Lu Qi, son of a records clerk, took the examination in place of Tang Yun, young master of the Qingyuan Tang family. He pressed his palm to the bone-testing board for three breaths, but not a single character appeared. Examiner Xu Jingzhi immediately issued an order to break his bones. An officer climbed onto the platform with an iron ruler and was about to smash Lu Qi's spine. With nowhere left to retreat, Lu Qi raised his left hand, and half of the Qingyuan Canon's surviving pages flew out of his palm. The four-foot-wide pages stood upright on the ground, taller than a person, covered from beginning to end with seventy thousand neatly arranged characters in regular script. The iron ruler struck the paper with a dull thud, but couldn't break through it.
It turned out that the more than seventy thousand characters he'd spent three years copying and memorizing had all been burned into his bones and blood. The bone-testing board tested one's registered status, but the canon in his hand had brought to light the old case of his grandfather's death in prison. The Tang family steward's words from when he changed clothes still rang in his ears: "No one will remember your face." Why was only half of the Qingyuan Canon left? Who had the other half? Examiner Xu Jingzhi stared at the page, his expression changing abruptly. As the officer raised his iron ruler a second time, Lu Qi softly read the third character in the first column. All eighty long desks in the hall trembled at once.
