Kays Translations
Just another Isekai Lover~
Chapter 136: Re-examination
Every scholar coming out of the Jiangnan Gongyuan was holding their noses and walking around a fat man; the smell emanating from him was simply unbearable.
Zhu Ping’an, standing three meters away from the tearful and snot-covered man, couldn’t bear to see him in such a state and said,
“Brother Xue, what’s done is done. Feeling sad is of no use now. Let’s fill our stomachs first; my treat.”
As soon as Zhu Ping’an finished speaking, the sobbing fat man three meters away let out a howl and started vomiting by the roadside again.
Uh… It seemed mentioning food wasn’t the best idea.
Under the fat man’s tearful pleas, Zhu Ping’an eventually didn’t leave him alone. However, he did kick the fat man into an inn, instructing the inn’s staff to take him to his room and have him scrub himself clean from head to toe. Zhu Ping’an advised against resembling a walking biological weapon.
While the fat man was upstairs washing, Zhu Ping’an sat by the window in his room, reading a book. The topics for the civil service exams’ eight-legged essays were confined to the Four Books, so the more he read, the more confident he became in tackling the questions.
When the fat man finished cleaning up and changed into fresh clothes, Zhu Ping’an put away his book and joined him downstairs for dinner in the inn’s main hall.
However, the fat man seemed to have developed a psychological trauma. He didn’t eat a single bite, not even a sip of soup. Zhu Ping’an could do nothing about it. You can’t wake someone pretending to sleep, nor can you feed someone who vomits at the sight of food.
The inn’s main hall gradually filled with scholars, gathering in small groups of two or three to have dinner while critiquing the day’s exam questions. The primary target of their complaints was a question based on Confucius said. Many seemed utterly baffled, not knowing where to start.
The night was quiet. Moonlight was hazy, starlight dreamy, and a gentle breeze rustled the window curtains. Zhu Ping’an sat by the window until the watchman struck the third watch before he packed his things. After extinguishing the oil lamp, he climbed into bed and fell into a deep sleep.
The next day, before dawn, Zhu Ping’an rose early to prepare for the final stage of the academy examination: the re-examination.
As usual, the fat man was the first to wake Zhu Ping’an for the exam. After a night’s absence, the fat man seemed much thinner, and his forehead appeared unusually bruised.
“Your forehead…” Zhu Ping’an looked at the fat man’s bruised forehead and was speechless.
“Oh, I deliberately bumped it against the top beam of the gate. It’s for good luck!” The fat man looked rather pleased with himself.
Fine, you win.
As they reached the bridge connecting both sides of the Qinhuai River, they ran into Zhu Ping’an’s uncle and others coming from the opposite bank. Zhu Ping’an was at a loss for words.
“Zhi’er, how did yesterday’s exam go?” Uncle Zhu Shouren yawned and asked with concern.
“Yesterday’s question…” Zhu Ping’an hadn’t finished his sentence before his uncle interrupted.
“You found yesterday’s question difficult too, didn’t you? Never mind. You’re still young; you can always try a few more times,” Zhu Shouren said, stroking his beard in consolation. “It’s a pity, though. If the question had been more ordinary, your first place in the prefectural examination would have made passing much more secure. This time the question was unusually difficult, so it’s a shame.”
Zhu Ping’an: …
Today was the second session—the re-examination.
The entry procedure was the same as last time. After roll call and identity verification, the candidates were led by officials to their exam rooms.
Yes, it was still the same exam room as before.
Zhu Ping’an couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for Xue Chi. That guy was probably going to vomit again.
Compared with the previous day’s main session, the re-examination carried slightly less weight. The Ming academy examination had a tight grading schedule of roughly ten days, so examiners focused most heavily on the essays from the main session. If a candidate had performed well there and received a strong initial assessment, the graders naturally approached his re-examination paper with more confidence. Conversely, a poor first-session performance could color how the later paper was read.
Of course, this didn’t mean the re-examination was unimportant. Graders still assessed the quality of answers, especially for eight-legged essays, which had a fixed format, making it easier to judge writing quality objectively.
After the cloud board was struck, the exam papers were handed out. Several officers held up boards with the exam questions pasted on them in the corridor in front of the candidates’ rooms, so the students could see the questions.
Today’s examination had fewer questions than the day before: two Four Books eight-legged essay questions and one less-common model-poem question. In fact, Ming provincial, metropolitan, and palace examinations did not normally test model poems. Even in the Children’s Examination they were uncommon, since Emperor Taizu had disliked them. After his influence weakened in the middle Ming period, model-poem questions occasionally appeared in the Children’s Examination, but the Four Books eight-legged essays still mattered most.
The two Four Books and Eight-Legged Essay topics were more orthodox compared to yesterday’s “Zi Yue” and were quite standard. The first question was “If you make a mistake, don’t hesitate to correct it,” from The Analects of Confucius: “A gentleman is not revered if he is not serious. His learning will not be solid. He is loyal and trustworthy, and has no friends who are worse than himself. If he makes a mistake, he is not afraid to correct it.” The second question was a long sentence, “A virtuous man in a village is the friend of another virtuous man in the same village, and a virtuous man in a country is the friend of another virtuous man in the same country,” from Mencius.
These two questions were rather standard and not too difficult for scholars accustomed to writing Eight-Legged Essays. How well one performed in the Eight-Legged Essay would depend on their foundation.
However, the last question, the model poem, was a trap. The question was “Yellow flowers like scattered gold.”
There is a sentence in the Book of Rites that reads, “In the last month of autumn, chrysanthemums have yellow flowers.” Many candidates might write about autumn scenery or chrysanthemums when composing their model poem based on this, but that would be completely off-topic.
When Zhu Ping’an saw the question, he felt some gratitude toward the scheming, sharp-tongued girl from Shanghe Village. If it weren’t for her, he would have gone off-topic as well.
The last time he went home, he borrowed books from the Li family to copy, mostly the Four Books, Five Classics, and Eight-Legged Essays. That boisterous girl once mocked him as a “toadish bookworm.” After Zhu Ping’an teased her with words, she used this line from the poem to ask him, and he, now the subject of her ridicule, became the “chrysanthemum” of her mockery. She handed him a poetry collection and teased him, saying, “Chrysanthemum, canola flower, Ping’an the stupid toad, too silly to tell the difference.”
The relevant literary references made the meaning clear. Xiao Tong’s Wenxuan (Literary Selections) from the Southern Liang and Tang poet Sikong Tu’s “Duwang” (“Gazing Alone”) contained imagery such as green stems like jade and yellow blossoms scattered like gold, and yellow flowers showing sparsely among the wheat. Zhu Ping’an therefore knew that the “yellow flowers” here were not chrysanthemums but spring rapeseed blossoms. The model poem was meant to describe a spring scene. He wondered how many candidates with shaky foundations would fall into the trap.
Zhu Ping’an dipped his brush in ink and first copied the three questions onto a draft paper before starting to draft his response.
As time quietly passed on the tip of his pen, from the morning sun to the evening sun, the fading glow of the sky gradually dimmed. The deep red turned to pink, and the vibrant red turned to light red. Finally, when all the red light had disappeared, Zhu Ping’an walked out of the Jiangnan Gongyuan.
“Come, come, come, Brother Zhu, appreciate my poem ‘Yellow Flowers Like Scattered Gold, Golden Wind Blows Chrysanthemum Petals’…”
Just as Zhu Ping’an exited the Examination Hall, he heard a familiar shout. Looking up, he saw Fatty Xue Chi, with two cotton balls stuffed in his nose, his chubby face grinning like a chrysanthemum, waddling toward him.
Chrysanthemum petals?
Zhu Ping’an looked at the fatty speechlessly. “Alright, Fatty. Go home and have your father buy you a jiansheng status.”