"Your Highness, this is a list of all the articles of our Ministry of Personnel regarding the cost of this examination."

In the afternoon, an official from the Ministry of Personnel delivered the cost statement for this examination to Zhao Hongrun.

Obviously, Zhao Hongrun's revenge on Luo Rong in the morning was regarded by the invigilators of the Ministry of Personnel as a deterrent to kill the chicken to warn the monkey.

And Zhao Hongrun did not point it out.

"Thank you, sir, let's go and do it first."

"yes."

The official of the Ministry of Personnel sued.

Seeing this, Zhao Hongrun picked up the stack of reports and looked in detail.

At this time, he was sitting alone in the side room of Confucius Temple, with only eight sectarian guards beside him, except for Chen Yu and Lu Mu.

As the saying goes, if you don’t do anything in your position, Zhao Hongrun, as a supervisor, should inspect the examination situation of the cadets in the subject and catch them, and whether there is any fraud. But the problem is that there are more than 2,600 candidates in the entire Confucius Temple. How can he and the eight sects monitor these more than 2,600 candidates at the same time?

Even if you run a leg, you can't do it!

Therefore, Zhao Hongrun simply did not rush to catch the fraud problem. Anyway, for him, it was the purpose of this trip to get rid of Luo Wenzhong. As for the issue of fraud in the imperial examination, it depends on whether he could catch clues.

If he really bumped into it, Zhao Hongrun wouldn't mind rectifying the imperial court for the Great Wei. After all, the more stable the entire Great Wei, the more stable the prince he was, and it would be easier for him to be a free king.

He reached out and picked up the teacup next to him and took a few sips. Zhao Hongrun's eyes turned to the report in his hand again.

As he expected, there are indeed false problems in this statement from the Ministry of Personnel.

『Forty-six thousand three hundred taels...hehe!"

Zhao Hongrun shook his head slightly.

According to the records of this report, the Ministry of Personnel submitted an application for 46,300 taels of silver to the Ministry of Revenue to repair the nearly 3,000 rooms in the Confucius Temple. It also includes facilities in the rooms, candles distributed to scholars, and relevant allowances for officials and servants participating in the examination, etc.

The listings of this line are quite detailed, and it seems that there is no problem, but Zhao Hongrun has seen the extremely simple number room with his own eyes. He never believed that the Ministry of Personnel spent most of his money to repair those number rooms.

Ten taels of bedding? Are you kidding?

Zhao Hongrun could not imagine that those quilts that were so thin that there was almost no cotton wool in the room were emitting a smell of musty smell, as if the quilts that had not been taken out of the warehouse for many days were worth ten taels.

You should know that Zhao Hongrun asked the eunuch in the palace to ask for a brand new thick quilt filled with cotton, which was only a dozen taels.

"Gao Kuo, let's go and check it out. I want to know where the source of this batch of cotton mattresses is... Go to the warehouse of the Ministry of Personnel to find some money for the servants there and ask them to let go. If you don't want to disclose the money, you two will do it yourself."

"Yes." Zong Wei Gao Kuo, Zhongzhao and left with his fists.

At this time, Zhao Hongrun took the report in his arms and walked out of the side hall of Confucius Temple with the remaining six ancestral guards and headed towards the room.

The total layout of nearly three thousand rooms is in the shape of a "retro" from a bird's eye view, one circle outside and one circle inside, and is built face to face. Therefore, when walking on the trail, you can see the two rows of rooms on the left and right, and clearly see the scholars in the room being busy writing.

Zhao Hongrun walked towards a room number curiously and looked sideways at the scholar's test paper.

"..." Maybe he noticed something, the scholar raised his head and looked at Zhao Hongrun in shock in shock. He was inevitably a little restrained when he was confused.

Seeing this, Zhao Hongrun said lightly: "You wrote yours, I just looked at the test questions."

"Yes..." The student breathed a sigh of relief when he heard this and continued to write quickly.

"Well, did you take the Four Books exam on the first day?"

After glanced at the test questions, Zhao Hongrun walked away.

The so-called Four Books refers to using paragraphs and sentences within the scope of the Four Books as topics to test students' talents.

What are the Four Books?

That is, the four books "The Great Learning", "The Doctrine of the Mean", "The Analects of Confucius" and "Mencius". The examiners who set the questions often pick a paragraph of text or even a few numbers from it. Apart from this, there is no prompt to test students' proficiency in the Four Books.

The so-called Four Books is also called "Statement on behalf of the sages", as the name suggests, which is to write articles in the tone of Confucius and Mencius.

Unlike other literary genres such as poetry, songs and essays, the framework of the four books is limited and tight. The article needs to be written strictly according to the eight parts of [solving the topic], [inheriting the topic], [starting the topic], [starting the lecture], [starting the stock], [center stock], [center stock], [back stock], and [supporting the stock]. Among the four parts of the last four, each part needs two parallel and parallel texts, that is, pairs, requiring flat and tone tone.

Therefore, the Four Books are also called the Eight-Legend Essay.

The most demanding thing is that the words and allusions used in the text need to be found in scriptures or in the record of the grandfather. You cannot make up your own things and describe the romance.

In short, it is a very boring article with almost no readability, but on the other hand, it can also be used to test students' understanding and familiarity with the Four Books, and is one of the criteria for measuring scholars' knowledge.

The test question issued by the Ministry of Personnel this time was, "Zi said to Yan Yuan, if you use it, you will do it; if you give it up, you will hide it. Only I and you have this husband!"

This sentence comes from the "Shuer" chapter of "The Analects of Confucius", which is what Confucius said to his student Yan Yuan. The original meaning is, "When the country uses you, you can implement various ideas according to your own opinions; when the country does not use you, you can put away your own ideas and imagine them. Those who can do this naturally and frankly, it seems that only I and you have this kind of cultivation and style."

In Zhao Hongrun's opinion, this topic is not difficult. As long as you can recite "Shuer" throughout, it is not difficult to understand the meaning of this sentence. The problem is how to write a narrative article through the words of sages and elaborate on this point in detail.

"I said to Yan Yuan, "If you use it, you will do it, and if you leave it, you will hide it. Only I and you have this man! The sage's actions and hide it, and wait for the capable to show it in detail. The sage's actions and hide it is not easy to regulate. From Yan Zi's few, he can talk to him. Therefore, he said: "A lifetime experience is only one or two ways to listen to others, and seeking it can be endless, and it is often very simple. He can be confident about it. Some people can get it alone and have no shares, and they are alone and have no words. This means that the entrusted is self-adapted, but I am lucky to have said it... Well, this scholar has written it well."

Zhao Hongrun checked the answers of each student from time to time while walking.

Some scholars who wrote well and wrote well were even Zhao Hongrun, but he was not interested in it at all. Some people wrote in a messy way and copied and copied, and simply used the words of sages without any of their own ideas. What is this called making words on behalf of sages? It is called making words on behalf of sages.

During this period, Zhao Hongrun also saw a strange thing, who actually translated the saint's words as, "Confucius told Yan Yuan that what you can use works, and what you don't need should be hidden. Only those who understand this principle can be considered as people with a real man's spirit in the whole world!"

Zhao Hongrun was simply shocked.

"What do you and I who understand the whole truth are considered to be the ones who are a man of the whole world?...Is it really okay if you translate so domineeringly?"

Seeing that the weird student didn't even write the article after the translation, he just drank and ate the chicken, as if celebrating himself, Zhao Hongrun was almost frightened.

"This guy is just here to try a three-day tour? It's really a world of wonders."

After glanced at the gorgeous vermilion dress of the strange student, Zhao Hongrun shook his head and walked away.

In his opinion, this student is probably the children of powerful and wealthy local people. He is purely a visit to the capital. He is still taking the imperial examination at this level?

"I don't know how much I spent to buy a quota for the provincial examination."

Shaking his head, Zhao Hongrun left this weird student behind. He was too lazy to pay attention to this guy, anyway, this guy couldn't make it to the list.

Zhao Hongrun walked for another time.

I have to say that aside from that weird thing, the scholars who participated in the exam this time were generally just right. Some of the students' articles were even good after reading them. But then again, today is only the first day of the exam, and it is still difficult to determine the final result.

In addition to understanding the level of candidates in this exam, Zhao Hongrun was also secretly paying attention to the issue of fraud in the imperial examination, but according to what he saw, he did not find anything wrong, as if all the scholars were answering questions and writing words in a regular manner.

"This is strange. Could it be that fraud in the imperial examination is false? Or... there are officials from the Ministry of Personnel involved?"

Zhao Hongrun thought silently.

In his opinion, there are two types of fraud in the world: one is that the candidates cheat on their own, and the other is that the candidates bribe the examiners to cheat together. No fraud incident can escape these two hypotheses.

Speaking of candidates who cheat on their own, it is nothing more than secretly hiding them. However, the officials of Confucius Temple are very strict about this and should not be omitted. In other words, if fraud incidents still occur frequently in the imperial examinations in previous years, it is only possible that some officials of the Ministry of Personnel were involved.

To be honest, this kind of fraud is not easy to catch. After all, there are too many people involved. From the invigilator to the chief officer, the officials and the servants of the Confucius Temple, they may be co-conspirators. As long as the person involved is silent, it is difficult to catch such a thing.

Around dusk, Zong Wei Gao Kuo and Zhongzhao returned and brought back the results of their investigation.

They spent fifty taels of silver to bribe a yamen guarding the warehouse of the Ministry of Personnel. Only then did they learn that there were still many ragged cotton mattresses piled up in the warehouse of the Ministry of Personnel. Most of these mattresses were collected from the hands of civilians in the capital, and the prices ranged from two taels of silver to four or five taels of silver. After the Ministry of Personnel took back these ragged goods at a low price, they submitted a report of ten taels of silver and one mattress to the Ministry of Revenue, using inferior products as good as good.

Don’t think that a cotton mattress can only earn a few taels of silver after being ripped through it. You should know that there are more than 2,600 scholars here. In this case, it is nearly 20,000 taels of silver, which is a huge sum of money.

"It seems that there is a lack of a supervisory agency in the court, such as the Censorate... It depends solely on the Ministry of Personnel to inspect, haha!"

On that day, Zhao Hongrun wrote the matter into a text and waited for the emperor to be presented to the emperor in the future.

『PS: There is a special guest role in this chapter. If you can understand, please don’t say anything. In addition, thank you to the student “Hello, Jing,” for becoming the first hall master of this book. I just noticed it. Please allow me to wait. Please let me slowly. The detailed outline and information throughout the past two days are very grateful.
Chapter completed!