From the Start, Jilted by My Fiancée, I Compose a Poem to Protect the Nation

The brilliant scholar Gu Changye is gifted with extraordinary insight and talent, yet his family’s decline and frail physique make him the target of public humiliation when his powerful fiancée breaks off their engagement. He refuses to be beaten down. Instead, at his lowest point, he awakens the Confucian path of using literature to embody the Dao and cultivating “righteous energy.” From then on, his brush becomes a sword and his poems, blades, as he sets out on an unconventional path of cultivation.

The story’s standout feature is how the protagonist’s rise is bound to the imperial examination system and the fate of the nation. Pass the county-level examination, and he can condemn with words and make them take effect; pass the provincial examination, and he can draw on the energy of heaven and earth, giving form to his literary talent; become a presented scholar, and he carries the fortune of an entire nation, able to determine the fate of mountains and rivers with a single character.

Gu Changye advances step by step, from the county and prefectural examinations to the provincial, metropolitan, and palace examinations, crushing his rivals and bringing everyone who humiliated him to heel. He must outwit scheming ministers and hypocritical political enemies at court, while on the frontier he turns poetry and prose into the army’s spirit to repel the invasion of demons and barbarians.

As his status rises, he gradually discovers that something is deeply wrong with the way this world works. The stars are out of place, cause and effect are in chaos, and it seems an unseen hand is manipulating the fates of all living things. The seemingly sweet and silly maid Xing Wan is, in truth, a princess of a fallen dynasty who can see the secrets of heaven. Together, they seek to establish a destiny for the people and a conscience for heaven and earth, while pursuing the ultimate secret behind the “chaos of cause and effect.” In the end, they face a fated showdown with the mastermind behind it all, or with the twisted Heavenly Dao itself.