At death's door, the fellow had supposedly returned to his true self, but only for a moment. In the end, he had still struggled to stand and shoulder political responsibility for his entire faction. It was hard to know whether to praise him or laugh at him.
That was Liu Cheng's inward grumbling, but he said nothing aloud. Perhaps even this General of the Vanguard Army had not noticed the melancholy behind his own complaint.
These days, encountering a military-political leader with a normal personality did not seem particularly remarkable, but every death meant one fewer. Who knew what the next one would be like?
Returning to the matter at hand, now that Yao Xiang was dead, they naturally had to accept the surrender of his Qiang followers on a large scale.
Those below collected them; those above divided them up.
Liu Acheng's shoulders were narrow. Having already swallowed the Lueyang Di people, he was certainly not entitled to another mouthful. Huan Wen would gulp down most of them, but Huan Wen's power was so extensive-his was already the largest military-political faction in the realm-that further division within it was inevitable. Even Liu Cheng's mouthful counted, in a certain sense, as an internal division of spoils within Huan Wen's faction.
There was also the question of military merit.
The cold front was clearly about to arrive. To spare the main army, along with all those Qiang people with no one to rely on, from enduring the bitter cold in Luoyang, they certainly had to get everyone out of the Luoyang Basin as soon as possible. Once outside it, even in Nanyang or Chang'an, things would be much more comfortable.
Under these circumstances, military merits had to be assessed, rewards issued, and compensation paid. Some Direct-Control Troops could certainly wait a