Dragging his broken leg, Shen Yuxiu crawled back to Langya, only to find the old Shen family home reduced to four crumbling earthen walls that let the wind blow through. Grass grew three feet high over his parents’ graves. His younger brother was starving, skin stretched over bone, and every breath split the cursed mark on Shen Yuxiu’s chest into another bloody fissure. For three years in Beirong, he had carried corpses and chewed tree bark. He thought nothing could be worse, until Wang Anshi spoke inside his mind: “In this world, feng shui is a lie. What’s real is people eating people.”
The Great Sheng dynasty’s imperial examinations test the classics on the surface, but secretly test geomancy. Locating energy points, finding dragon veins, and determining burial sites by the direction of the earth’s veins: noble families train in these arts from childhood, while the poor cannot even touch the covers of their books. Shen Yuxiu is determined to take the exam, and to come first. Borrow a dragon vein? He will. Bear the backlash? He can take it. He improves the waterwheel so springs bubble up in drought-stricken fields, breaking the noble families’ grain hoarding scheme. At the provincial exams, he exposes leaked questions, driving the chief examiner to vomit blood in front of everyone. But every person he helps deepens the curse. The chancellor offers him a letter of recruitment, Beirong spies set their sights on his head, and old debts from the Wang family patriarch are crawling up from underground.
