The morning of October 29.
Heavy snow had fallen over the capital all night, blanketing the imperial city and everything beyond it in a thick layer of grayish white.
A large sedan chair emerged from the First Prince’s residence. The bearers trudged through the snow, sinking deep with every step.
The sedan traveled straight ahead and finally stopped before the stone steps of the rear administrative compound of the Court of Judicial Review.
Xiao Jingxing bent down and stepped out of the sedan, setting his feet on the wooden footstool before descending to the ground.
A gust of dry, frigid northern wind swept snowflakes into his face, whipping the dark cloak around his shoulders backward.
Xiao Jingxing caught sight of the stone sculpture of a bixie guarding the entrance to the Court of Judicial Review.
The mythical beast lay crouched atop its pedestal, snow piled thickly over its head and inside its gaping, snarling maw. It gave off the grim, murderous air of a place where criminals were judged and punished.
He strode forward and climbed the steps.
The Vice Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, several assistant examiners from the Ministry of Rites, and a number of other civil officials in crimson and green robes had been waiting there for some time.
They had stood in the freezing wind for half an hour, their hands and feet numb with cold.
When they heard the sound of boots crossing the threshold, the Vice Minister immediately concealed the weariness on his face.
They all knew that the First Prince carried with him a bloody, utterly unreasonable aura.
Several officials bent at the waist in unison and bowed deeply toward the approaching black official boots.
“Your Highness the First Prince.”
Xiao Jingxing neither stopped nor told them to rise.
Without looking to either side, he walked straight past the bent officials.
As he went, he pondered the oral decree his Imperial Father had issued that day.
The locking of the examination compound. The inspection of the papers. The sealing of the examination scripts.
These had been regulations established at the founding of the Great Qian Dynasty, intended to prevent chief examiners from favoring private interests or colluding with powerful clans.
But such matters had always been handled by the Ministry of Rites. Now they had been transferred directly to the Court of Judicial Review, which specialized in criminal investigations and punishments.
This was the posture of someone guarding against thieves.
When he reached the examination hall, he raised a hand and pushed open the two thick firwood doors.
The smell of old ink rushed toward him.
After he took two more steps inside, the pungent scents of boiling tung oil and sealing wax struck his lungs.
Within the hall, dozens of runners and clerks were working at frantic speed.
They had piled several thousand examination scripts—copied in black ink with the candidates’ names pasted and sealed over—on several long tables, sorting them according to subject.
Once each stack had been compressed, it was placed into large iron chests with all four corners coated in moisture-resistant tung oil.
Beside them, a black iron pot sat over a charcoal brazier, the boiling sealing wax inside bubbling furiously.
At the sound of the opening door, the assistant examiner from the Ministry of Rites, who had been standing outside, immediately straightened and hurried into the room after Xiao Jingxing.
He held a yellow register half an inch thick in both hands. Bending over, he approached the purplewood desk at the front.
“Your Highness.” The assistant examiner raised the register slightly. “The examiners in each section have worked day and night for the past two days. They have finished assigning grades to every examination script.”
“The registration process has also been completed.”
“All that remains is for Your Highness to look it over and sign the list. Once that is done, the chests containing the first-, second-, third-, and fourth-grade scripts can be locked. This afternoon, they can be sent to the Ministry of Rites to determine the time for the announcement of the results. After that, the names of all the successful candidates may be revealed.”
Xiao Jingxing walked behind the long desk, pulled the back of his dark cloak aside, turned around, and sat down in the grand armchair with his legs spread wide.
He ignored the register being offered to him.
“What’s the rush?”
The moment those three words left his mouth, all the clerks in the room stopped what they were doing. Even the hands carrying the chests froze in midair.
Xiao Jingxing’s gaze settled on the assistant examiner’s face.
“Since Imperial Father has entrusted this year’s scripts to me for sealing, naturally I must examine them myself.” His fingers paused in their tapping. “The Ministry of Rites selects the pillars of the nation. Among these several thousand scripts, is there no essay with an extraordinary argument—one worthy of becoming a model for scholars throughout the realm?”
Xiao Jingxing understood that the examiners’ preferences would never escape the old, rigid rules and conventions.
He would have to inspect the scripts himself.
The room fell deathly silent.
The assistant examiner turned his head and exchanged a rapid glance with the two examiners beside him.
Struggle flickered in their eyes. Then the examiner at his side closed his eyes ever so slightly.
They were pushing that hot potato out.
Since the First Prince was supervising the examination, they might as well hand this heretical work over to him and let him take the blame.
The assistant examiner swallowed hard before turning and beckoning to a clerk standing in the right-hand corner.
“Go.” His voice had taken on a slight tremor. “Bring out the bottom chest marked A—the examination script at the very bottom, the one without a grade.”
The young clerk looked as though he had been granted a reprieve. He hurried to the iron chest in the corner.
After lifting the lid, he removed the scripts piled on top, reached his hand all the way down, and pulled out a single script that had been pressed beneath the rest.
The clerk ran back and handed it to the assistant examiner.
The assistant examiner turned around and walked half a step forward. Holding the script in both hands, he carefully placed it on the right corner of the purplewood desk.
“Your Highness, this script… We did not dare assign it a grade.” The assistant examiner lowered his head deeply.
“Did not dare?” Xiao Jingxing gave a mocking laugh. “You draw salaries from the imperial court to grade examination scripts. In the Great Qian examination halls, is there any essay you dare not evaluate?”
“This candidate… was outrageously rebellious,” the assistant examiner replied, forcing himself to continue.
“He does not discuss benevolence, righteousness, or morality anywhere in the essay. He says nothing at all about the proper bonds between ruler and subject.”
“If he had merely gone off topic, that would be one thing. But this candidate actually skipped over the subtle principles laid down by the sages and dared to speculate on the origin of the creation of Heaven and Earth!”
Another examiner hurried forward to add, “Your Highness, this candidate’s brushwork is exceptionally forceful, and his arguments are rigorous.”
“But his views truly violate the laws and institutions of our ancestors.”
“Examiners from several sections passed the script around and argued over it for two full days. All feared that it might contain heretical ideas.”
“We truly did not dare make a decision, so we placed it at the bottom of the chest and left it aside.”
Xiao Jingxing did not listen to another word of their rambling.
He reached out, seized the edge of the examination script, and dragged it toward himself.
The paper unfurled across the purplewood desk.
The first thing he saw was a field of glaring vermilion.
More than a dozen examiners had covered the script with red-ink criticisms. Their crisscrossing annotations crowded out nearly every line of the original black text.
Xiao Jingxing immediately snorted, his face filled with disdain.
So it was not that they could not understand it. They simply did not dare acknowledge it.
Xiao Jingxing’s gaze moved past the trembling red annotations and went directly to the first line of the essay’s opening argument.
“The Great Void is qi. The Great Void has no form; qi is its fundamental substance. Its gathering and dispersing are merely the transient forms of change.”
For centuries, the classics and histories had been filled with discussions of Heaven’s mandate and the interaction between Heaven and humanity.
To the scholars of this age, the origin of all things was inseparable from that established system of thought.
Yet this essay had begun by directly proclaiming the existence of qi.
In other words, there were no immutable laws decreed by Heaven at the root of the universe. There was only the gathering and dispersing of qi.
Xiao Jingxing’s breathing grew heavy.
With one finger pressed against the page, he continued reading.
“Qi possesses yin and yang; every thing consists of two aspects. The movement of the sun and moon, the alternation of cold and heat—all are the natural workings of the bending and extending of these two forms of qi. No divine being governs them.”
No divine being governs them!
There was no Heaven sending down calamity, no deity bestowing blessings.
The rising of the sun and setting of the moon, the passing of winter and arrival of spring—all were the result of two forces, yin and yang, operating in constant alternation.
Xiao Jingxing felt his throat tighten.
He eagerly scanned farther down the page.
The more he read, the more shaken he became.
“The nature of Heaven and Earth is pure and wholly good. Yet the nature shaped by one’s innate temperament may be hard or gentle, gifted or mediocre. Thus, the greatest benefit of learning lies in seeking to transform one’s temperament.”
His gaze fixed on the four words: “transform one’s temperament.”
If a person’s nature could be changed, if all things could be reshaped through the gathering and dispersal of qi—
then what did the ironclad laws of pedigree, birth, rank, and privilege proclaimed by the court amount to?
So long as people sought change for themselves, the balance of power in the imperial court could be overturned entirely!
The co-examiners beneath the steps secretly raised their eyes to look at the First Prince seated behind the long desk.
Xiao Jingxing sat rigidly against the back of his chair, utterly motionless and making not a sound.
The assembled civil officials were so terrified that their legs trembled uncontrollably. Instinctively, they retreated half a step.
They could not begin to fathom what was going through this Living Hell King’s mind, and they feared that the First Prince might erupt in fury on the spot at any moment.
These old gentlemen, who usually held the teachings of the sages above their heads, were now so cowardly that they scarcely dared breathe too loudly.
They had no idea that, at this very moment, a world-shaking storm was raging inside Xiao Jingxing’s mind.
Those great clans who filled their mouths with the principles of Heaven and the proper order of things relied on nothing more than the words “the Mandate of Heaven” to monopolize the imperial court.
This rotten moral order was the protective shell shielding every aristocratic clan in the realm!
Whoever dared challenge that great righteousness would face every scholar in the land rising up against him.
But now, he had seen a blade.
What was this, if not an examination essay?
It was clearly a shovel—one capable of completely severing the feng shui beneath the ancestral graves of the great clans of Great Qian!
Using language more refined and archaic than that of those sour old scholars, it had dug straight down to the very source of the old order and unearthed it by force!
Xiao Jingxing’s gaze raced toward the very end of the essay.
The sweeping treatise concluded with eight words, their edge laid bare:
“Know that the Great Void is qi, and thus there is no nonbeing.”
Once one understood the origin of qi’s gathering and dispersal, one knew that absolute nothingness did not exist in this world!
He stared at those eight words. Deep within his eyes, a hidden ember slowly blazed into a roaring inferno.
The fervor and possessive determination shining from that light seemed almost strong enough to burn through the thin sheet of paper.
What sort of madman would dare write such a world-changing masterpiece in the middle of the imperial examination hall?!
