Transmigrating to the Ming Dynasty’s Imperial Examination

As the month of June looms ever closer, and graduation slowly approaching, the soon to be university graduates were all in a hurry.
They jump from one recruitment fair to the next, tossing and turning in their beds with anxiety as they try to find a satisfactory job.
During the day, the boys adorn themselves with various professional attires while bustling busily outside for an entire day.
Once they returned to the dormitory, however, they immediately changed back into their unkempt sleeveless tank tops and shorts, all donning slippers as they squat in front of the window sill to snack on some watermelon.

When Cui Xie returned to the dormitory, he came home to see such a scene of three watermelon-eating people squatting near the windowsill.
Sensing his presence, they all turned around to stare at him.
The room was hot and stuffy, quite like the inside of a steamer basket and on his table, there was one triangular slice of watermelon remaining on the top of the plate. 

He was only wearing a thin t-shirt and jeans, and there was not a single droplet of sweat on his forehead.
It was like he had not even walked under the huge, hot, baking sun outside.
The dormitory’s eldest resident glared at him several times and said: “Your sweat-free physique during summer is really enviable and hateful, ah! If I knew you hadn’t suffered from the heat at all, we wouldn’t have left you a slice of watermelon!”

Cui Xue grinned, taking out a batch of popsicles from his bag, dangling it in front of his envious cohort of roommates who had gathered together.
Facing them good-naturedly and enthusiastically, with his pure ivory teeth glinting, he asked: “On such a hot day, why haven’t you all turned on the air conditioner? Are you guys planning on entering the mountains as savages if you can’t find a job? Are you guys trying to familiarize yourselves to a life in a natural environment without electricity or air-conditioning in advance?”

“The electricity box downstairs is out of service, can’t you see that we don’t even dare to play video games right now? We were afraid that we would spend every last bit of the remaining electricity before the power comes back on.” The dormitory’s eldest flung the watermelon rind in his hand onto the ground and randomly picked up an ice-cold popsicle, tore off the packaging, took a bite, and gave a contented smile: “Also, what savages? If you really want to be a savage, it is better to transmigrate into ancient times.
When the time comes, just find a place to open up and cultivate the land, you shouldn’t have to worry about finding a job.”

The second eldest resident, a student in the College of Chemistry, also gnawed on a popsicle, mumbling: “How great would it be to transmigrate! We could make frosted window panes, brew wine, steelmaking…in ancient times, they precisely had a shortage of professional talents like ours.
Putting me in this era and making me run back and forth between job fairs is a waste of my useful knowledge!”

The third eldest and last roommate threw his popsicle’s plastic packaging to the ground, then lazily reclined on the back of his chair, laughing at his complaining roommate: “Based on how you cram read the textbook last night right before the final exam, I estimate that even if you transmigrated, you would forget all of the material you’ve learned within a few days.
Might as well band together with us English majors to become a group of mountain bandits or something, at least that has better future prospects than whatever you do.
Boss (referring to the eldest) is in the College of Economics, and if he transmigrated, he could just start a small business or something.
But the most suitable for transmigration would have to be our little fourth-ah (Cui Xie)!”

The other two smiled, saying: “Yes, only little fourth is a literature student, in ancient times he would have been considered a scholar.”

The eldest nodded vigorously in agreement, slapping his dirty hands together, the ones covered in watermelon juice and melted popsicle and wiped them on Cui Xie’s shirt before sincerely and earnestly exclaiming: “Little fourth-ah, it’s time to transmigrate, you’ll have to pack up your writing brushes, as well as your ink and wash paintings.
Ancient scholars must know a little bit of those.
Once you do that, go buy a collection of good poems and then memorize them.
Then in the future, you’ll be able to easily plagiarize them if you transmigrate.” 

The second eldest’s popsicle stick dangled languidly from his mouth as he walked to his bedside and found a book.
He couldn’t help but shove it into Cui Xie’s hand: “This is a book that I bought from a second-hand website online with great difficulty, it’s called ‘A Fool’s Guide to Ancient Chemistry’, please take a good look.
If you transmigrate in the future, don’t forget to make us chemistry majors proud!”

The third eldest fumbled around his desk for a while and saw that there wasn’t really anything to take.
He simply unplugged his portable hard disk and carefully handed it over like it was extremely valuable: “All ancient Emperors liked fangzhongshu.
If you can’t mingle along well, just learn a few tricks from here and who knows, maybe you can even become a State Preceptor later.
“

fangzhongshu: a comprehensive name for a book on ancient Chinese eugenics, sexual medicine, and sexual health books; basically a sex manual

Cui Xie touched the wet stains on his t-shirt sleeves, feeling the sticky book and hard disk shoved in his hands with a slight frown.
His slender phoenix eyes swept over his three roommates, his cold, yet righteous gaze making them bow their heads one after another in shame.

He hugged the book and the hard drive, glaring at his three roommates for a long while.
The corners of his pursed mouth jumped up slightly, revealing a sly smirk: “I have already been hired as our university’s librarian, brothers, you should just go transmigrate by yourselves.” He was a student and scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature.
If he transmigrated to a time period before the late Qing Dynasty’s New Culture Movement and the popularization of the new written vernacular Chinese, he would not be much better off than those English majors*.

*Modern Chinese Literature, which is what our protagonist learns, is called “白话文” or ‘baiwenhua’ and roughly translates to: ‘plain speech writing’.
Before, roughly around the 1910s, people still used a really complicated form of written old Chinese that only scholars really understood.
Thus, the common people created an easier form of writing based on their own dialects and their spoken Chinese, thus a written ‘vernacular’ Chinese became popularized.  During the Ming Dynasty, this form of writing was starting to become popular in novels and ‘lowbrow’ writing, but those of high-ranking or well-learned people still tended to use the old Chinese standard.
As such, Cui Xie would have majored in the “Vernacular”, modern style, which is vastly different from former classic Chinese literature before that time period.  If you want more information, here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese ).

The other three in front of him raised their heads and stared at him in surprise: “You’ve been hired as a librarian? Joining the faculty of our alma mater right after graduation?”

“Well, well, little fourth, you came back and pretended to be so serious, why didn’t you tell us such happy news earlier! Go, go, go, let’s go have a drink, let boss treat you!”

His roommates swarmed and flocked around him, dragging him to the barbecue stall parked outside the university, feasting on meat skewers.
They also ordered a few bottles of beer to celebrate his stable new job position and to commemorate their upcoming graduation as university seniors.
The four of them drank and reminisced about their four years at university.
They all clutched their respective beer bottles, crying disorderly and messily, and they did not return to the dormitory until it was almost closing time.

The electricity was still out when they returned back to their dormitory in the night, so the four of them had to sleep in the dark.

Cui Xie awoke in the middle of the night, his throat feeling unspeakably thirsty, so he felt around his bedside table to get some water.
While he was gulping down water, he saw a dashboard light on his laptop blinking, as if the electricity had finally come back on.
He set down his cup and went to unplug his laptop.
Unexpectedly, the cup was accidentally overturned by the thick charging cord when the wire had been unplugged, and the water spilled across the keyboard.
It was unknown which wire had been connected to an electricity source, but a gleaming blue arc flashed out of the keyboard.
It streaked across the nearby chemistry book, the portable hard disk, nipping his fingers which were immersed in that water puddle.

Unspeakable pain and numbness struck Cui Xie’s brain.
Before he could react, he lost consciousness.

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