Hiss!
A short, sharp chorus of gasps erupted from the ranks of the hundreds upon hundreds of scholars gathered along the street.
Then the entire scene fell into deathly silence.
Everyone doubted their own eyes.
Gu Cuimo.
The prized scholar whom the Gu clan had cultivated with the strength of the entire family.
Last month, he had swept all three top spots in a poetry contest at the Imperial College. His poetry, prose, and parallel couplets were impeccably crafted, earning him lavish praise from the capital’s renowned scholars, who declared him a prodigy destined to claim the Jieyuan title.
In this metropolitan examination, he had also enjoyed the advantage of competing on home ground and was the overwhelming favorite.
Yet now, he ranked only fourth!
He had not even made the top three!
At the sight of this, Gu Cuimo merely smiled faintly and cupped his hands toward those around him.
“You flatter me far too much! Beneath the Son of Heaven, there are countless men a hundred times more capable than I.”
Though he said this, Gu Cuimo clenched his fists tightly.
He, too, desperately wanted to know what the essays of the three men ahead of him were like!
At this moment, the scholars in the front rows tacitly sealed their lips.
Once the rankings were nailed to the wall, they became an indisputable verdict.
Gu Cuimo had been relegated to fourth place.
The three men ahead of him must have produced essays of extraordinary brilliance.
The weight of the top three had risen infinitely in that instant.
Thousands of gazes locked onto the only three red, empty boxes remaining at the far right of the ranking board.
The clerk holding the announcement scroll straightened his back.
Another clerk stepped forward, holding an expensive Duan inkstone in both hands, and respectfully presented it to the chief clerk.
But the chief clerk did not hurry to write.
He tossed the dip pen in his hand into a discarded wooden bucket.
Then, from the inner side of his sleeve, he carefully drew out a brand-new wolf-hair brush.
He lowered the tip into the Duan inkstone, slowly and forcefully pressing all the bristles deep into the ink.
He was deliberately dragging things out.
The top three laureates would surely be scholars who had one foot on the golden steps and the other beneath the azure clouds.
At this final moment, the chief clerk had to pause and leave sufficient time to build suspense.
That was how the imperial court displayed the majesty and grace of its selection of talent.
One breath.
Two breaths.
Three breaths.
A full five breaths passed.
The clerk’s wrist sank.
At last, the wolf-hair brush, now saturated with thick ink, lifted from the inkstone.
Its tip pressed against the wall.
Third place!
Wanping County!
As those few black characters appeared, everyone’s eyes widened. Their minds raced as they searched for the prominent clans and eminent families of Wanping County.
The next instant, the name emerged.
“Niu Dazhuang!”
The moment those three words reached their ears, everyone knew that this man had come from the fields and had not the slightest connection to the word refinement.
At the very front of the crowd.
The iron-tower of a strongman whom Laiwang had just been hugging around the waist, his face full of disdain, suddenly shuddered from head to toe!
The violent jerk was enough to rip open the patched clothing he had mended seven or eight times, sending threads snapping apart.
Laiwang, who had been desperately tugging at him in an attempt to climb higher, suddenly felt as if he were clinging to a wild boar gone berserk. Caught completely off guard, he was thrown backward by the man’s monstrous strength.
With an “Oof!” he landed squarely on his backside.
Laiwang rubbed his aching buttocks and was just about to start cursing when he saw that the burly man stood frozen in place like a black iron tower.
His enormous eyes, round as bronze bells, were bulging so wide that the blood vessels in them looked ready to burst.
His nostrils flared in and out, even spraying two visible streams of white vapor.
His great hands hung suspended in midair, trembling.
Suddenly, the strongman slapped himself hard on the forehead.
The people around him felt the pain of it on his behalf.
Then—
The strongman thrust both arms toward the heavens and threw back his head, unleashing a tremendous roar:
“Good heavens—!”
“Old Niu’s made it! Old Niu’s passed the Classics and taken the Classic Laureate spot!”
That single bellow possessed the force to topple mountains. It was like Zhang Fei roaring at Changban Slope!
Several frail scholars nearby, already wound tight with tension, were jolted by the sound until their eardrums throbbed. Stars swam before their eyes, and their legs nearly gave way beneath them.
Laiwang, still sitting on the ground, was utterly dumbstruck. His mouth hung open wide enough to fit a duck egg.
Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that the crude, boorish brute he had clung to as a makeshift step in a moment of desperation… was actually the Classic Laureate who had trampled the scions of prestigious families and noble young masters beneath his feet!
This man, built like a wild boar, had actually written an essay good enough to place in the top three?!
Following Niu Dazhuang’s earth-shaking roar, the entire street fell still…
The silence lasted for two breaths.
Then, from the direction of the betting den on the tea house’s second floor, the place exploded.
The bookmaker kicked over the abacus in front of him. Wooden beads scattered down like hail.
Several gamblers with dark circles beneath their eyes from sleepless nights beat furiously on the long table, cursing nonstop.
“The examiners have gone blind! Some nobody from the countryside whom no one’s ever even heard of managed to beat Young Master Xie into the top three? I wagered my entire fortune on Xie Yunting!”
But no matter how loudly they cursed, the red boxes and black characters could not be changed.
This shattered everyone’s expectations.
Since Niu Dazhuang had passed, it meant that the identities of the first- and second-place candidates were now even more impossible to predict.
Along the long street.
Only two places remained.
First.
Second.
Several thousand people did not even dare to breathe too loudly.
The morning wind swept past the screen wall, cutting against their faces like blades.
Every eye followed the wolf-hair brush suspended in midair.
The clerk’s wrist sank slightly once more.
The tip of the brush aimed at the center of the enormous red box for second place.
It was only half an inch from the paper.
Everyone’s heart rose into their throats.
Yet the clerk stopped once again.
He drew his hand back and forcefully pressed the bristles deep into the inkstone, repeatedly gathering more ink even though the brush was already fully saturated.
Then, amid the oppressive silence, he gave a solemn clearing of his throat.
“Ahem!”
That exceedingly deliberate cough made the faces of several old scholars who understood the hidden significance turn pale.
Before the screen wall—
The clerk drew in a deep breath of cold air, and his sonorous, resonant voice rang out:
“Second place!”
He announced the rank first, withholding the name.
The crowd was already so impatient that they were on the verge of shouting curses.
“Runner-Up Laureate!”
At the very front of the crowd—
Laiwang’s legs could no longer support him. He collapsed to his knees.
He squeezed his eyes shut, his lashes clumped together with tears and cold sweat.
At that very moment—
Outside the crowd, Xu Zijin stood beneath the edge of the sky, where a faint glimmer of dawn had just appeared. The light happened to fall across his cold, sharply defined profile.
Xu Zijin gazed toward the Imperial Examination Compound from afar, his expression as calm as an ancient well.
The examiner’s vermilion brush had long been destined to add one final stroke to the top of his examination paper.
And precisely as the morning light suddenly climbed higher—
At the end of the long street, before the screen wall—
The clerk’s furious cry shot into the heavens.
“Xu Zijin!”
The wolf-hair brush swept across the wall in bold, flowing strokes, like a dragon gliding through the clouds.
Within the red box, the three characters, thick with dark, dripping ink, struck straight into the eyes of everyone present.
Xu Zijin!
