You Sent Me to Take the Exam for Someone Else, So Why Am I Backing the Empress from Behind the Scenes?

Liu Long is a master's student in classical literature. Reborn in the Great Zhou, he ends up as a poor scholar selling calligraphy by a bridge.

His child bride is malnourished, so Liu Long has no choice but to take the imperial examinations in place of someone else's foolish son.

He leaves his hometown to save his family, never expecting to top the imperial examinations.

At thirteen, he writes "Man Jiang Hong," stunning everyone and lifting the army's spirits. When the border troops hear it, their blood boils and they mount their horses to kill the enemy.

At sixteen, he places first in the provincial autumn examinations. His poem "Lin Jiang Xian: The Yangtze Rolls Ever Eastward" moves the chief examiner to tears.

He travels to the capital for the metropolitan examinations, opens his essay with the "Four Sentences of Hengqu," and is named the top candidate by the Minister of Rites.

At the palace examinations, he writes, "One hundred and forty thousand soldiers laid down their armor; not one of them was a man." The woman emperor personally names him the top scholar, first in the first rank.

From then on, his official career soars. Deeply favored by the woman emperor, he becomes the empire's de facto deputy emperor at just twenty.

His "Three Hundred Poems of Zhou" makes paper in the capital so expensive that later generations add it to the list of required reading for all time.

Once in power, he transforms the frontier into a place as prosperous as Jiangnan, and torments the enemy until they cry out to the Khan of Heaven for help.

He raises the nation to a level beyond the reach of feudal society.

From then on, the woman emperor cannot sleep at night for thinking of him, the courtesan of the pleasure quarter can't eat for longing for him, and the princess of the enemy kingdom cries herself to sleep over him every night.

Generals fight with blood and sweat after hearing his poems. Literary giants weep tears of age after reading them. Scholars across the realm revere him as the greatest sage of literature in all history.

Many years later, Liu Long looks back over the land and says, "I was only a commoner from the countryside. What does the world matter to me?"