The Top Scholar from a Poor Family: I Enter the Mansion with My Mother and Outshine My Legitimate Brother

When Cui Ce transmigrated, his family was so poor they had nothing left but a beautiful, hopelessly foolish mother.

The good news: the prefect had taken a liking to her and wanted to marry her as his second wife.

The bad news: nobody wanted him tagging along as dead weight.

His legitimate older brother, Lu Zhao, sneered at him. “Stay cooped up in the back courtyard. Don’t come out and embarrass us.”

Cui Ce nodded. “All right.”

And he really did stay in the back courtyard. While his brother kept fighting crickets, walking dogs, and cuddling maids, Cui Ce got up before dawn to study essays on statecraft.

While his brother slept until late morning, the ink on Cui Ce’s sleeves had dried three times over.

While his brother drank and traded toasts at banquets, Cui Ce pored over The Great Learning until its pages curled and three lamps ran dry.

At first, his brother just mocked him. “What a bookish pauper. Who are you trying to fool with all that studying?”

But with a study fanatic like him around, how could anyone else sleep in?

Before long, his older brothers were panicking! One after another, they dragged themselves to the academy before dawn to study.

Three years later, when the provincial exam results were posted, a herald arrived at the prefect’s residence and shouted at the top of his lungs:

“Congratulations, Master Lu! Your son has placed first in the provincial examination! Which of you is Master Cui Ce?”

The entire hall fell silent.

The thrush in his older brother’s hand flapped in fright and flew up to the rafters.

Prefect Lu Heng stared blankly for a moment, then turned to look toward the little side courtyard at the back.

The door opened. Cui Ce stepped out, with a boundless future stretching before him.

His older brothers were completely panicked!

“Damn it, you really passed!”

Then one day, the fires of war blazed across the land, and the Jurchens to the north watched like hungry wolves.

These young men, forged by years of tearing into one another, each set off for their own battlefield.

The treacherous died in bloody combat, the loyal fell to slander, the gifted were trapped in factional strife, and the valiant generals perished at the hands of petty villains...