Both the Han Court and the Taiping Army had sent out scouts in great numbers. Each saw the other's orderly ranks, cavalry stretching in swathes, and countless tents arranged neatly between mountains, rivers, and cities.
Scattered units on the outskirts had already begun fighting. The two sides traded blows as they contested certain key areas, sustaining negligible losses.
They spent quite some time testing one another with stratagems, chiefly to determine the routes their supply trains took and where the two armies stored their grain.
Once the grain stores were located, they had to judge how quickly provisions were consumed and the timing of supply shipments. Cutting off provisions was always the surest road to victory in war.
If they could burn the newly delivered supplies just before the existing stock ran out, the army would go hungry.
The timing of that fire could be neither too early nor too late, because news of the burned supplies needed time to ferment.
If the enemy learned too early that their provisions had burned, they would change the timing of the decisive battle and hurry to bring in fresh supplies.
Too late went without saying-it would be no different from not burning them at all.
Thus, the supplies had to be burned when the decisive battle had become unavoidable. Without further provisions coming, the army's morale would crumble at once. Even the commanding general might surrender outright.
But after a period of probing,
it became clear that both sides were clever, and neither could crush the other completely. Until the fighting reached a white-hot pitch, stratagems alone could not win a major engagement.
Luo Xiao considered this result fairly normal. After all, he faced the outstanding talents of the entire Han Court.
Back then, his ancestor Duke Wu had led the Luo