A bitter, freezing drizzle fell across Central Scholar Avenue the next morning.
The grey sky hung low over the capital, coating the vermilion walls of the Imperial Immortal Academy in a sheet of thin, glassy ice.
Outside the towering bronze gates of the academy, an enormous crowd of ten thousand young scholars stood shivering in the slush.
They had traveled from the farthest borders of the Nine Provinces. Some had walked on foot for three months across snowy mountain ranges. Some had sold their family’s remaining draft oxen or pawned their mother’s silver hairpins just to afford the journey to the capital.
Every single one of them carried a worn wooden book-box on their back, holding hand-copied scrolls of poetry, statecraft, and foundational cultivation theory.
For three hundred years, the Triennial Imperial Exam had been the only narrow bridge allowing commoners to enter imperial service and study advanced Nascent Soul scriptures.
In the damp cold, two young scholars from the Southern Marshlands huddled together behind a stone lion, sharing half of a frozen, roasted sweet potato.
“My village pool raised eighty copper coins so I could buy this winter brush,” one scholar whispered, his fingers trembling with chill. “My father said that if I pass the third rank, our county will be exempt from the grain tax for three years.”
