[Woman disguises herself as a man + imperial examinations + strong female lead + female protagonist + identity revealed + no romance]
[I write for women, so I make the rules! The heroine won't be beheaded just because her identity as a woman is exposed!]
After a plane crash, Jiang Yu and her best friend Zhou Heng were bound to an imperial examination System.
The System tasked Jiang Yu with becoming an able minister and Zhou Heng with becoming a powerful minister. Once they completed their missions, they could come back to life and return to their original world.
So the underachiever Jiang Yu and the top student Zhou Heng were forced to embark on the path of the imperial examinations.
But the System had no idea how painful it was to make an underachiever sit the imperial examinations. Jiang Yu had to give it everything just to scrape through:
Zhou Heng crushed every stage, coming first in the county, prefectural, provincial, metropolitan, and palace exams, earning the unprecedented distinction of sixfold top honors and surpassing the world;
Jiang Yu gave it everything, scraped through every exam by the skin of her teeth, and consistently took last place, earning the one-of-a-kind distinction of sixfold last place in history.
Jiang Yu passed the examinations by the narrowest of margins all the way to the presented-scholar rank.
And so the Great Qian Dynasty produced its first sixfold top scholar and its first sixfold last-place finisher at the same time!
The entire nation was stunned. Some were envious, some jealous, and everyone said Jiang Yu had gotten lucky to scrape her way to the palace exam!
But later, they had to eat their words. Jiang Yu, the woman who supposedly got lucky, turned two poor prefectures into prosperous lands. The emperor even praised her: "Minister Jiang is an able minister of state sent to me by Heaven. Having her in my service is my great fortune!"
Later, Jiang Yu kept getting promoted over the heads of others, and she and Zhou Heng became the emperor's trusted ministers. Everyone thought they would rise even further, but then Jiang Yu and Zhou Heng revealed their identities themselves:
"Hey! We're women!"
Political enemies: "The crime of deceiving the emperor is punishable by death!"
Officials in the Jiang and Zhou factions: "Our lords are amazing!"
The emperor: "Establish women's imperial examinations. I want all the able ministers working for me!"
