Spring rain soaked the flagstones outside the examination compound as the results were posted. To the powerful Cui Muxian, the sight of the poor scholar Jiang Yan helping an old man across the street was like a thorn in his side. “A dirt-covered peasant thinks he can reach for the stars?” sneered the young master Cui, brutally tearing up Jiang Yan’s answer sheet, which had placed third in the metropolitan examination. Scraps of ink-stained paper fluttered into the mud, like insults and tears of blood.
Jiang Yan silently gathered the torn pieces, raised his eyes to Cui Muxian, and spoke each word like ice: “Today you tore up one sheet of mine. One day, in the palace hall, I will strike your Cui family from the rolls, and your blood will stain your ceremonial caps!” His vow cracked like thunder before the examination compound’s towering gates, reaching the depths of the eyes of Yan Henian, Grand Tutor to the Crown Prince.
He did not belong to this world. The soul of a modern genius with unrivaled intelligence had been forced to be reborn in this frail body, ravaged by poverty and illness. Ten years of hard study? That was only a glimpse of the wisdom he had kept in reserve. The palace examination was near, and three imperial questions loomed over him: resisting the Japanese pirates, preventing disasters, and strengthening the nation and its military. The emperor believed in the supernatural, the great families were entrenched in every branch of power, Japanese pirates ravaged the southeast, and the people were suffering as if trapped in fire and water!
No flashy cheat, just peerless strategic brilliance! He wielded his brush as though it held the Milky Way. Using celestial physics, he precisely predicted the “land-sinking calamity” that would strike the southeast ten years later, shocking the emperor to the core! He devised The Art of Commanding the Waves, using sound waves to control the sea and turning man-eating sharks into a fearsome weapon to tear the Japanese pirates apart! He also created the Sunlight Condenser, a miraculous device that focused the scorching sun to boil up the cold springs buried deep beneath the drought!
He takes first place in the palace examination and is paraded through the streets in triumph. Standing above the crowd, Jiang Yan raises his jade tablet like a sword and points it at Cui Muxian, whose face has turned ashen. “I, Jiang Yan, am the new top scholar! Your place, Cui family, make room for me!” A mouthful of bright red blood sprays across the main street, and the powerful family’s dignity crumbles into the mud!
