When he woke, Jiang Yan, a graduate student in the humanities, had become a wastrel in Wu County, Jiangnan.
His parents were dead, his family fortune squandered, and the family home was to change hands the very next day. All he had left were an old servant, a boy who was barely grown, and a suicide note that read, “I am already dead.”
To make matters worse, he had only twenty taels of silver in his pocket and a muddled debt from the previous owner for ransoming someone at the Zui Xiang Pavilion.
No System, no golden finger, just a head full of modern knowledge.
He rolled up his sleeves, made soap, opened a shop, and recruited a wealthy wastrel as a business partner, working his way from a market stall to South Main Street.
On the day the county examination results were posted, he took first place.
Just as he thought life was finally looking up, the words in the suicide note lodged in his mind like a thorn: his father's death had not been an accident, and the shadow of the capital had been following him all along.
To uncover the truth, he had no choice but to keep climbing the ladder of academic honors: the county, prefectural, provincial, and palace examinations.
From a small county in Wujiang, to the Suzhou Weaving Bureau, and then to the imperial palace.
Every stroke on the road to scholarly honors was written with his life.
