Luo He was also careful never to present these benefits as though they were gifts for which the soldiers should endlessly thank him and be obedient towards him.
Whenever someone praised his reforms, he redirected the praise toward the army itself. When soldiers thanked him for their wages, he told them they had earned them.
When families thanked him for pensions, he treated their gratitude as unnecessary, as though supporting the family of a fallen soldier were simply the natural duty of their lord and his responsibility.
He cultivated the image of a ruler who genuinely cared about the people beneath his banner. Eventually, the distinction between image and reality became almost irrelevant for the soldiers.
The soldiers genuinely believed that Luo He cared about them. They spoke proudly of his reforms to their families. Their children knew his name. Veterans defended his reputation without being ordered to do so.
The loyalty he had originally cultivated through carefully designed systems had become something much more organic. Luo He understood the irony better than anyone else.
He did not need to love every soldier personally. He could not. There were too many of them. But he could understand what they needed from their lord and provide it consistently enough that they eventually loved him in return.
Fear could make a soldier obey. Money could make him stay. Discipline could keep him in formation. But none of those things could make him willingly die for a banner, for a cause, for him lord. But belief can.
For that, a soldier needed to believe that the banner represented something worth that is worth protecting.
Luo He gave his men recognition, homes, pensions, families, capable commanders, wages and the promise that their deaths would not disappear unnoticed. He gave them roots.
Then he gave those roots time to grow. The stronger the soldier became, the more invested he became in the army. The more responsibility a commander received, the more connected he became to the men beneath him who chose him.
The more families depended upon the army, the more those families depended upon Luo He's continued success. The entire structure reinforced itself.
And beneath all of it was the cold ruthless calculation Luo He never showed them. He knew that every soldier was replaceable. If one died, another could eventually take his place immediately.
If ten thousand fell, the still army could be rebuilt. If a commander failed, another could always rise. A strategist who became sentimental about individual pieces would eventually lose the entire game.
But Luo He also understood the opposite truth. A player who treated every piece as worthless would eventually have no pieces left. So he treated his soldiers as though they were precious.
He paid them. He fed them. He protected their families. He honored their dead. He rewarded their courage. He gave them opportunities to rise.
He allowed them to choose the men who would lead them, and he made certain that the families of the fallen knew that their sacrifices had been seen.
The soldiers never saw the entire cold calculation beneath it. They saw their lord standing before their memorials. They saw their proud commanders kneeling beside wounded comrades.
They saw medals placed into the hands of grieving families. They saw gold delivered to widows. They saw veterans promoted because of merit rather than birth. They saw a lord who had changed their lives.
And when the next war came, Luo He would not need to order those men to stand. They would already be standing. That was the true achievement of Luo He's uniquely special military system based on beliefs.
He had not simply built an outstandingly loyal army that obeyed him. He had built an army that believed always standing beside him was in its own interest, out of belief and duty to the man who changed their lives.
He had transformed loyalty from something demanded by authority into something cultivated through thousands of small, deliberate decisions.
From the foundation to the flag at the very top, Luo He had built it himself with his knowledge and wisdom. And when the wind came, the entire structure stood.
After the war had finally settled into something resembling peace, Luo He found himself with several very serious problems to resolve at once.
The Wu Crown Prince had escaped with roughly twenty thousand cavalry, and the emperor immediately dispatched a force of nearly twenty-five thousand men under the command of the Second Prince and Duke Bian to pursue them.
It was Luo He who had recommended the Second Prince for the expedition. With the Crown Prince dead, the Second Prince was now the most viable successor, and Luo He believed that a future emperor should have more than a claim written on paper.
He needed experience, merit, and the reputation of having actually stood on a battlefield. The emperor accepted the suggestion without hesitation. By now, trust in Luo He had reached an almost absurd level.
If Luo He told him to sit on the right, he would sit on the right if he would ask him to sit on the left he will sit on the left. If Luo He told him to face east while doing so, he would probably turn towards east without even asking why.
It was not that the emperor had suddenly become incapable of thought. Rather, he had learned that Luo He possessed an almost unnerving ability to see several moves beyond everyone else.
Following Luo He had become less like taking advice and more like trusting the judgment of a man who had repeatedly proven that his seemingly outrageous decisions eventually made sense.
Luo He also asked Jun to take his twelve thousand five hundred cavalry and follow the Second Prince as a supporting force. Together, the armies pursuing the remnants of Wu army that escaped.
With this the numbers reached close to forty thousand cavalry. To the emperor, it was another reinforcement for an important pursuit. To Luo He, however, the purpose was considerably narrower.
He gave Jun his real order in very privately. "Make sure the Second Prince dies here." Jun had stared at him for a moment, but Luo He had shown no hesitation. The fate of the Wu Crown Prince was secondary.
Whether the man survived or died mattered little to him now. The Second Prince was the important piece. His death would destroy his position as the future betrothed to Xuexin. Luo He had no intention of allowing that marriage to stand strong.
Under ordinary circumstances, such an order might have shaken Jun. Instead, he simply accepted it. That change in Jun had not happened overnight.
It had been built slowly through everything he had witnessed since beginning to follow Luo He. There was something deeply contradictory about the man.
Luo He could be terrifyingly cold when dealing with enemies, capable of making decisions that would cause ordinary commanders to hesitate for days.
Yet the same man could turn around and obsess over the welfare of people standing beneath his banner. He could destroy an enemy's army without blinking.
Then spend an entire afternoon asking why a village had not received enough grain to survive. Jun had first truly understood that contradiction after the recapture of the Yue capital freeing it from its siege.
The city had been broken, its military power broken, and the treasury was already under pressure from the enormous cost of the campaign that had just been won.
When the emperor hesitated to open the royal granaries to feed the starving mass population, Luo He had simply offered to cover the expense himself.
"The five million gold will fund the recovery for years. Open the granaries and feed them now." There had been no grand political calculation in his tone.
The people were hungry, so Luo He wanted them fed. That simple decision had truly changed something in Jun. He had already judged Luo He according to Gin Wenyuan's standards and recognized his extraordinary talent, but this was different.
He was beginning to understand the kind of ruler Luo He could oneday become. A very ruthless commander who could win a war with twelve thousand five hundred men was rather impressive.
A ruthless commander who could win the same war and still remember the people starving in the aftermath was something else entirely different.
Jun had come to respect that contradiction. Luo He did not just demand loyalty merely because he possessed power. He always cultivated it. He rewarded the people who stood beside him.
Protected their families, and treated their lives as something worth preserving. That was why Jun could now receive an order as terrible as the one concerning the Second Prince and simply lower his head.