Lin Xiaoqiao's Imperial Examination Chronicles: the Farmer's Ordinary Luck

On the ridge of the fields in Qingxi Village, Nanping, no one calls him Lin Zhihuai, but everyone calls him "Lin Puppy" - this peasant boy covered in mud and able to count the harvest of ten acres with stones is the "Kilin Son" held in the palm of the village. Lao Tongsheng said that he was "ten times smarter than he was back then." The villagers chipped in to send him to school in the town. Even the landlord took the initiative to hand over the rent-free land deed, hoping to benefit from his "high official status in the future." He also believed it, thinking that with this "talent", the road to the imperial examination would be smooth, and he would transform from a poor person to a master. But after walking out of Qingxi Village, he realized how cheap "genius" is: In the town school, a classmate's writing in regular script was as beautiful as a willow tree. His handwriting had the hardness of field work, and he was criticized for being "unbookish"; In the county school, when the current affairs class on river engineering and salt and iron was discussed, he didn't even know "what a water ship looked like" and could only huddle in a corner and remain silent; Outside the Gongyuan Academy in the capital, officials and officials were talking about the classics, talking about Taoism and citing scriptures. He was clutching the only "Analects of Confucius" and couldn't even answer "the difference between the annotations of Cheng and Zhu Neo-Confucianism". The year he almost failed the examination, he hid in an inn and ate cold steamed buns, only to realize that he was just a "genius in the village", not a genius in the world. He finally won the rank of Jinshi, the last of the second class, but was sent to the south of the Yangtze River to be a small county magistrate. He wanted to implement the policy of farming and mulberry farming, but was ostracized by the nobles; he wanted to protect the people, but he had to compromise because of his lack of background; even getting married had to go from "wanting to climb a high family" to "finding an ordinary peasant girl", and the salary was not even enough to hire a maid. People in his hometown still say that "the Lin family has a Jinshi master", but only Lin Zhihuai knows that he has never become a "dragon or phoenix" in his life, he just walked out of the field in Qingxi Village.