After Disguising Herself as a Man for the Imperial Exams, She Drives the Capital's Elite Wild

[Woman disguised as a man · imperial examinations · everyone’s favorite · powerful court official · female-led story · System-powered comeback]

Gu Wangshu wakes up in the body of a woman disguised as a man who was meant to die in someone else’s place. From the start, she’s trapped in a hellish predicament: her whole family has been executed, and she has fallen off a cliff!

Forced to disguise herself as a man and enter the treacherous world of the imperial examinations, all she wants is to clear her family’s name and, while she’s at it, build a law-abiding Great Jing.

She uses “dialectical materialism” to argue old scholars into doubting their own sanity; uses immaculate financial ledgers to strip corrupt officials bare; and uses financial short-selling battles to shatter the powerful clans’ dreams.

From Blackwater City, choked with poisonous miasma, to the Great Jing capital, where all the lands bow in submission, Gu Wangshu maxes out the technology tree and sweeps all three top honors in the imperial examinations. Using empiricism and a crushing advantage in knowledge, she grinds the decayed old system and its old-school scholars into the dirt!

Everyone thinks Chancellor Gu is a ruthless living demon.

Until the day in the Golden Hall when the regent sneers, exposes her secret identity, and tries to have her executed for deceiving the emperor.

The entire capital thinks she’s doomed!

But who could have guessed that the usually aloof and proud second-in-command of the Grand Secretariat would defy the ancestral rules for her, eyes red with tears; that the fierce general from a military family, commanding a great army, would march to the capital for her; and that even the 100,000 new troops, educated in basic literacy, would swear to hold their ground to the death!

Seeing the people gathered outside the palace gates, holding up a “canopy of the people” to support her, the regent panics: “Have you all gone mad?!”