In the second year of Qingli, the Renzong Dynasty of the Northern Song Dynasty. Su Chen, a graduate student in the Department of History, travels to a fifteen-year-old boy whose parents have died in Xinjian County, Hongzhou Prefecture. He is faced with three acres of thin farmland, three hundred Wen in debt, and twenty-three imperial examination failure tickets left by his father.
This is not a cool story about a genius counterattack. The admission rate for the county examination is 10%, the government examination is 5%, the college examination is 2.7%, The township examination is 1%, and the general examination is 0.5% - A hundred times more difficult than the modern examination in Qingbei. Without the golden finger of photographic memory, Su Chen only had modern academic thinking: using "arithmetics" to quantify everything, and "system design" to replace human relationships. He created "profit-sharing and leasing" to free up time, used "approximation" to solve truncated questions, turned his father's twenty-three floating notes into a "wrong question set", and calculated every way to survive in the hell of the imperial examination.
Next to him is the clever child bride A Yuan, who has grown from a maid to a bookkeeping partner who can "calculate chips"; in the distance is the master of practical learning Li Gou, who teaches "application of the world" rather than "memorization of chapters and sentences"; there is also a pragmatic official in the court, Zhang Ruogu, who exchanges "political investment" for his "Nine Chapters of Arithmetic Studies".
While the literati of his generation were still reciting the Four Books and Five Classics, Su Chen was already using "probability" to predict harvests, "property rights" to clarify field boundaries, and "incentive compatibility" to design tenancies. This is not the rise of a scholar, but the institutional experiment of a rational soul in the bureaucracy of the Northern Song Dynasty - proving that beyond the imperial examination, there is practical learning; beyond chapters and sentences, there is still the world.
