I Am the Great Ming's Top Scholar! Why Are You Asking If My Daughter Is Betrothed?

[Great Ming] + [Political Intrigue] + [Smart Characters] + [Devoted Love] + [Aihong: Lin Pianpian] + [Mutual Salvation] (This book features characters from Aihong!! It counts as a derivative work!)

The ninth year of the Chongzhen reign.

The top scholar of the provincial exam in South Zhili.

The whole realm condemned him as a heretic, all because he wrote an essay called “Why Industry and Commerce Should Be the Foundation of the Nation.”

Some said he could save the Great Ming, while others said he would destroy it.

But none of them knew how the Great Ming would meet its end.

They had never seen the rope on Coal Hill.

They had never seen the bloodshed of the Yangzhou Massacre.

Nor had they seen that cold line in countless history books: “The Ming fell in the seventeenth year of the Chongzhen reign.”

This time, he would give it a try.

He would see if he could change the fate of this dynasty.

Saving a crumbling empire was a long and arduous task, and the journey was always full of unexpected little mishaps.

But saving the people of the world could wait. First, he would save the person by his side.

After getting drunk, he inadvertently bought the freedom of a girl his own birth mother had sold into the red-light district three days earlier: Lin Pianpian.

Later, when he met the Chongzhen Emperor for the first time,

the emperor who would one day understand him as both ruler and subject stared at him for a long while.

Then he asked earnestly:

“Miss, are you married?”

[Reading Guide]:

The story starts slow and picks up later. It is not a mindless power fantasy. The everyday romance is full of subtle emotional tension, while court politics are a bloodbath!

[Gu Qingqiu]: A young lady from a prominent local gentry family in Suzhou Prefecture.

“If you would mend the rift in the heavens, I will carry a candle and walk beside you; if you would save all under heaven, I will bind my hair with yours and follow you.”

[Lin Pianpian]: An unfortunate girl whom Xiao Jingyan rescued from the brothels of Yangzhou Prefecture.

“My life is insignificant, and what is death to me? If I could become a candle and light your long road, then even if Pianpian died, she would have no