It's Too Difficult for Me to Apply for the Ming Dynasty

In the forty-first year of Jiajing's reign, the glazed tiles of the Forbidden City still had wet marks from last night's spring rain. The ambergris in the Jinluan Hall was mixed with the smell of sulfur from the old emperor's elixir making, making people dizzy. Zhou Qi, a history graduate student, discovered that he had traveled through time and became the Suzhou scholar who was supposed to be named Xu Shixing, but later changed his name to Shen Shixing, and served as the first minister of the Wanli Dynasty for eight years. At this moment, he was still a prospective Jinshi who had just taken the palace examination. He knew that the timing of his time travel was terrifyingly subtle. In three years, Emperor Jiajing will pass away, Emperor Longqing, the short-lived emperor who indulged in wine and sex, will sit on the throne, and his "mentor" Gao Gong will start a life-and-death power struggle with the later Zhang Juzheng; in another twenty years, Emperor Wanli, who is still the prince in the East Palace and will not go to court for twenty years, will personally push the Ming Dynasty into the abyss. And he, Shen Shixing, will climb step by step from a small Hanlin to the position of chief minister of the cabinet in this series of power reshuffles, and become the person who desperately "papered over" the cracks in the Ming Dynasty after Zhang Juzheng's death. But now, he is just a young man who has just won the first prize, standing on the tail of the Jiajing Dynasty, looking at the last prosperity of this dynasty and the many holes hidden under the prosperity. His fingers gently caressed the cloud pattern on the official robe, and he knew in his heart: he couldn't just be the Shen Shixing of "harmony with mud".