The Great Zhou dynasty was at the height of its literary culture, and civil service examinations selected its officials. A fine poem could be worth a fortune. Yet in this land steeped in the scent of ink, an outsider had appeared: Lu Jixing, an “alien scavenger” who had crash-landed in this world after a jump malfunction aboard his battered interstellar mining ship.
With the mind of a law PhD, he was full of ideas about “intellectual property,” “business logic,” and “the laws of physics.” In a world that revered literature above all else, he stuck out like a sore thumb. To earn enough “star coins” to repair his ship, he had no choice but to pick up his pen and unleash five thousand years of Earth’s cultural achievements in a one-sided intellectual assault. The great Confucian scholars of the dynasty hailed him as the reincarnation of the Star of Literature, the romantic young talents begged him to take them as disciples, and even the emperor clapped him on the shoulder and asked, “My dear subject, what other surprises do you have in store for me?”
Only Lu Jixing knew that all he wanted was to save money quietly and get home as soon as possible. But a tree that towers above the forest is bound to be battered by the wind. A mysterious organization called the Ink-Scent Pavilion, jealous of his “talent,” began spreading rumors that he had “cheated in the examination hall,” trying to drag him from his pedestal. Faced with a tide of malice and the doubts of the entire realm, Lu Jixing sighed and quietly pulled out his “golden finger”: an interstellar device capable of breaking down and reassembling anything, as well as scanning “cultural data.”
“If you want to play a game called ‘cheating,’” he said with a grin, “then I don’t mind showing you what real ‘memory tampering’ looks like.”
