Imperial Exams for a Poor Scholar: My Whole Clan Helps Me Reach the Top!

Shen Yan, a modern history graduate student, dies suddenly and transmigrates into a dying farm boy in the Great Jing Dynasty. When he wakes, he learns that he is the “fake farmer” who was deliberately switched at birth twenty years ago. His birth parents were loyal officials framed and stripped of their estate. Returning to the dirt-poor Shen clan, he finds hungry children, elders coughing blood, and barely more than an acre of meager farmland.

The clan head shakily holds out half a sack of coarse rice. “This is all the Shen family has left. We'll use it to send you to school and take a chance!”

To survive and uncover the truth behind his parents' wrongful conviction, Shen Yan picks up his brush and ink. He applies modern thinking to the rigid eight-legged essays and uses basic agricultural knowledge to improve his clan's lives. But then, in the entry-level imperial examination, he runs into the county magistrate's son cheating; the provincial examination draws him into Prince Jing's shadowy system of patronage; and the metropolitan examination puts him face-to-face with the in-laws of the imperial family and their murderous schemes.

Qin Yaoyao, the Censor's daughter, seems gentle, but secretly commands a network of informants who submit reports based on hearsay. She and Shen Yan go from testing one another to entrusting their lives to each other. As they expose corruption in the imperial examinations, they gradually uncover the truth behind the massacre of a loyal family twenty years earlier.

When Shen Yan stands in the Golden Throne Hall, the road behind him has been paved with the blood and sweat of his entire clan. Ahead lies an abyss ringed by powerful ministers. Only then does he understand: a poor family's rise is never one person's struggle. It's a desperate wager on the lives of an entire clan.