Dream of the Red Chamber: You Destroy My Books and Ink? I, Jia Huan, Will Win a Marquisate Through Letters and Arms

[Dream of the Red Chamber + soul transmigration into Jia Huan + no System + photographic memory + childhood development + imperial examinations + archery, horsemanship, and war + political scheming + multiple heroines] Zhou Yan, a 32-year-old publishing-house proofreader, works late night after night and drops dead in front of his computer. When he opens his eyes again, he is seven-year-old Jia Huan, a concubine-born son of the Rongguo Mansion. In his previous life, he was neither a history professor nor a special forces soldier. He was just an ordinary man who had spent ten years dealing with typos, ledger pages, and page proofs. His birth mother, Aunt Zhao, is disliked wherever she goes; his legitimate mother, Lady Wang, treats him coldly; and everyone in the household only cares about Baoyu, who was born clutching a piece of jade. Worse still, Zhou Yan knows that this grand ducal mansion, now in the height of its splendor, will one day be reduced to a barren wasteland. He has no System. He has only one extra ability: anything he has seen with his own eyes, whether written text, ledger pages, or maps, he will never forget. But remembering a book does not mean understanding it, and recognizing a move does not mean being able to draw the family bow. So he fights Wang Xifeng for three days’ worth of paper and ink, then rises from the last broken desk in the clan school. He studies under great scholars, trains in archery and horsemanship, places among the top three in all three county-level examinations at fourteen, wins first place in the provincial examination at seventeen, and earns third place in the palace examination at eighteen. Later, war breaks out on the frontier, and a fake military order threatens to send tens of thousands of soldiers to their deaths. The concubine-born son who once could not even draw the family bow takes up his blade, mounts his horse, and enters the central command with the casualty register in hand. “I don’t want the title the Jia family inherited from our ancestors.” “I’ll earn my own.”