No cheats, no system. Chen Shouzhuo's core weapon is the "Secret Notes" manuscript left by his father, which contains all the secret codes of the imperial court, the context of party struggles and official scandals in the forty years of the Wanli Dynasty. His only specialties are "imitating handwriting" and "deciphering cipher text" - judging the candidate's student from the shade of ink on the rural examination paper, inferring the identity level of the writer from the signature pattern at the end of a letter, and sniffing out the political alignment behind it from the citation of a policy paper. His "imperial examination" was not a test of the Four Books and Five Classics, but a test of worldly sophistication, speculation, and the courage to dance on the tip of a knife.
