Ghosts on the Way to the Exam: Even Ghosts Fear How Hard I Study

She disguises herself as a man to take the imperial examinations, intending to focus on studying and earn an official title. But she's had yin-yang eyes since birth, and she runs into ghosts even more often than she runs into other candidates. On the road, a starving ghost begs her for food, so she munches on dry rations while reciting the Analects to ward it off. At a ruined temple, she meets a ghost scholar who isn't after her life, just borrowing her revision notes. Even when a ghost official grabs the wrong soul, he gets exposed by her obsessive studying until the third watch of the night.

The ghosts come in all varieties: a ghost child pestering her to explain exam topics as a bedtime story, a water ghost asking her to settle an old score, and an old ghost determined to fulfill his long-abandoned dream of passing the imperial exams. Caught between preparing for the exams and catching ghosts, she has to do both at once. She uses the Four Books and Five Classics to argue with ghosts, math problems to help them sort out cause and effect, and even pushes the ghost officials so hard that they start questioning the point of being born into the yin realm.

Along the way, she also runs into a group of bizarre exam candidates: a rich second-generation kid who fakes supernatural tricks and wants to copy her notes, a top student blessed with auspicious signs who wants to race her at solving practice questions, and the son of a stern censor who keeps scrutinizing her identity. As the supernatural incidents grow more serious, they reveal an exam fraud case and long-standing grudges. She has to deal with exam questions and unravel the mysteries behind the ghosts, racing along both the "exam grind" and the "ghost grind" tracks. All she wants is to pass the exams and, while she's at it, send all these pesky ghosts "grinding" their way back to the underworld.