I Was Born to Be the Top Scholar

The imperial vermilion endorsement on the throne room memorial was barely dry when Qin Yanzhi fell from the clouds into the mud. His red robe as the newly crowned top scholar had barely warmed on his shoulders when rumors of cheating in the examinations swept through Tokyo. The examiner was demoted, his degree revoked, and even the chancellor’s daughter, to whom he had been betrothed since childhood, had her steward throw him out with the gold-embossed marriage contract when he came to explain. For his sick mother, coughing blood in bed, and his little sister, clutching half a steamed bun against the cold, the former top scholar put away his brush and ink and took up his painting case. At the village school, he was a poor tutor whom the Ministry of War vice minister’s son pointed at and called a “fraud.” Outside Xiangguo Temple, he was a destitute painter sketching worshippers to earn three coins for medicine. Then, one day, a creditor came to force him into marrying into his family. The carriage of his former fiancée stopped in front of his painting stall, and the jade belt embroidered with python patterns worn by Liu, the third-place laureate, swayed before his eyes. Qin Yanzhi’s hand tightened around his paintbrush. He remembered the words he had written in the throne room: “The people are water, and the ruler is a boat.” He remembered the policy essay hidden beneath his mother’s pillow, and the twin lotus flowers his sister had embroidered with fingers cracked by the cold. “A hundred taels for a painting?” Facing the crowd’s jeers, he slowly raised his head. “From this day on, those who know my worth pay nothing. Those who look down on me? No amount of gold can buy my work.” The brush that once wrote of all things beneath heaven could paint every facet of the human world, and pierce the fog that blanketed it. When the threads of an old case wound around the chancellor’s high walls, and the examiner from that year sent back a letter written in blood from Yazhou, Qin Yanzhi knew it was time to show Tokyo what it meant for a brushstroke to stir wind and rain. After all, he had passed the palace examination as the top scholar.