Back In Time For Imperial Examination Chapter 8

The weather was getting hotter and hotter. Ryan Cui saw that the clothes on the chests and backs of the three men were soaked with sweat and their breathing became heavier. He put down the water bag, stood up and said, "You guys take a rest first. I'll go buy some water and food. Even if people don't want to rest, the horses still need to eat and drink."

Alex Cui hurriedly stopped him: "How can I let you buy anything? Ask Ethan Peng to go!" He winked at his son and said: "Go east and walk two streets. There is a place selling food and wine. Brother Zhao has suffered a lot in sending us back. Ethan Peng should buy some wine and meat for Brother Zhao to eat before returning to Beijing."

Ethan Peng stood up and said, "Don't worry, Dad. I often buy food for you outside. I can tell what's delicious at a glance." He turned around and held Ryan Cui, saying honestly, "Brother, you don't have any money and you don't go out often. You may not be able to find the way. Just wait here. I'll go to the neighbor's house to get some water to wash your face."

He was full of energy and trotted out the door.

The neighbors next door and across the street had been watching them for a long time. When they saw a young man with long hair coming out holding an inkstone, they did not care about gender differences and came out to pull him aside to ask, "Young man, which family does your master belong to? Did you rent the house of a Jinshi to study, or did you go to the same elementary school as Mr. Wang?"

Holding the inkstone, he puffed out his chest and said, "What do you mean by renting a house? My master is the owner of this yard, and I came back to my hometown with my eldest son."

An old lady asked, "But the master of the Cui family is an official in Beijing? I heard that he became a fifth-rank official, so why did he ask the eldest son to return home alone?"

Ethan Peng was unwilling to tell Ryan Cui about being kicked out by his father, so he said lightly: "The young master came back to his hometown to take the Tongsheng exam. The noise in the capital is not conducive to studying, so he brought us back to live in advance."

Everyone sighed for a while, and suddenly a woman in her thirties asked sharply from behind the crowd: "How old is your son? My eldest son passed the examination to become a student at the age of 18, and he can pass the examination to become a scholar with one more exam. The young men in Beijing must be better at studying than the people in our county, right?"

The people next to him curled their lips and said, "It's ok for Madam Zhang to just talk in front of a bunch of women like us, but the son of a Jinshi scholar is not as good as your son who works as a worker? The people living on our street are all scholars, and everyone has passed the imperial examination at a young age."

Ethan Peng felt a headache after hearing this, and coughed lightly, saying, "Excuse me, all the grandmothers and aunts, my son has just moved in, and the well water in the yard is not clean. Can I borrow a few buckets of water from you?"

Those people immediately stopped arguing and said, "It's okay to fetch water. Ask your servants to come to our yard and fetch as much as you want. If you want to dig a well, there is a carpenter's market on North Street. It only costs four cents a day to hire a carpenter. If you want to repair the house, there are masons and wall mounters there. It's cheaper to hire them all together."

Ethan Peng didn't dare to make the decision on his own, so he went back to the yard to ask his father.

Alex Cui said, "It will take several days to dig a well. When you go to buy wine and food, take a look at whether there are any water jars for sale. Buy a large jar to store water and make do for the next two days. We also need to hire the craftsmen, but it's getting late. Let's eat first, and then I'll go with you to check it out."

Bongyan went out again, and soon someone knocked on his door carrying a large jar, along with a bucket and a ladle. Alex Cui was spreading the kang mat in the upper room and had no time to fetch water, so he gave them an extra cent and asked Zhao the driver to take them to the neighbor's house to fetch water and borrow some fresh grass and beans to feed the horses.

Ryan Cui accidentally saw that Zhao the coachman scooped up the raw water and drank it directly. He thought it was unhygienic, but he didn't know how to light a wood stove, so he had to go upstairs to ask Alex Cui to boil water.

Alex Cui thought he was thirsty, so he put down his bedding and went to boil water. The box containing the bedding was open in the corner of the room, so he spread the bedding on it. The kang was embedded with wooden frames on all four sides, and it looked like an ordinary wooden bed. He climbed up and hung the gauze curtain, and hung a sachet on the corner of the curtain. After spreading his own bed, he went to the other side of the room and saw that there was only an earthen kang under the south window. He went to the living room, rummaged through the boxes of Alex Cui and his son, and spread their bedding on it.

When Alex Cui came back from making tea, he saw his bedding neatly spread out in the upper room. He was so scared that he almost threw away his teacup and kept saying, "No, no, Master, how can you spread our bedding in the upper room? How can a servant live in the main room? I will move the bedding out and let Ethan Peng sleep in your outer room. He will pour tea and water for you at night... Well, how can you do such a servant's work!"

He put down the plate and went to get the quilt. Ryan Cui didn't expect to change his mind, so he just talked about money: "Didn't you say when you came that we only have more than 30 taels of silver left? I don't know if the capital will give me monthly wages in the future. This little money has to support my recovery and study. How much can I set aside to repair the house? The upper house must be renovated. If you two live in another house, you will have to spend more money on repairing the house. It's better to live here, which saves money and trouble."

Alex Cui said hastily: "That's also..."

Ryan Cui raised his hand and pointed out the window, interrupting him: "Uncle Zhao and the others are outside, let's do this for now, don't let anyone hear us arguing."

Alex Cui immediately shut his mouth and sighed to himself.

Soon, Ethan Peng came back with a waiter, carrying two large food boxes and a small jar of wine: one box contained white fish soup, old chicken soup, stewed eel shreds and fresh vegetables for Ryan Cui; the other box contained fried quail, pickled fish, meat soaked in wine, crispy bones cooked in vinegar, as well as a large pot of fragrant rice, for Zhao the coachman and Alex Cui to go with the wine. The wine was the store's own brewed white wine.

The waiter brought the box to the upper room, opened it, and took out the dishes one by one. He also helped them break the seal on the jar and said, "Enjoy your meal, and return the bowls and jars later. We are neighbors on the street, and we hope that the young master will take care of our business in the future."

After the waiter left, Alex Cui looked at the table full of food and wine that was worth at least five or six cents of silver, and thought of Ryan Cui's "wrong logic" just now, and could not help but sigh a few more times.

Ryan Cui pretended not to hear and asked Ethan Peng to bring the dishes to eat with him on the kang, and asked him to drink with Zhao the driver in the main room. Zhao the driver had to drive the car and did not dare to drink too much. He just drank a few cups of crisp bones and ate four or five bowls of rice happily. After a short rest, he said goodbye to them, took the fare and returned to Tongzhou.

Alex Cui hurriedly cleaned up the dishes, poured the leftovers into his own plate, put it in the kitchen, and whispered to his son: "You should persuade the young master in the future. He is a young master from a wealthy family, not a poor scholar. Why would he help the servants with work? Wouldn't that mess up the hierarchy?"

Ethan Peng was actually very happy when he thought about how he pushed away the demon when he met him on the road and didn't act like a master when he came home. But after hearing what his father said, he felt that this was not in line with the behavior of a young master. After hesitating for a while, he said, "Maybe it's because my brother has only been with us these days and doesn't care much about etiquette. When he goes to the academy to study for a few days and learns the words of the saints, he will naturally get better."

As the father and son chatted, they cleaned up the leftovers, scraped the plates clean and put them back in the food box of the tavern. Then they prepared to go out to buy daily necessities and return the food box to the tavern.

When Alex Cuilin went out, he was still worried about his young master doing housework, so he pushed the book box he brought from home to the side of the bed and told him to read when he was bored and not to do any work.

Ryan Cui readily agreed: "I can just lie down in the room and do nothing. Don't worry, Uncle Yuan. I know the importance of this matter."

After they settled down here, it was time to consider finding a teacher to read to. In the past few days, I was busy with espionage work in the inn and had no time to touch books. I had to copy the original handwriting in the next few days and read all the basic courses. Although reading does not mean understanding, at least I have a PDF in my mind, and I can read it if someone takes the test.

Alex Cui glanced at him with some concern and went out to harness the horse.

After a while, the gate outside made several "creaking" sounds. Ryan Cui thought they had left, so he stuck his head out of the window to take a look. Unexpectedly, Alex Cui came in from the second gate again, and stood at the gate and shouted: "I asked the family of Mr. Zhao next door to help watch the gate. They will be back after dark. Young master, take a good rest and don't read too late."

Ryan Cui repeatedly promised that he was not going anywhere, and honestly retracted his head back into the house. After a while, the door was slammed shut from the outside, and the courtyard finally became completely quiet.

He looked for the bookcase that the original person had used since childhood, sat on the footrest beside the bed and slowly flipped through it, and he actually found a pile of papers that the original person had copied, and immediately saw a sentence "It is said that self-cultivation lies in rectifying one's mind. If one is angry, one cannot rectify it." He remembered that there was a sentence in "The Great Learning" that "If one wants to cultivate oneself, one must first rectify one's mind", so this pile of copied papers was most likely "The Great Learning".

He couldn't understand the content, so he looked at the font carefully. It was written in Yan style. Maybe the original author was still young and couldn't write with much strength, but the font was plump and arranged neatly and tightly, which was good and not difficult to imitate.

Under the pile of copied papers was a half-new set of "Collected Annotations on the Four Books", a set of 80% new original texts of the Five Classics, and further down were the slightly old "Three", "Hundred", "Thousand", "Poems of Child Prodigies", "Ancient and Contemporary Parallels"... and a very old copy of the "Book of Filial Piety", with densely packed notes in small characters on the edges.

It seems that this child has spent all his time on the Filial Piety Classic. No wonder Master Liu despises his progress. But since the original body loves to read it, he has to memorize it in his mind. If someone wants to test him with this, he can also open the PDF to cheat.

Ryan Cui pursed his lips, put the remaining books in order, opened the "Book of Filial Piety" and read it word by word.

The pages he read were generated as PDFs in his mind, stretching down page by page, not as he had thought before, where each page he read generated a separate file. His eyes and brain were like scanners: if he looked carefully, the file in his mind would be printed clearly; if he glanced at it in a hurry, the text would be different, and the parts he didn't read carefully would be blurred, missing words, or even unrecognizable. But as long as he read it again carefully, the clear version of the text would cover the original blurred parts.

After reading the entire book, the document was automatically named "The Justice of the Book of Filial Piety", turned into a PDF icon, and lay quietly in the hard drive.

The wine recipe I wrote last time and the letter Alex Cui wrote to Qianhu Xie were both placed at the front of this book, but they did not have proper names. Instead, they were named after the first few words of the document content.

Are the naming conventions of these documents the same as in Word? Can they be deleted? Don't just come back and generate a PDF for just a few words, which will take up memory space in vain?

He was reluctant to delete such a long volume of the Filial Piety Classic, so he tried to hold the recipe for liquor and concentrate on dragging it outside the hard drive. Sure enough, it shattered into powder in the air and disappeared! Moreover, there is a pattern in the generation of these documents: if you keep turning the pages, a continuous document will be generated; if you close your eyes after reading a page or a few lines, these words will also be generated as independent documents and automatically saved to the hard drive.

This is not much different from Windows 10. He thought to himself: Although reading books will generate fragments and be a bit messy, as long as I delete them in time, it will be fine. In the future, I will slowly burn those boxes of books into the hard drive, and when I need them, I can open them according to the name. Maybe I can even pretend to be a genius with photographic memory.