Medicine Master Disciple’s Cultivation Notes

Chapter 86: Hidden Dragons and Crouching Tigers in the Examination Hall

A large, fluffy tail, bright fiery red.

The sky was still dim and not many people had noticed yet, but the girl cried out in pain and nearly lost her human form entirely.

That single yelp drew every pair of eyes in the vicinity.

"I don't want to take the exam anymore, I want to go home, wuwuwu..."

The little fox who had embarrassed herself, and she did appear to be a fox though exactly what kind was unclear, crouched on the ground with her head in her hands and wept bitterly.

Before anyone had finished watching that scene play out, a chubby little boy nearby pointed at the exposed fox and shouted, "I want one of those! Mom, buy me one!"

Li Qiuchen felt his scalp prickle.

He hadn't expected that such a small county-level children's examination would gather so many exceptional and unusual figures in one place.

Fortunately, this kind of chaotic scene was apparently something they went through every year. The county school had accumulated ample experience in handling it, and had already arranged for soldiers to be present on site to maintain order.

About half an hour later, Li Qiuchen guided Miss Tang Xiaoxue through the crowd and arrived at the entrance to the examination hall.The teacher standing at the door looked Li Qiuchen over with a blank expression and said, "Persons unrelated to the examination are not permitted to enter."

"I am also a candidate."

Li Qiuchen quickly presented his examination permit, a proof of identity issued by the county school when he had registered two days earlier, which listed his age, surname, place of origin, and ethnic background in detail.

"Are you aware of the examination hall rules?"

"I am."

"Go in."

Having seen his share of wealthy families sending companions in with their children, the teacher asked nothing further.

The so-called rules of the examination hall were simply no whispering, no serving tea or water, and no copying or writing on someone else's behalf, rules aimed precisely at study companions like Li Qiuchen who came from wealthy households.

Inside the examination hall, candidates brought their own brushes and ink. The desks, however, could be chosen freely.

Li Qiuchen picked a reasonably warm spot, pressed the bleary-eyed Miss Tang Xiaoxue into the seat, and sat down beside her.

He turned his head and found the little fox whose tail had been caught in the door staring fixedly at Miss Tang Xiaoxue.

Her tail had naturally been tucked away by now and was nowhere to be seen. She looked like an ordinary girl with neat and pleasant features.

Li Qiuchen blinked, then understood immediately.

Miss Tang Xiaoxue's cape was made of white fox fur.

I'm seeing my little fox friend's second aunt on a future classmate. What kind of hellish joke was this?

Which also raised the question of why fox spirits were allowed into the children's examination in the first place. Everyone had told him this was a proper, serious examination!

The little fox stared for a long while. Seeing that Miss Tang Xiaoxue wasn't responding, which was because she was still half asleep, she puffed out her cheeks and blew a sharp breath in Miss Tang Xiaoxue's direction.

A cool, yin-tinged gust swept past Li Qiuchen's face and dove into the back of Miss Tang Xiaoxue's neck, jolting her awake on the spot.

She turned her head around and found the little fox waving at her energetically.

"Hello there!"

Miss Tang Xiaoxue blinked, and began trying to recall the various rules and conventions Zhang Shaoyao had drilled into her. What was the correct response in a situation like this?

If she went by her own instincts, she would just hoist her pickaxe, shout "hey!" and be done with it but the pickaxe hadn't been brought in.

"Hello..."

"Silence!"

The examination proctor at the front of the hall gave a sudden cough, cutting off the exchange between the two girls, "Begin distributing the examination papers!"

Their particular examination room held around eighty candidates. There were four such rooms in total, designated First, Second, Third, and Fourth.

In other words, the total number of candidates sitting the children's examination this year was roughly three hundred.

Based on what Li Qiuchen had gathered over the past two days, only about a third would ultimately be admitted.

Many of the candidates were not sitting the examination for the first time. Looking around the room, the clothing and bearing of the students made it clear that very few came from ordinary households.

Obviously. Ordinary households couldn't afford the expensive tuition fees.

This much was evident even from the congestion at the gate. Every family that had managed to send a child to sit the examination arrived in at least a horse-drawn carriage.

Candidates around Miss Tang Xiaoxue's age were relatively rare. The overwhelming majority of those sitting the examination were between twelve and fifteen years old.

The examination time was tight, with four subjects to be completed within a single two-hour period.

Li Qiuchen received his examination papers and gave them a quick scan. The Classical Literature paper was comparatively simple, testing knowledge of characters and literary allusions, with a final essay to be written based on a given topic.

The Arithmetic paper was considerably more difficult. The opening questions were manageable, but the difficulty increased steadily toward the end. The last several major questions bordered on exceeding the prescribed curriculum.

As for the Ethics and Ritual Law papers, those were entirely tests of rote memorization.

The "Faxiang" and "Liji" from among the Five Classics, even in the simplified and abridged versions for young students, still contained close to a hundred thousand characters of content.

How much a candidate had memorized came down to ability. Whether the questions happened to cover the sections they had memorized came down to luck.

Li Qiuchen let out a slow breath.

Any question based on rote memorization was essentially a free gift of points for him.

The inherited ocular arts of the Li family had their strengths and their weaknesses. The strength was a photographic memory for anything seen. The weakness was that it was only a photographic memory for things seen.

What someone told him verbally, he might not necessarily retain.

The last two papers were ones he could score perfectly on. The real question he now faced was whether to hold back his score deliberately.

What business did a poor boy from a mountain village have scoring that high? Was there something suspicious going on? He claimed it was a secret family art? He claimed his family ancestor was someone? Li Jingyun? Oh right, wasn't that the... the great demon of the Medicine Master remnants who had reached the Golden Core stage?

Oh no. That would be a disaster but if his score was too low, would he miss out on any hidden rewards?

Wasn't that how it always went in novels? In a sect tournament, the top three finishers received special prizes.

Maybe the county school had something like that too? They hadn't announced it openly, but what if they quietly gave something out anyway?

The examination lasted two hours, and Li Qiuchen spent half an hour of that time wrestling with himself internally.

In the end, he decided stability was the wiser path. He couldn't be too inconspicuous, but he couldn't stand out too sharply either. He would write the first two papers normally and skip around on the last two, aiming for a result somewhere in the upper-middle range.

Any top student who had ever deliberately throttled their score would know that if you got exactly sixty on every single subject, you would absolutely be noticed. But if you hovered around seventy-five, the teacher wouldn't even bother to look twice at you.

He had wasted a fair amount of time at the start, but because the last two subjects were relatively easy for him, he still managed to finish his papers ahead of time. He turned to look at Miss Tang Xiaoxue, and found the child face-down on the desk, drooling in her sleep.

Well, alright. However things turned out, her father had paid what needed to be paid.

He turned the other way to check on the little fox, who was chewing the end of her brush with every scrap of mental effort she possessed, a vein standing out on her forehead, her little canine teeth exposed.

It was perfectly obvious. This one was also academically hopeless.

After barely surviving to the end of the examination and having the papers collected, Li Qiuchen had just roused Miss Tang Xiaoxue when the little fox bounced over with cheerful familiarity and introduced herself, "Hello! My name is Hu Caiyi. Can I touch your horns?"

Hu Caiyi. That sounded quite festive.

Her father had some skill in naming. At least more reliable than Boss Tang.

There weren't many girls among those who had registered for the children's examination, perhaps six or seven in the entire hall. These two were the most distinctively unusual-looking among them. The little fox had clearly found a sense of belonging in meeting another non-ordinary person and had come bounding over to strike up a conversation.

"Horns?"

Miss Tang Xiaoxue wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth, "What?"

Her mind was not yet fully online.

As Miss Tang's personal study companion, it fell to Li Qiuchen to step in and act as her brain and her voice at this moment, "My young miss's surname is Tang, given name Xiaoxue. She has just arrived in Yun and is unfamiliar with everyone here. If there has been any breach of courtesy, we ask for Miss Hu's understanding."

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