't bring them back despite wanting to, but we could remember them.
Honer them for sacrificing them selves so we could stand here now and remember why we are alive today."
The soldiers answered with a roar that rolled across the memorial grounds. Luo He understood exactly what that sound meant, and he planned every single step of this.
Then medals were avoided for the bravest.
These medals placed upon the chests of the living and the families of the dead were little more than decorated pieces of brass.
He knew their material value was almost meaningless to him.
Yet their symbolic value was enormous. For perhaps the first time in the region, soldiers were being publicly recognized for courage rather than merely being counted according to how many enemies they had killed.
Even men who had died performing heroic acts received medals, which were passed into the hands of their families as proof that someone had noticed how their loved ones had fought for something greater.
At Pirate Island, a separate ceremony honored those who had fallen during the fighting there.
Among them was the man who had saved Jin Sang's life by firing a bolt that pinned a Grand Master thus the killing blow was not to be delivered.
His bravery and quick thinking and ruthless creativity was publicly recognized, and he received a special honours and a promotion to become a commanding officer and a reward for saving a commander's life.
Luo He knew precisely what such gestures accomplished. A soldier watching these ceremonies would remember that the commanders were watching.
He would understand that extraordinary courage could bring honor not merely to himself, but to his entire family. Suddenly, bravery had become something tangible.
Luo He had never believed loyalty could simply be demanded. A lord could always command a soldier to kneel, threaten him with punishment, or frighten him into blind obedience but none of those things created genuine loyalty.
They created compliance, and compliance disappeared the moment the man with the whip disappeared. Luo He always wanted something far more durable.
He wanted soldiers who would stand their ground when nobody was watching, men who would protect his territory not because an officer stood behind them with a sword, but because they believed that abandoning it would be worse than dying there.
His philosophy was remarkably simple. If he wanted soldiers to give their lives for him, he first had to make those lives worth protecting. It was not a philosophy he would ever explain honestly to the court.
Because beneath all his warmth remained the cold calculation of a strategist. To Luo He, soldiers were still pieces on a board. Useful pieces, expensive pieces, but still very replaceable pieces.
But he understood that a soldier must never feel replaceable. The man had to believe that his lord valued him, remembered him, and would protect the people waiting for him at home even if he didn't return.
That was why Luo He treated his soldiers differently from the armies of most nobles. He wanted them to have good wages, proper equipment, food, clothing, medical treatment, regular leave.
The opportunity to build lives outside the barracks. A second-line soldier elsewhere might receive only a handful of copper coins each week, barely enough to survive.
Luo He's soldiers received a silver coin every week. Because regularly their basic necessities were already provided, much of that wage could actually be saved.
After every three months of service, they received a month of leave, giving them time to return home, marry, raise children, and remember that they were men with lives beyond the battlefield.
Luo He never needed to order his soldiers to have families. He simply created the right circumstances in which having a family became possible.
He wanted a soldier to return from the army to a wife waiting at the door and children running toward him. He wanted that soldier to have a house, savings, and something that belonged to him.
A man fighting only for himself had one life to lose, but a man who believed his wife and children depended upon the survival of his homeland possessed something far more powerful than fear. He possessed roots.
The same principle extended into his command structure. Luo He had little patience for commanders who possessed authority merely because their fathers had been nobles for centuries.
A man could memorize every famous battle in history and still collapse swiftly the same moment arrows began falling around him.
He could know every military formation ever recorded and still have no understanding of what an exhausted soldier felt after three nights without sleep on a battelment.
Luo He wanted commanders who had experienced the same hunger, exhaustion, fear, and uncertainty as the men they commanded to fight.
The smallest unit of his army consisted of ten soldiers, and those soldiers selected their own commander. Ten such groups formed a hundred-man unit.
Whose commander was likewise chosen through the confidence of the soldiers beneath him. These men had marched together, eaten together, slept beneath the same tents at the hardest times.
They had survived the same campaigns, so they knew exactly who remained calm under pressure. Who was fast, who was strong, who panicked, and who could still think clearly when everyone else was losing their heads.
When such a commander gave an order, the soldiers did not see a distant aristocrat hiding behind the army. They saw one of their own brothers leading them.
The higher ranks were handled differently, but the same principle remained.
Thousand-man commanders were nominated by Luo He, Xu Mun, and the senior officers, usually from among experienced veterans who had survived decades of warfare.
Yet nomination alone did not guarantee their position. The men beneath them still needed to vote for them. Luo He wanted loyalty flowing in both directions.
A commander who was loyal only to his soldiers could become insubordinate, while a commander loyal only to his superior might sacrifice his men carelessly.
He wanted men who truly understood the responsibility upward and downward at the same time.That system created something rare within his army. Soldiers believed that their voices mattered.
A commander who repeatedly abused his men, ignored their concerns, or constantly demonstrated incompetence could always be challenged by them.
Authority still existed, discipline remained absolute, and orders still had to be always followed, but command was no longer merely a gift handed down by aristocratic families to their younglings.
The soldiers themselves participated in determining who deserved to stand above them. Luo He extended the same principle philosophy to the dead.
A fallen soldier could not simply disappear into a casualty report. Someone had to face the family. The ten-man commander was responsible for personally delivering the military compensation.
He should speak with the dead man's wife, mother, or children. He had to place the ten gold coins into their hands and explain that their husband, son, or father had died serving the army.
He had to look them in the eyes rather than hiding behind a written document. If that commander had also fallen in the battlefield then the responsibility passed upward. The hundred-man commander went instead.
If he was dead, the responsibility passed higher still. Luo He had designed the system so that no officer could easily forget that every casualty represented an actual living household.
A family that suddenly missing one of its pillars. A military report could contain a number, but a grieving mother could not be reduced to one.
That understanding also changed the way Luo He's soldiers fought. When a comrade fell wounded, his companions were more willing to risk themselves to bring him back.
Not because they had become weak, and certainly not because they had stopped obeying orders, but because they had learned that a wounded soldier was still worth saving.
Luo He did not want an army that threw men into the grinder merely as a way of demonstrating obedience. He wanted an army that followed orders intelligently.
An army which preserved its strength, and understood that every veteran saved today could become an experienced commander tomorrow.
His rewards for bravery reinforced the same lesson. Promotions went to men who had actually distinguished themselves. Medals were given to living soldiers and to the families of the dead.
Officers who fell in battle were replaced by capable men who had fought beside ordinary soldiers rather than automatically being replaced by some nobleman's son.
Every success created another example for the younger soldiers to imitate, and every act of courage became part of the army's growing culture.