A poor scholar from Qingzhou, with a divorce notice hurled right in his face.
"Your family is in decline, and you may not be able to bear the weight of the Su family." On the marriage contract personally delivered by Miss Su, the words "you're not worthy" might as well have been carved into his bones.
Lin Mo took the contract and firmly signed the divorce papers. He said only eight words: "When I top the imperial exams, don't look down on the poor young."
From top scorer in the county exam, to top scorer in the prefectural and academy exams, then provincial-exam juren, metropolitan-exam huiyuan, and palace-exam zhuangyuan, he climbed the ladder of the civil service exams one step at a time, with a pool of blood following each step.
Someone mixed glue into his inkstone. Someone carved secret marks into the walls of his exam cell. Someone sent an assassin to silence him in the dead of night.
A single order from the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian could turn ten years of hard study to ashes.
But Lin Mo held far more than a pen in his hand. In his previous life, he had read the entire History of Ming and Draft History of Qing. He knew better than anyone the deadly tricks of officialdom, the chess games of factional strife, and the ironclad evidence of exam fraud buried in old records.
When the emperor personally wrote "Only by listening to all sides can one see clearly" during the palace exam, when the old case from the fifth year of Xuande was unearthed page by page, and when the curved secret mark burned from the bottom of an inkstone all the way to the Golden Hall, everyone thought this poor scholar had reached his limit by becoming huiyuan.
Until the day the results were posted, when his name appeared at the very top of six golden lists.
