Luo Cheng turned his back on the chorus of cries and the rosy glow of the lanterns that swung over the doorway of the drinking house. The entreaties from his fellow scholars were well-meaning enough, but the pleas to stay and be sociable quickly died away, fading behind gales of laughter and carousing. How did his fellow scholars manage to stay out drinking all night, every night, and hope to pass the imperial exams? He’d woken up with his face pressed into the pages of a book for three days now, after having fallen asleep in the middle of another treatise on statesmanship and duty. And heaven knows, there were many. The empire had an abundance of paper and these politicians were intent on writing on all of it. At twenty-five years, Cheng was no longer the young prodigy that the local magistrate had boasted about to his exalted peers. Any man, no matter how humble his birth, could become a ranking official by proving himself in the civil exams. The hopes of his entire county had been behind him when he passed the provincial test three years ago.
What do You think about Capturing The Silken Thief?
