A Humble Scholar from a Wealthy Family

Poems and books are passed down from generation to generation, who should drink a bowl of chicken soup? When a humble family rises, how many people can be accommodated on that narrow road? During the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, silent contests were staged every night in the main hall of the Zhu Family in Zhuhe Village. The fat of the chicken soup only floated in the bowl of the eldest grandson Zhu Yawen. The whole family tightened their belts to support a "reading seed" who had struggled for more than ten years but had not yet become a scholar. In a corner where no one was paying attention, five-year-old Zhu Tao lowered his eyes and drank the gruel with a human figure in his bowl - inside the shell was the soul of a modern graduate student majoring in ancient Chinese who had no chance of finding a job. Traveling through time and becoming a son of a poor family, he faced not only hunger and cold, but also strict ethics and ubiquitous "rules." If you steal books, you will be kidnapped and kneeled in the ancestral hall. If you speak or behave slightly differently, you may be regarded as a "monster". All Zhu Tao can do is to achieve the ultimate Ksitigarbha clumsiness: secretly practice glyphs on the mud with tree branches, burying the thoughts of adults deep under the ignorant shell of a child. He saw his uncle Zhu Yawen enjoying the family's support and going to school to prepare for the exam, but rumors of a "literary meeting" in the restaurant vaguely floated back to the village. He saw his father squatting silently on the threshold, his mother's trembling fingers while sewing late at night, and his sister's coughing sound as the family expressed desperation that they had no money to buy medicine. Within the wealthy family, glory and livelihood, dignity and survival were torn apart and dripping with blood. The turnaround started outside the window of the village school. Once he was fascinated by it, and his concentrating expression was accidentally caught by the Master. The poor old boy didn't say anything, but the sound of the lectures from then on would always be clearly heard outside the window, leaving the paper full of words by the window for a moment longer. A silent tacit understanding is established in the wind...