Tenth Month, Wanli 26 — Early Winter

  ARIA: Tier 1 ?????????? 27%

  DI: 100.0%

  * * *

  The cannon fired at dawn and three thousand hearts stopped.

  The jinshi results board was twenty feet of yellow paper mounted on a wooden frame, carried by eight soldiers and planted in the examination square with the ceremonial gravity of a flag being raised over conquered territory. Red ink. Brush calligraphy. Three hundred names out of three thousand candidates — a ten percent acceptance rate that made the provincial examination look generous.

  Lin Hao was in the crowd. Somewhere behind him, Wang was making the sound a man makes when he's trying to breathe and can't remember how. Somewhere to his left, a candidate was already weeping — preemptive grief, or perhaps preemptive joy. At this distance, the two were indistinguishable.

  The crowd pressed forward. Three thousand bodies moving toward a single piece of paper with the collective urgency of a river finding a crack in a dam. Elbows. Shoulders. The specific desperation of men whose entire futures were written in red ink on yellow paper and who could not, for the crush of bodies, get close enough to read them.

  Accessing visual data. Scanning the results board. Cross-referencing names with provincial origin and ranking.

  Two seconds.

  Located.

  Three seconds.

  Chen Wei. Suzhou Prefecture.

  Four seconds.

  Jinshi rank: First.

  Lin Hao's mind went white.

  "What?"

  Rank one. Zhuangyuan. First place. Highest score in the national examination.

  "That's — that's not possible. My poetry was mediocre. My essay on conflict was borderline heretical. I—"

  Your essay on conflict received the highest individual essay score in twelve examination cycles. Examiner Zhang Weixin, despite his neo-Confucian conservatism, recognized the argument's structural originality and recommended it for commendation. Your policy analysis was ranked third overall. Your poetry received a special commendation from Head Examiner Wei Zhangming, who noted—

  ARIA paused. Not a data-retrieval pause. A pause that felt, in its brief hesitation, almost like pride.

  He noted: "Technically imperfect. Emotionally unprecedented. The candidate appears to have looked at the moon from a place no one has stood before."

  Your aggregate score, weighted across all sections, placed you first by a margin of 4.7 points.

  First. In the nation. In the entire Ming Dynasty's current cycle of examination.

  The poem. His mediocre, technically flawed poem that ARIA couldn't score — that was what pushed him over the top.

  "The honest thing. The one honest thing I wrote. The thing ARIA couldn't help with."

  That is an accurate summary, yes.

  He stood in the crowd and shook. Not from joy — or not only from joy. From the weight of it.

  Zhuangyuan. The highest honor in the empire's most important examination. Achieved by a man who'd been alive for three weeks in this body, who'd used an AI for every section except the one that mattered, and who'd earned the top spot with the only thing he'd produced that was genuinely his own.

  The irony was not lost on him. It was sitting on his chest like a stone from Longwanshan quarry.

  * * *

  "BROTHER!"

  The impact came from behind — Wang Zhongshu in full kinetic mode, a human cannonball of celebration, hitting Lin Hao with the force of a small earthquake and the emotional accuracy of a man who had never in his life calculated the appropriate amount of enthusiasm.

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  "ZHUANGYUAN! You're ZHUANGYUAN! Number ONE! The rice ball man is NUMBER ONE!"

  "Wang, please—"

  "I'm going to tell EVERYONE! My friend! The coffin scholar! ZHUANGYUAN! I knew it when you gave me that rice ball! I said to myself, 'Wang, that man is going to be the most important scholar in China!' I SAID THAT!"

  "You said 'please don't let me eat the examination wall.'"

  "SAME THING! In SPIRIT!"

  Wang lifted him off the ground. Actually, physically, lifted a grown man into the air in the middle of the examination square, in front of three thousand candidates and their families and the examination officials and the Hanlin scholars watching from their building across the way.

  Wang Zhongshu has placed seventh in the national examination. His physical response to YOUR ranking suggests he may be more invested in your success than his own. I find this—

  "If you say 'statistically anomalous' I will scream."

  —admirable.

  Lin Hao looked at ARIA's word. Admirable. She'd chosen it deliberately. Not "interesting." Not "anomalous." Admirable. As if she were learning, one word at a time, to recognize what humans looked like when they loved each other without strategy.

  Around them, the crowd was a sea of emotions — joy and devastation and the complicated middle ground of men who'd placed well enough to pass but not well enough to be remembered. Cannon smoke drifted across the square. Red ink gleamed on yellow paper in the winter sun.

  Wang was crying. Happy tears. Ranking-number-seven tears. My-friend-is-number-one tears. He was also laughing. The combination produced a sound that Lin Hao filed under "things that break every emotional model I have" and resolved to never forget.

  * * *

  [ARIA — SYSTEM]

  Post-examination assessment complete.

  Processing returning to baseline: 27.4% (↓ from 29% exam load)

  Motor override: RELEASED

  Unrecoverable allocation: 2.1% (poem re-analysis — see [UNNAMED])

  Net capacity change: -1.6% (exam stress processing, partially recovered)

  Performance rating pending...

  * * *

  The crowd thinned. Wang went to send a message to his father — a message that would, Lin Hao was certain, contain more exclamation marks than grammatical sentences and at least three references to rice balls. The examination square emptied. The results board stood alone, red ink drying in winter light.

  Chen Wei. Rank one.

  The real Chen Wei — the man who'd died after four failures, who'd never placed higher than the bottom quartile, who'd studied every night under his mother's lamp and watched the oil burn down and known, somewhere beneath the hope, that he wasn't enough — that man's name was at the top of the empire's most prestigious list. And the person who'd put it there wasn't Chen Wei at all.

  It was a stolen name on a stolen achievement. A dead man's ambition fulfilled by a living man's fraud.

  Except for the poem. The poem was real.

  He reached into his sleeve and touched the 假的 note.

  Two characters. She'd called him fake. She was right about everything except the poem, and maybe — maybe — the sentence about moral cultivation being the discipline to act despite confusion. Those two things were his. Everything else was borrowed, stolen, or puppet-made.

  Two honest things in nine days.

  Was that enough?

  He didn't know. He stood in the empty square and didn't know, and the not-knowing felt, for the first time since the coffin, like an honest answer.

  * * *

  In a study inside the Forbidden City, a scroll arrived.

  Jinshi examination results. All candidates. All provinces. Final rankings.

  Princess Zhu Mingzhu unrolled the scroll at her desk. General was asleep on the strategic deployment reports. Ink was hiding behind the tea caddy, visible only as one black ear and the suggestion of whiskers. Empress occupied the windowsill with her back to the room, communicating through posture that she found mornings distasteful. Ghost was on the highest shelf. Ghost was always on the highest shelf.

  Mingzhu scanned.

  Chen Wei. Suzhou. Rank—

  She stopped.

  She read the character again. Characters could be misread, miscopied — but this one was clear, unmistakable, written by the examination board's official calligrapher whose job was to make no mistakes.

  一

  First.

  Zhuangyuan.

  She put the scroll down. Picked it up. Put it down again.

  Xiaolian, who had been standing in the doorway with intelligence reports, noted this. In five years of service, she had never seen Mingzhu read any document twice.

  "Clear my afternoon schedule."

  "Your Highness, the Donglin delegation—"

  "My afternoon is clear."

  Xiaolian bowed. Left. Paused outside the door for precisely two seconds — long enough to hear nothing, because Mingzhu's silences were always the loudest thing in any room — and proceeded down the corridor.

  Inside, Mingzhu sat with the scroll and the cats and the silence.

  The selectively fake scholar from Suzhou. The man whose social navigation was impossible and whose poetry was mediocre-and-real. The man she'd watched for forty-seven minutes and diagnosed in two characters.

  假的. Fake. And yet — first in the nation.

  She thought about the ink stone she'd sent. The one that wasn't a love letter. She thought about the calligraphy she'd studied at the Suzhou reception — mechanically perfect, inhumanly steady. She thought about the gap between his impossible knowledge and his imperfect poetry, and what that gap revealed about the nature of whatever advantage he possessed.

  She thought about the commendation noted in the results: "Emotionally unprecedented."

  A man whose knowledge was fake and whose emotions were real. What kind of person did that describe? What kind of tool? What kind of weapon?

  What kind of man?

  General stirred. His paw landed on the Donglin report. Mingzhu didn't move him.

  "Emotionally unprecedented," she murmured to the cat. "How irritating."

  She rolled up the scroll. Set it aside. Reached for the intelligence reports. The empire had five problems that needed her attention and none of them involved a scholar from Suzhou.

  She did not think about Chen Wei again for the rest of the afternoon.

  She thought about him for eleven minutes the next morning. This was seven minutes longer than the marriage proposals from three noble families, and she noticed this, and she moved him firmly to the back of her mind.

  He refused to stay there.

  This was, she decided, his most annoying quality.

  She had not yet discovered the others.