For Liu Bei, learning that Emperor Li Zhi could casually mobilize three hundred thousand men did not inspire jealousy.
It inspired administrative dread.
Zhuge Liang had explained the realities of commanding massive armies to him on many occasions.
Once an army exceeded one hundred thousand men, the enemy was no longer the commander's greatest concern.
The real enemies were logistics.
Maintaining a stable supply chain. Keeping communications functioning across multiple levels of command. Ensuring orders traveled down the chain without being distorted. Keeping an army of that size responsive once the battle descended into chaos, these were the true challenges.
These were the problems that destroyed generals long before the enemy ever had the chance.
Zhuge Liang had also taught him that a commander must know when to trust his subordinates. Trying to control every arrow would lose the battle before it began. A good general delegated, trusted, and only intervened when the bigger picture demanded it.
Furthermore, morale was more important than numbers.
A thousand men who believed they would win were stronger than ten thousand who believed they would lose.
That was why Zhuge Liang always made sure his soldiers understood the purpose of their mission, rewarded them frequently, and kept them occupied to prevent boredom and despair.
But Zhuge Liang had also noted that these obstacles were not impossible to clear.
A trained officer corps, basic literacy requirements for commanders, standardized signals with flags and drums, a large staff of dedicated military planners: all practical and achievable. These were all practical solutions they had discussed over late-night tea.
Commanding a massive army was a science. It could be studied, cultivated, and replicated.
The legendary victories of history's greatest generals were something else entirely.
Take Marquis Huo Qubing. He plunged deep into uncharted enemy territory, never lost his bearings, and maintained a terrifying speed across multiple engagements.
Or take Li Jing of the Tang Dynasty. He led a cavalry strike through a blinding blizzard to wipe out the Eastern Turkic Khaganate, perfectly predicting the enemy's movements.
At this moment, Liu Bei finally understood a phrase the Light Screen had used previously: A truly great general exists to accelerate the timeline of history.
A genius commander could achieve a strategic objective with ten thousand men that a mediocre commander would fail to accomplish with three hundred thousand. They used less time, consumed fewer rations, and delivered a cleaner victory.
[Lightscreen]
[The decline in the combat effectiveness of the Tang military under Emperor Li Zhi was visible without needing a specialist to point it out.
Many historians attribute this purely to the gradual collapse of the Fubing system. They argue that the terrifying military might of Li Shimin's era was simply because this militia system was operating at peak efficiency.
But reality is far more complicated.
By the later years of Li Shimin's own reign, the Fubing system was already struggling to keep pace with what the empire needed. The clearest evidence is Xue Rengui himself.
Xue Rengui was not a Fubing militiaman. He was a recruited volunteer, known in the Tang Dynasty as a "Zhengren."
The Basic Annals of Taizong recorded the situation very clearly. The Emperor mobilized armored soldiers from across the empire, specifically recruiting one hundred thousand volunteers, and marched on Pyongyang to strike Goguryeo.
Why did Li Shimin shift to volunteer recruitment? Because the Fubing system simply did not have the manpower to sustain foreign conquest at that scale.
The Fubing system was essentially a soldier-farmer hybrid model. In times of war, they fought. In times of peace, they farmed. In exchange for military service, their families received tax exemptions. They were only required to serve a set number of days per year.
Let us look at a practical example.
Suppose there was a thousand-man military garrison within a five-hundred-mile radius of Hulao Pass. According to Tang regulations, this garrison had to divide its troops into five alternating squads of two hundred men. These squads would rotate active duty over a five-month period. This meant each man served one shift, or "Fan," before rotating back to his fields.
Once the Tang started expanding its borders aggressively, this model broke under the weight of geography.
The rapid expansion of territory meant that a soldier's deployment zone was often thousands of miles away from his home garrison. A single tour of duty could easily consume an entire year, sometimes much longer.
Furthermore, the Zhenguan era was a period of constant, overlapping warfare. A militiaman might finish his required deployment for one campaign, only to find another war breaking out on a different front. He would immediately be shipped off to the next meat grinder. The bureaucratic nightmare of calculating who was owed rest and who was due for deployment became mathematically impossible.
More importantly, the Fubing system actually limited the scale of offensive operations.
Let us stick to the rotation math. In the tenth year of the Zhenguan era, Li Shimin established roughly six hundred and thirty-four military garrisons across the empire. These were divided into upper, middle, and lower tiers, holding twelve hundred, one thousand, and eight hundred men respectively.
A rough calculation puts the total Fubing forces at around six hundred thousand men. Following the standard rotation rules, the absolute maximum number of troops the Tang could legally mobilize at any given moment was roughly one hundred and twenty thousand.
But those one hundred and twenty thousand men could not all march off to war. They had to guard the massive frontier borders. They had to protect the imperial capital. By the time you factored in defensive obligations, the actual number of troops available for an expeditionary force was hovering around forty or fifty thousand.
If you factor in travel time across the continent and the mandatory rest periods required by law, the number of deployable combat troops could plummet to a mere thirty thousand during back-to-back campaigns.
This is precisely why Emperor Li Shimin began actively recruiting volunteers for the Goguryeo campaign. It was during this massive recruitment drive that he managed to pull a golden SSR card named Xue Rengui out of the military gacha pool.
Historical records paint a vivid picture of this recruitment drive. They state that when the call went out, for every ten men needed, a hundred volunteered. For every hundred needed, a thousand applied. Those who were rejected wept in the streets with frustration.
The results were spectacular. For the commoners of the Great Tang, joining the army was not about the meager base pay. Everyone was aggressively chasing military merit to secure generational wealth and aristocratic titles.
During the Liaodong campaign, the raw combat power of these volunteer recruits was undeniable.
We do not even need to mention the God of Slaughter, Xue Rengui. He was the ultimate poster boy for the volunteer system.
A perfect example is the Battle of Baiyan City. The defending city lord surrendered and then immediately rebelled again. This enraged Li Shimin. He issued a standing order: once the city was breached, the imperial treasury would not take a single copper coin or captive. Every piece of loot and every prisoner would be distributed directly to the soldiers.
Fueled by this extreme financial incentive, Baiyan City fell in exactly three days. During this siege, the Tang general Qibi Heli led a mere eight hundred men to completely shatter a relief force of ten thousand soldiers from Wugu City. The sheer lethality of highly motivated volunteers was terrifying.
When the Goguryeo campaign temporarily paused, another war flared up with the Xueyantuo Khaganate. Even though the battlefields were relatively close, Li Shimin issued a strict edict: anyone who had fought in Goguryeo was expressly forbidden from participating in the Xueyantuo campaign.
You could argue this edict was a merciful act to let the veterans rest. You could also argue it was designed to let the fresh troops sitting at home finally get a taste of the military merit pie.
But all these frantic logistical adjustments proved one undeniable truth. The Fubing system was not necessarily breaking down from internal corruption. It was simply fundamentally incompatible with a global superpower that needed to project force across thousands of miles.]
Inside the Ganlu Pavilion, Li Shimin stared at the map. He had not yet issued the edict to fully overhaul the imperial garrison system, but he had to acknowledge the brutal geopolitical reality.
"This conflict between our military structure and our borders is a genuine crisis," Li Shimin admitted, his voice echoing in the vast room.
"The majority of our military garrisons are concentrated in Henan, Hebei, Hedong, and the Guannei circuits. If we are marching north to fight the Eastern Turks, it is manageable. The distance is only a thousand miles. But if we need to conscript soldiers from the southern Huainan circuit and march them all the way to the Western Regions, a single round trip will consume an entire year."
But the Tang could not simply ignore the troops stationed in the south. If the empire only drafted troops from the central Guannei circuit for western campaigns, those central soldiers would rapidly accumulate massive amounts of military merit and land grants. The soldiers stationed in Huainan and Hebei would be locked out of the system, their eyes turning green with envy as they missed out on promotions and wealth. Mutiny was born from such inequality.
Faced with this logistical puzzle, Du Ruhui voiced a highly practical question.
"I am intensely curious to know how the military system of the future era operates."
Li Shimin, a man who had spent his entire life immersed in the violent art of war, waved his hand dismissively. He was focused on a deeper truth.
"Regardless of the specific conscription model, the ultimate goal of any military system is to forge a willingness to fight within the heart of the soldier."
The Emperor paced in front of his throne. "The militia of the Zhenguan era is fierce because our system of rewards and punishments is absolute. Merits are heavily compensated. Faults are strictly penalized. Our generals lead from the front, and our men do not hesitate to throw away their lives for the nation."
Li Shimin stopped and looked at his cabinet. "If you can achieve that standard, it does not matter if they are conscripted farmers or paid volunteers. They will be elite shock troops. If you fail to achieve that standard, possessing a thousand military garrisons is entirely useless."
It was an answer to Du Ruhui, but it was also the Emperor clarifying his own internal philosophy.
At that exact moment, a memory surfaced in Li Shimin's mind. He recalled the specific title the Light Screen had used for the army of the future. They were the "People's" Army. He remembered the footage of those soldiers marching directly into catastrophic natural disasters, risking their lives without the promise of loot or titles.
He suddenly understood a profound concept, recalling a question he had asked himself long ago.
"What truly constitutes a strong army?" Li Shimin asked aloud.
He did not wait for his ministers to answer. He provided the quote himself.
"The Way means the people and the ruler share the same heart. When that happens, they will face life and death together without fear."
Li Jing, a man who essentially had Sun Tzu's Art of War permanently hardwired into his brain, immediately recognized the quote. He noticed Su Dingfang looking slightly lost and decided to offer an impromptu lecture.
"Sun Tzu states there are five fundamental factors to achieving military victory," Li Jing explained, his tone shifting into that of a seasoned academy instructor. "First is strict discipline and laws. Second is the wisdom and courage of the commander. Third is a masterful understanding of terrain. Fourth is the ability to seize the climate and timing."
Li Jing paused and looked directly at Su Dingfang. "Those first four factors are difficult, but they can be mastered through study and talent. The fifth factor is what Sun Tzu called 'The Way'. It means the people and the ruler are of one heart. When that happens, they will face life and death together without fear. No reward can match that. No punishment can surpass it."
Su Dingfang mentally rolled his eyes. The first four factors were not difficult? Fine. For a monstrous tactical genius like Li Jing, perhaps they were easy.
But Su Dingfang quickly recognized the quote as the opening thesis of the Art of War. Because it was placed at the very beginning of the text, it was often skimmed over by arrogant commanders eager to study the sexier chapters on deception, troop deployment, and espionage.
Sun Tzu phrased it simply, but the sheer weight of the concept suddenly crashed down on Su Dingfang.
"Winning the people's hearts..." Su Dingfang murmured, his eyes widening. "That is an impossible standard. Who could ever actually achieve that?"
Inducing the people to share the exact same ideological aim as the sovereign. Creating an army that fought without fear of death, not for money, but out of pure shared conviction.
According to the Light Screen's brutally honest analysis, even the legendary soldiers of the Zhenguan era were fundamentally fighting for military merit and social mobility. They were far from achieving true unity of "The Way."
Du Ruhui also remembered the footage of that future army charging into the floodwaters and earthquake rubble. He let out a long, heavy sigh.
"The army of the future era," Du Ruhui said softly. "That is an army that has found The Way."
Su Dingfang and Li Ji exchanged skeptical glances. It sounded too utopian to be real.
Li Shimin merely smiled, understanding their disbelief.
[Lightscreen]
[So, the Fubing system had its problems. But it was not the real reason the Tang military turned into a joke under Li Zhi.
The real reason was Li Zhi himself.
Li Zhi looked at his father's volunteer recruitment policy, saw that it worked brilliantly, and decided to copy the homework.
A perfectly reasonable decision. The problem was that he copied it incorrectly.
At first, it seemed fine. The volunteers came. The volunteers fought. The volunteers won. But then, something happened. The pool of strong, healthy, willing volunteers started drying up.
By the later years of his reign, local officials were reportedly dragging the elderly and the frail into service simply to meet their quotas.
Think about that contrast.
During the Zhenguan era, young and ambitious volunteers rushed to enlist, hoping to earn military merit and change their family's fortunes.
Under Li Zhi, old men with walking sticks were being shoved into armor and told to march.
Eventually, Liu Rengui, a veteran minister who had seen enough incompetence to last several lifetimes, could not take it anymore. He submitted a brilliantly passive-aggressive memorial to Li Zhi. He pinpointed the exact moment everything went wrong.
The fifth year of Xianqing. 660 AD.
That year, Su Dingfang conquered the three kingdoms of the Pamir Mountains and returned to Chang'an in triumph. The army had bled. The army had won. The army had earned its rewards.
And then Li Zhi looked at the accounts and made a decision that was utterly devoid of basic human decency.
He stopped compensating the families of fallen soldiers.
Think about that for a moment.
Under Li Shimin, if a soldier died in battle, the court personally dispatched envoys to mourn the dead and provide assistance to their widows and orphans.
A soldier knew that even if he fell on the battlefield, his family would not be abandoned.
That certainty mattered. It was one of the reasons men willingly charged into walls of spears.
Li Zhi looked at that system and said, "Nah. Too expensive."
So he abolished it.
Later, during the grueling campaigns to pacify Baekje and besiege Pyongyang, Li Zhi escalated his stinginess.
Not only did the dead receive no compensation, but many surviving veterans found that the rewards they had been promised were heavily reduced by the bureaucracy.
They fought, they bled, they won, and then they were handed only a fraction of what they had earned.
After 660 AD, the recruitment scene became the exact mirror opposite of Li Shimin's era.
Any man who was young, healthy, or financially comfortable did everything possible to avoid service. They bribed officials, hid from recruiters, or simply disappeared into the countryside.
The only people left to be conscripted were the desperately poor, the weak, and the elderly who could not afford to escape the draft.
Under these conditions, the combat effectiveness of the Tang military plummeted off a cliff. No surprise there.
Throughout Emperor Gaozong's reign, almost every major campaign required increasingly large recruitment drives.
The quotas grew larger and larger.
After the devastating loss at the Dafei River, Li Zhi probably sat down, engaged in some painful self-reflection, and came to a spectacularly wrong conclusion.
He believed his mistake was simply not drafting enough men.
So, he panicked and drafted three hundred thousand men in a single wave, dumping the entire mess onto Pei Xingjian's lap.
It was a minor miracle that Pei Xingjian was a logistical mastermind.
If Li Zhi had handed that bloated, undertrained, heavily drafted mob to a lesser general, the Tang army would have starved to death on the march before the Turks even fired an arrow.
The soldiers would have eaten each other out of desperation.
But why did Li Zhi suddenly transform into a penny-pinching miser? Why abandon the widows and orphans of his own troops?
The answer is simple.
He needed money.
A great deal of money.
Because he was preparing an enormous ceremonial project: the Fengshan sacrifices at Mount Tai, performed in honor of his late father.
The preparations began in 664 AD. Grand altars were constructed. Foreign dignitaries were invited.
The entire empire was mobilized to stage a magnificent religious spectacle that would impress Heaven itself and make the Ministry of Revenue break into tears.
The ceremony finally took place in early 666 AD.
It was arguably one of the most extravagant and financially disastrous vanity projects in Tang history.
And only one month later, with the treasury nearly exhausted and state finances under severe strain, Li Zhi issued a new monetary decree.
The government would cast new currency and aggressively devalue the old coinage.
The Emperor of the Great Tang was about to discover one of the oldest tricks in fiscal history. He was about to officially start robbing his own citizens.]