The Disgraced Minister’s Son: A Path to Office

On the first day gaokao scores came out, a certain Zhuo — just named top science-track scorer in his province — died. Died, but not all the way. He woke up in a scholarly old family, also surnamed Zhuo, as the eldest grandson of the senior branch. Six years old. Sounds good. Except the family patriarch had backed the wrong side in a succession fight and lost his head for it, and his three sons — all promising, all credentialed — were exiled with their whole households to Shuozhou in the far north and sentenced to hard labor. Zhuo Siheng assumed he’d been handed a survival game, so he set about learning practical survival skills. What he didn’t expect was that a few years later a new emperor would take the throne and declare a general amnesty. The Zhuo family’s convict status could be lifted, but going home was out of the question. Shuozhou is poor, remote and backward, and still needs developing. You’re getting ordinary-citizen status, so stop complaining. So the boy made up his mind. If he was no longer a criminal’s descendant and could sit the imperial examinations, he’d change his fate by exam and fight his way back. He had transmigrated straight off the gaokao with his brain at its peak, and all that knowledge came with him. The kitten goes mew mew mew, and everything is marvelous, marvelous, marvelous. Unfortunately, he was a science student. In an age when the examinations tested nothing but the humanities, changing his fate meant scaling the heavens. But even the ninth heaven can be climbed. Let me scale the sky and seize the Northern Dipper — the heavens are high, and I make myself strong.