Just as he was gazing into the distance, someone suddenly hurried over to report.
The man was named Xu Huo, just over thirty. He had once served as a captain in the Yellow Heaven Army. By the time Zhao Cheng found him after the previous battle, one of his arms had already gone necrotic. Had Zhao Cheng not treated him with his medical skills, a few more days' delay would surely have cost him his life.
In the army, losing an arm meant, without question, that one was finished.
In peacetime, someone injured in the line of duty would generally be transferred to another department and given an idle post. But now that Yellow Heaven had been defeated, it was difficult for a cripple to survive. Being pushed to the margins was inevitable.
Yet Zhao Cheng had taken notice of the man's ability to read and write.
Indeed, in this age, only those who had memorized the books of sages could barely be called scholars. But Zhao Cheng knew he had no room to be picky right now.
The ability to read and write alone was enough to put one above ninety-nine percent of people in this era.
Take the remnants of Yellow Heaven he had gathered: nearly three thousand troops, yet only around thirty of them could read and write.
And among those thirty-odd literate men, roughly a third could recognize words but had rigid, dull minds, lacking flexibility. That too was an inevitability born of intellectual confinement.
In this world, even if ordinary people were fortunate enough to learn some characters, unless they possessed exceptional natural talent, they would only read books by rote. The more they read, the more stubborn they became.
Poor families rarely produced distinguished sons not merely because of visible disparities in resources, but