This series. It's ABSURD. It's everything I loved as a teenager and then hated for years because it was consistently so poorly done, but then Liu shows up and absolutely slays the entire genre to the point that I could barely keep track of the characters and I did not care.
Liu's is very clear that his main influence is wuxia, but the series itself is also constantly asking the question: "what does it mean, philosophically speaking, to be a good leader?" and weighing everything that hangs in the balance. The narrative itself is a kind of weighing of the fish - when this happens, who or what does a leader become? What does it mean for a leader to be good?
And while Liu lays out the possible answers, he's equally aware of how impossible it is to answer that questions in specifics or in anything beyond the story itself that is, in all its 4000+ pages of complexity, the answer.
He also shares Neal Stephenson's gift for spending ages on technology without being extremely boring and using technology not as a macguffin, but as a tool that allows the characters to do what they all really want to do anyway. And he clearly has such fun with it.
Anyway, if you're looking for books that capture the joy of epic fantasy, but whose understanding of morality grew up as well, here it is.