Luo Yi naturally had never imagined that Luo Cai would worry he might leave Luo Village because he could not find his footing. For an elder brother to have come to this, he probably would not know whether to feel gratified by their close sibling bond or smile bitterly at his own incompetence.
But Luo Yi was not actually as inadequate as Luo Cai imagined. Governing a commandery into ever-deeper decline was different from governing it into ever-greater prosperity.
Luo Yi had enough ability to serve as a state chancellor during the Warring States and keep the state from declining. If he really governed a commandery, his outstanding achievements would certainly earn him promotion to the central government.
Once Luo Yi reached the central government, however, he would probably only be able to watch the situation gradually deteriorate, patching things up as best he could while its decline remained inevitable.
But were most high officials in the world not like that? Merely reaching the level of a paperhanger who could patch things over already made one an extraordinary, renowned chancellor.
Anyone who could successfully push through reforms to prolong a state's life, as Duke Wen of Luo and Duke Xuan of Luo had done, was an absolute titan whose name would go down in history.
Commanding ten thousand fighting men and even being able to charge enemy formations qualified him as a great general by any measure, no worse than those extraordinarily gifted old comrades under Liu Bang.
Luo Yi's role was not actually as neither-here-nor-there as Luo Cai imagined, nor was his position in Liu Bang's camp awkward.
That was because Luo Yi had successfully played to his strengths and avoided his weaknesses, finding his place in Liu Bang's group: checking for gaps and filling them for Liu Bang.