My Family Has Been Butchers for Generations, and You Want Me to Take the Top Scholar Exam?

Chen Dao transmigrated!

The good news: His family owned property and a shop, a pork stall at the vegetable market.

The bad news: His father shoved a butcher's knife into his hands and said, “If you can't pass the exam and become a licentiate, you'll come back and take over the family business!”

Hell mode from the start:

The Analects in his left hand, a cleaver in his right. He recited classical phrases while cutting pork belly for customers.

At the county exam, sons of generations of Hanlin scholars mocked him. “A butcher thinks he can hold a pen?”

Chen Dao sneered and wrote as if wielding a cleaver. He dissected the eight-legged essay more cleanly than a carcass!

His road to a comeback:

He placed first in the county exam, and his essay was praised as “like Cook Ding carving an ox, every word revealing the bone!”

When someone tried to frame him at the prefectural exam, he dismantled the question and argued his case on the spot. The examiner was stunned. “This boy's logic is as precise as a butcher cutting meat!”

At the palace exam, the emperor asked how he would govern the country. Chen Dao replied, “Keep taxes and labor duties light. It's just like selling pork: tax people too heavily, and all they have left to chew on are bones!”

In the end, at the imperial palace:

All the high-ranking officials heard the name of the “Pork Scholar-Topper”!

His father clutched the family's ancestral butcher's knife and wept until he fainted in the ancestral hall. “The ancestors have answered our prayers! My son really has mastered his books!”

“Who says a butcher's hands can't write a brilliant essay?”

“This year's top scholar was carved out with a butcher's knife!”