My Chancellor Is Always Drawing Turtles

Shen Zhi’an is sure he must have been reborn into the wrong script. Other people get a comeback and face-slap their enemies when they’re reborn. He has been reborn three times, and each time he lands squarely in a death-by-own-stupidity ending. The first time, he becomes a general, but his horse trips during a charge and he tumbles into the enemy ranks, where he’s hacked to death. The second time, he takes the imperial exams, but while writing his policy essay, he accidentally writes “The emperor is so wise” as “The emperor has only a little wisdom left.” It’s taken as mockery of the emperor’s “remaining scraps of cleverness,” and he’s beheaded on the spot. The third time, he becomes a princess’s husband, only for the princess to force him to drink poison and kill him.

When he opens his eyes for the fourth time, Shen Zhi’an finally gets it. What are fame and fortune, what are the nation and the people? Nothing matters more than staying alive and biting into a hot steamed bun!

The emperor orders him to fight at the frontier? He clutches his back, pretending to be weak-kidneyed. “Your Majesty, I threw my back out changing a lightbulb (wrong!) while practicing archery last night. My hands shake whenever I draw a bow. I’d only be going there to get killed.”

A princess tosses her embroidered ball to choose a husband? He squats behind the crowd to tie his shoe, catches the ball perfectly with the back of his head, and puts on a show of being “knocked unconscious.” Once he’s carried into the princess’s residence, he feigns illness until she thinks he’s about to die.

The officials nominate him for prime minister? He spends every day at work drawing turtles, crooked and with the colors running. The emperor, however, slaps the table in delight at the turtle drawings. “Zhi’an! This turtle’s wise retreat into its shell is full of Zen. Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish: you need to stay steady and keep a low profile!”

Shen Zhi’an: “...?”

He was supposed to lie low and scrape by, so how did he somehow become the court’s universally acknowledged “most unfathomable genius”?! Even more absurd, the people who killed him in his first three lives now come running to cling to him. “Lord Shen, please let us coast along with you!”