Ma Mengqi, a corporate drone crushed by the 996 work culture in his previous life, transmigrates to the Shengyuan Dynasty and becomes a bullied illegitimate son of the Ma family in Lingzhou. On the surface, he's gentle as jade and smiles like a puppy, but inside he's panicking like crazy. To protect himself, he's forced onto the path of the imperial examinations, where he unexpectedly awakens the Character Persona Weight System. As long as he maintains the fixed perception others have formed of his "innately pure nature," the "faith points" generated by his acting can become real attributes such as intelligence, memory, and presence. But his path through the examinations is destined to be bloody: a classmate plagiarizes his essay and then accuses him of cheating, an examiner takes bribes and tries to disqualify him, and the sons of powerful court officials want to use his persona to climb the ladder, tearing away his facade as "the greatest scholar under heaven" in front of the whole world. Facing one schemer after another, Ma Mengqi appears calm on the surface while screaming "Leave me alone!" inside, yet the System keeps forcing him to become "the best actor around." The danger of his persona collapsing becomes his chance to strike back. In the end, all the players who try to shatter his persona are kicked headlong into the abyss by him instead. Just when you think he's finally reached the summit of the literary world and entered the halls of power, you'll suddenly discover that all of this is merely the beginning of a much bigger game. The novel is 1.2 million characters long, spanning five volumes and a hundred chapters, with one crisis solved after another and constant reversals. It vividly portrays the greatest contrast puppy in history: "terrified and trembling inside, yet as steady as an ancient hound on the outside."
