In the seventh year of the Great Yongjinghe Period, droughts and locust attacks occurred one after another, and Sishui County was starved to death.
In Xinghua Village outside the city, Shen Yan was told by the county government that the person taking the imperial examination today was Zhao Chengye of the Zhao Mansion.
——But the examination paper with his article written on it clearly belonged to him, Shen Yan.
Three years of cold weather, the lights were on at the fifth watch, the paper and pen provided by my mother selling embroidery work, and the remnant inkstone entrusted to me by my teacher before his death. Overnight, his fame and fortune changed, his mentor was furious, his family was without food for three days, and his younger sister was so hungry that she didn't even have the strength to cry.
That night he smashed the ancient inkstone handed down from his ancestors.
In the broken inkstone, a space opened. He heard a voice: **Everyone who enters here can evolve. **
He threw in the last handful of moldy grain.
At dawn, there lay in the palm of my hand a golden, plump seed that could withstand drought and locusts.
From then on, no one in Sishui County remembered the failed scholar who had been replaced. First, he shocked the gentry with his wealth of gold and grain, and then he was heart-wrenching with every word of his imperial examination essay. Later, it was the grain mountain soldiers in the northwest border who nailed the answer to "Who is worthy of being the master of the world" for him into the history books.
