“The gates are open!”
“The list is out!”
The dozen or so attendants in the front, bundled in threadbare winter coats, surged forward like madmen.
Those behind them could not see a thing. They simply squeezed their eyes shut and drove forward with their shoulders, pushing with all their might.
“Fall back! Move back!”
The flag officer at the front roared furiously.
The rough-looking thug who had shouted the loudest was just about to use the momentum from behind him to force his way forward when a cudgel slammed squarely into his chest.
The blow knocked the breath—and nearly the life—out of him.
“Ah!”
The thug’s mouth stretched wide, but he could not even vomit up the sour bile in his stomach. His entire body was thrown backward, knocking four or five people off their feet as he fell.
At last, the crush behind him lost its momentum.
The flag officer tightened his hand around the hilt of his saber, his eyes bulging as he shouted, “Take one more step forward and you’ll be put in the cangue on the spot! Your master’s degree will be stripped away!”
At those words, the crowd finally stopped advancing.
The soldiers seized the opportunity to move two steps forward with their spears leveled.
Just then, two clerks in black robes emerged from the gate, one behind the other.
The man in front was carrying a roll of yellow hemp paper across his arms.
The instant he stepped outside, a cry suddenly rang out from deep within the inner compound of the examination hall.
“Report of success! The Metropolitan Circuit Examination…”
Several of the lowest-ranked students from the Imperial Academy stood at the very front. Their eyes were bloodshot from exhaustion, and they leaned halfway out over the crowd, ears straining.
“Did you hear? Which county did they call?”
“I couldn’t hear! The wind’s too strong!”
One of them stamped his feet anxiously, both hands clutching the front of his robe.
The people outside were frantic, but the two clerks remained unhurried.
The clerk behind carried a wooden bucket steaming with white heat. It was filled with thick white paste.
He walked up to the roughly ten-foot-high screen wall, took up a soft brush, and stirred the paste twice.
Then he slapped the brush against the wall near its base.
“Why are they starting from the bottom?”
Someone in the crowd shouted in panic.
An old licentiate who understood the rules of the examination turned around and barked, “You ignorant fool, shut your mouth! This is the reverse-posting method! It’s meant to prevent unruly rabble like you from causing trouble in the crowd. They start with the last-ranked candidate and work their way upward. It’ll take at least half an hour before they get to the Jieyuan!”
The clerk worked swiftly, soon pasting up one candidate’s native place and result.
“Wanping County… seventy-seventh place…”
“Li Baoshan!”
The three characters had barely taken shape when the old licentiate who had just scolded the others froze where he stood.
With the number of successful candidates reduced this year, seventy-seventh place was the final spot.
That meant he had failed.
At that very moment, the old licentiate’s graying hair whipped wildly in the wind. His lips trembled, and a hoarse sound rattled in his throat.
“It’s over? … It’s over?! It’s over!”
He clawed at his disheveled hair, making it even more chaotic, then dropped to his knees with a thud.
He had completely forgotten about dignity. He pitched forward toward the wall.
Bang!
When he raised his head again, blood streamed down from his forehead, mixing with his tears and smearing across half his face.
“Ancestors above!” he cried to the heavens, his voice so full of anguish that everyone’s heart ached at the sound. “I’ve been taking these examinations for forty years! Forty years! I, your unworthy descendant, have no face to meet you!”
He clawed at the frozen mud beneath him until his fingers were raw and bleeding.
Yet no one around him laughed.
Countless scholars from impoverished families watched him, their eyes filled with the trembling grief of those who had witnessed another’s ruin and recognized their own fate in it.
But the clerk paid none of this any mind. His brush continued climbing up the wall.
The ink, scented with pine resin, spread through the air.
When he reached sixty-eighth place and wrote the name Sun Changming, a poor scholar standing less than three feet to the right of the old licentiate suddenly muttered something under his breath—and then let out a wild cry.
“I passed… I passed!”
Every line on his face unfolded with joy. His eyes shone with the delight of a man who had come back from the brink of death. He pointed at the name on the wall, his mouth splitting into a grin.
“Hahahaha!”
“Your master passed!”
He threw his arms wide, preparing to shout at the heavens once more.
But suddenly, his eyes rolled upward, showing nothing but white.
The breath of his frenzied joy failed to continue, and his body toppled straight backward.
“Changming! Husband!”
A woman in a patched cotton jacket came scrambling out from behind the crowd, dragging along a pale, scrawny boy.
Her face was filled with terror. She threw herself onto the poor scholar, digging her fingers hard into his philtrum, laughing and crying at once.
“Wake up! Husband, wake up! We’ve finally made it through! Our family can finally escape this life!”
The bloodcurdling sobs of those who had failed and the delirious ecstasy of those who had passed intertwined cruelly beneath that tiny stretch of wall.
Just then, a sudden commotion erupted toward the back of the crowd on the right.
“My young master placed fifty-ninth! Hand out the money! Steward, hand out the money!”
A middle-aged merchant in a silk-padded robe was flushed crimson with excitement.
He kicked the dazed steward in the butt.
“What are you standing there for? The young master has crossed the Dragon Gate—he’s an honored juren now! Hurry up and scatter the money!”
The steward jolted awake and fumbled to untie the heavy cloth bag at his waist.
He grabbed a handful of gleaming copper cash and hurled it toward the outer edge of the crowd with all his strength.
“Share in our joy! My young master has passed!”
The clatter of copper coins hitting the ground instantly sent a crowd of women, idlers, and beggars at the edge into a frenzy. Even several vendors abandoned their stalls and dove to the ground to snatch up the coins.
The street was a spectacle of the utmost joy and sorrow.
Far away, seven or eight sedan chairs with dark green curtains stood parked at the mouth of a shadowy lane. At this moment, all their thick padded curtains were thrown open.
Inside were the servants of noble households, dressed in fine silk, each clutching heavy ingots of silver.
These were the lavish rewards promised by their masters. The moment a name appeared, they would sprint back to report the good news.
But as the rankings climbed higher and higher, their expressions grew increasingly grim.
“Why hasn’t it appeared yet?” one servant muttered through clenched teeth, his legs trembling uncontrollably.
Across the street stood a gambling house.
The chief manager in charge gripped an abacus tightly in his hands.
His gaze pierced through the countless heads and locked onto the clerk’s bamboo-handled brush.
“Forty-fifth… thirty-sixth… twenty-first…”
The abacus beads trembled beneath the manager’s fingers.
A fine sheen of cold sweat broke out across his forehead and streamed down his cheeks. He did not even dare waste the time to wipe it away.
Every time the clerk lowered his brush to the paper, hundreds or even thousands of taels of silver changed hands across the gambling tables.
Each stroke was a knife cutting directly into the manager’s heart.
Near the most crowded part of the front ranks, Lai Wang’s feet had long since gone numb with pain. Even his toes had lost all feeling.
He paid no attention to anything else. Wrapping his arms around the waist of a burly man in front of him, he used the man’s body as leverage and desperately tried to climb higher.
The burly man looked back at him with a mixture of disdain and fear.
What the hell? I’m not into men!
But Lai Wang paid no mind to his expression. His eyes were bloodshot from exhaustion as he searched line by line through the fresh black characters covering most of the wall.
Nothing.
Xu Zijin’s name was not among the seventy-seventh.
Nor among the fifty-fifth.
Nor among the thirtieth.
He kept searching until the fifteenth place, which had just been written, yet still could not find Xu Zijin’s name.
“Impossible… The young master said there wouldn’t be any problem.” Lai Wang’s teeth clicked together.
The trace of joy that had just risen in his heart was instantly crushed beneath anxiety.
Lai Wang swallowed.
The clerk’s hand moved with astonishing speed.
He dipped his brush in thick ink, and the rankings quickly closed in on the top ten.
“Wuqing County… Tenth place, Zhou Zheng!”
“Ninth place, Chen Boyong!”
Eighth, seventh, sixth!
A string of names was written out in succession.
Several cheers erupted from the crowd.
Yet none of those positions belonged to the scions of the prominent families who were rumored to be favored by the examiners. Xu Zijin was nowhere to be seen, either.
Laiwang suddenly sucked in a lungful of icy air.
The chill stabbed straight through his windpipe and into his lungs. He clutched at the burly man’s sleeve.
Could it be… that what the young master had muttered at the inn about taking second place…
had actually come true?
That essay, so disrespectful that the chief examiner had not dared award it first place, had instead been forcibly pushed down to second?
Before the screen wall, the clerk’s brush moved to the final blank section on the right.
These were the fifth and fourth places.
The ink in the Duan inkstone was nearly used up.
The clerk casually picked up the ink stick and ground it twice more against the inkstone before lifting his brush again.
At that moment, everyone’s gaze converged into a single line.
Fourth place.
The clerk murmured the words to himself as his brush swept across the paper.
Daxing County.
The place of origin was written first. Then three bold characters followed beneath it.
“Gu Cuimo!”
