A Brash Hero Breaks Through the Perilous Pass, Then Tops the Imperial Exams

[Alternate history + power fantasy for male readers + imperial exams + superhuman strength + overwhelming intelligence + everyday farming + an unbeatable contrast + later struggles for supremacy] One morning, Zhao Changyuan, a top modern all-around strategic expert and master of traditional martial arts, wakes reborn in a famine-stricken year in the fictional Great Chu dynasty. From the start, the difficulty is hellish. His predecessor was a fifteen-year-old hunter nicknamed “Iron Bull,” who starved to death in a thatched hut. Looking at his own eight-foot-tall frame, broad build, and bulging muscles, then at the famine victims strewn outside and the predatory local gentry, Zhao Changyuan crushes a rock in his hand. While others sell their children during the famine, Zhao Changyuan heads into the mountains and tears apart a five-hundred-pound wild boar with his bare hands. His whole family gets to eat meat! While others suffer the gentry’s oppression in silence, Zhao Changyuan lifts a thousand-pound stone lion with one hand, and the local tyrant drops to his knees, calling him “Dad”! He’s built like a bear and possesses godlike strength, yet he also has a photographic memory and literary and military talents that leave his era in the dust. One day, he carries a bear into a private school. “Sir, would you trade the Four Books and Five Classics for this bear?” At the special imperial examination in the capital, civil and military officials watch a giant, built like an iron tower and resembling a god of slaughter reborn, enter the exam hall, and are completely dumbfounded. Examiner: “Can a brute like that even read?” Half a day later, an extraordinary essay is finished, stunning the world! Years later, turmoil erupts on the frontier and a foreign state invades. Zhao Changyuan, now grand chancellor and supreme commander of the empire’s armies, tears off his official robes, revealing his powerful physique, and takes up an eight-hundred-pound Fangtian halberd. The soldiers cry, “Commander, aren’t you a civil official?!” Zhao Changyuan sneers. “Who says the top scorer in the imperial exams can’t smash a foreign emperor to pieces with his bare hands?”