“Who, exactly, wrote ‘The Void Is Qi’?!”
Liu Wenyuan’s face instantly turned the color of pig liver. The refined bearing he had been affecting vanished on the spot. He lunged forward two steps, his finger nearly poking Li Ke in the nose as spittle flew from his mouth.
“Outrageous!”
“You sour scholar with no regard for your own life! How dare you bring up that heretical, filthy text in the presence of the Honored Provincial Laureate! If you don’t want to live, then don’t sully this sacred ground!”
The sons of the aristocratic clans around them were thrown into an uproar as well.
This was the joyous occasion of the new examination results being posted—and more than that, it was the Zheng clan of Xingyang’s opportunity to establish its authority by suppressing heterodox doctrines. Yet this impoverished student from the lowest dormitory of the Imperial Academy had deliberately brought up that notorious essay at this very moment.
He was publicly slapping every defender of orthodoxy in the face!
“Drag him out!”
“Where are the patrol guards? This madman is slandering the moral order! Seize him and shackle him at once!”
The shouting grew louder and louder. More than a dozen scholars in silk robes waved their arms and bared their teeth, attempting to force Li Ke back through sheer numbers and noise.
At the edge of the crowd, the portly owner of Book Forest Studio was utterly stunned by the sudden turn of events.
Just moments ago, he had been urging his assistant to copy down Zheng Xiuyuan’s examination answer. Now, he hurriedly tugged at the back of the assistant’s robe and asked in a hushed voice, “What void? What ‘Void Is Qi’? Was that another essay from the examination? Hurry, hurry! Have you heard of it? Could it be another rare manuscript worth a fortune?”
The assistant’s charcoal pencil stopped on the paper. He stomped his feet anxiously, then shoved away the fat shopkeeper’s hand.
“Boss, shut—don’t say anything! Just listen! This is a deadly essay that dared to contradict the Imperial Academy Chancellor to his face. Don’t get involved!”
In the middle of the avenue, Li Ke stood firm despite the shoves and insults hurled at him by Liu Wenyuan and the others. His feet seemed rooted to the ground, and he did not retreat an inch.
“Honored Provincial Laureate!”
Li Ke shouted again, his voice overpowering the surrounding jeers.
“Thirteen students from the lowest dormitory of the Imperial Academy did not sleep a wink last night! We read that fragment over and over again—more than a hundred times! It is true that the essay contains not a single annotation from the sages, nor the slightest endorsement from the saints’ teachings. But its deductions concerning the gathering and dispersal of qi, the cycle of heat and cold, strike directly at the true principles governing the workings of Heaven and Earth!”
Li Ke took half a step forward, his expression verging on madness.
“We poor scholars cannot afford your aristocratic families’ collections of books. But we have minds of our own, and we know how to follow reason to its bitter end! Today, this student dares to ask the Honored Provincial Laureate to set aside the Zheng clan of Xingyang, set aside the teachings of the Imperial Academy Chancellor, and answer us—as a scholar, guided only by his own conscience. Is this essay righteous or heretical?”
The avenue fell abruptly silent.
Several thousand pairs of eyes shifted back and forth between Li Ke and Zheng Xiuyuan.
Zheng Xiuyuan said nothing.
The twelve-year-old prodigy who had mastered the commentaries of classical learning at an early age now wore an extraordinarily complicated expression.
He looked at Li Ke, who stood before him with his neck thrust out, while the voices of the aristocratic young men around him urged him to denounce the heresy at once. His thick brows drew tightly together.
In truth, all he had to do was open his mouth and cite a few orthodox doctrines. With that alone, he could crush Li Ke—and the essay along with him.
Liu Wenyuan hurriedly fanned the flames beside him. “Brother Zheng! There’s no need to waste words on a madman like this. Bring out your essay and show him what it means for an ant to challenge a tree!”
Yet Zheng Xiuyuan remained silent.
A few days earlier, his grandfather, Zheng Bo’an, had ordered everyone to write an essay entitled “Refuting Delusions.”
Zheng Xiuyuan had sat at his desk for three full hours. Not a single character had appeared on the blank sheet before him.
He had tried to refute the essay using the theories of yin and yang, the Five Phases, and the correspondence between Heaven and humanity. But to his horror, he discovered that the inner logic of “The Void Is Qi” was flawless and entirely self-consistent.
How was he supposed to write anything?
I, Zheng Xiuyuan, don’t know how to refute it!
Does Grandfather?
With everyone holding their breath, Zheng Xiuyuan finally moved.
Before the eyes of the entire crowd, he slowly shook his head.
“Honored Provincial Laureate…” Liu Wenyuan’s laugh caught in his throat. Sensing that something was wrong, he spoke with bewilderment.
Zheng Xiuyuan exhaled the heavy breath he had been holding in his chest.
“Last night, I read that fragment over and over. I went through it no fewer than thirty times.”
“The author’s skill with the brush is extraordinary. In deducing the creation and transformation of Heaven and Earth, he cast aside the constraints of classical doctrine and went straight to the source of qi.” He paused, and his tone grew especially solemn. “Though I dare not agree with his reckless rejection of the moral order, his reasoning concerning the true principles of the world is without the slightest flaw.”
Boom!
The instant those words fell, the scholars lining the avenue erupted in chaos.
“How… how is that possible?”
Liu Wenyuan’s legs went weak, and he staggered back two steps.
“Brother Zheng! Have you gone mad? How can you publicly admit that such a heretical, filthy text contains truth?!”
Several Imperial Academy students beside him were equally horrified, waving their hands in panic.
“You must not speak recklessly! Honored Provincial Laureate, you must not! If this reaches the ears of the chief examiner or the Chancellor, it will cause a catastrophe!”
The aristocratic young men’s previously overbearing confidence was utterly drained by Zheng Xiuyuan’s candid admission.
They could not accept that Zheng Xiuyuan—the very standard by which their world judged the highest level of scholarship—would yield to some madman whose name they did not even know.
Li Ke’s body began to tremble violently.
He had won the wager.
He had never imagined that Zheng Xiuyuan would truly admit it in public.
Wild joy rushed to his head. Staring at Zheng Xiuyuan, Li Ke immediately pressed him for an answer.
“Then may I ask, Honored Provincial Laureate! This great talent, who understands the true principles of Heaven and Earth and dares to break through the shackles of orthodoxy—who is he? Is he some reclusive master of letters from the imperial court, or an unparalleled genius from Jiangnan? Please enlighten us!”
The scene once again fell deathly silent.
Everyone strained their ears.
Who was it?
The author whose work had forced the heir of the Zheng clan of Xingyang to bow his head and admit that it was flawless must possess a background terrifyingly powerful.
Zheng Xiuyuan did not answer Li Ke with words.
He simply turned around.
Amid the absolute silence, Zheng Xiuyuan looked toward…
Xu Zijin.
Following Zheng Xiuyuan’s gaze—
one person,
ten people,
a hundred people,
thousands of eyes all focused on Xu Zijin at that very moment.
Liu Wenyuan’s mind exploded with a deafening buzz, and he stood there as if struck by lightning.
He followed Zheng Xiuyuan’s line of sight. When he saw that it had fallen on Xu Zijin, his mouth opened involuntarily.
“Impossible… Absolutely impossible!”
Liu Wenyuan stamped his feet and shouted.
“He’s merely the second-place finisher beneath Brother Zheng! A rustic madman who doesn’t even understand the rules of our Great Qian orthodoxy! How could he have written such an essay? Brother Zheng, Young Master Zheng! You must have mistaken the man!”
Liu Wenyuan denied it hysterically.
But the more vehemently he denied it, the more clearly those around him heard the truth.
Deep down, Liu Wenyuan had long since admitted that the essay was extraordinarily brilliant. He simply could not accept that such brilliance had come from Xu Zijin.
Elsewhere, Li Ke and the group of students from humble backgrounds behind him stared at Xu Zijin’s face, their minds racing furiously.
“Principles reside in things… The butcher’s killing of a pig is itself a principle.”
“Though qi within human beings differs in clarity and turbidity, purity and impurity…”
“The nature of Heaven and Earth is pure and perfectly good, one with the Grand Void. The nature imparted by one’s endowment, however, may be hard or gentle, sluggish or swift; one’s talent—or lack thereof—is determined by it.”
“It’s him… So it really was him!”
A poor-born licentiate was so agitated that his eyes turned red.
“Other than Young Master Xu, who just declared before everyone that ‘principle lies within things,’ who else could possess such extraordinary daring and write that earth-shattering essay, On the Grand Void Being Qi?”
The way they looked at Xu Zijin had changed completely. They no longer saw him as an ordinary Runner-Up Laureate.
Xu Zijin was destined to establish an entirely new school of thought!
Xu Zijin then set off, walking calmly through the passageway that the tens of thousands gathered along the main street had instinctively opened for him. At last, he arrived before Zheng Xiuyuan.
The two stood no more than three feet apart.
One was the eldest legitimate grandson of the Zheng clan of Xingyang, the embodiment of a century of orthodox learning in Great Qian.
The other was a retainer of the Xu household, a man who had used the mundane affairs of the marketplace to expound the Way and written an essay that defied accepted doctrine.
In the center of the street, the two stood in stark confrontation.
The tens of thousands surrounding them held their breath.
Even the idlers who had been scrambling for copper coins at the edge of the crowd now fell silent.
At the moment the examination results were posted, the two intellectual systems of Great Qian—old and new—had finally collided head-on.
Xu Zijin looked at Zheng Xiuyuan’s solemn face and the complicated curiosity in his eyes.
Then he turned his head and swept his gaze over the aristocratic young men, whose faces were filled with alarm, as well as the poor-born scholars, who were trembling with excitement, their eyes shining brightly.
For some reason, Xu Zijin suddenly thought of Xu Qinghuan. A faint smile touched his lips as he slowly spoke:
“Since the Honored Provincial Laureate finds my so-called nonsense somewhat worthy of attention, then today, beneath the cool shade of this examination board, I shall borrow the breeze and say something even more outrageous.”
