"Your Highness, this is a list of the expenses of this examination."

In the afternoon, an official of the Ministry of Officials sent the cost report of the scientific examination to Zhao Hongrun.

Obviously, Zhao Hongrun's revenge on Luo Rong in the morning was regarded by the invigilators of those officials as a deterrent to kill chickens and monkeys.

And in this regard, Zhao Hongrun did not break it.

"Thank you for this adult, let's get busy first."

"Yes."

The official retired.

Seeing this, Zhao Hongrun picked up the stack of reports and looked at it carefully.

At this time, he was sitting alone in the side hall room of the Confucius Temple, accompanied by only eight sect guards except Shen Yu and Lu Mu.

As the saying goes, if you are not in your position, you can't do your job, and now that Zhao Hongrun, as a companion, it stands to reason that he should inspect the examination situation of the scholars in the field and grasp 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 Zongwei monitor more than 2,600 candidates at the same time?

You can't do it if you break your leg!

Therefore, Zhao Hongrun is not in a hurry to catch the problem of fraud, anyway, for him, the whole Luo Wenzhong is the purpose of this trip, as for the problem of fraud in the field, it depends on whether he can catch the clues.

If it really hits, Zhao Hongrun doesn't mind rectifying the field for Da Wei, after all, the more stable the entire Great Wei is, the more stable he will be as a prince, and the easier it is for him to become an idle king.

Reaching out and picking up the teacup next to him and taking a few sips, Zhao Hongrun's eyes fell on the report in his hand again.

As he expected, there was indeed a problem with the falsity of the report of the ministry.

"Forty-six thousand three hundred and twenty...... Oh!'

Zhao Hongrun shook his head slightly.

According to the records of this report, the officials submitted an application to the household department for the renovation of the nearly 3,000 rooms in the Confucius Temple, as well as the facilities in the rooms, the candles distributed to the scholars, and the relevant allowances for the officials and miscellaneous servants who participated in the examination.

This line is quite detailed, and it seems that there is no problem, but Zhao Hongrun has seen the extremely simple number room with his own eyes, and he will never believe that the officials have spent most of the money to repair those number rooms.

Ten taels of a futon? You're kidding?

Zhao Hongrun couldn't imagine that the bedding in the room was so thin that there was hardly much cotton wool, exuding a musty smell, as if the bedding that had not been taken out of the warehouse for many days and dried could be worth ten taels.

You must know that Zhao Hongrun asked the chamberlain in the palace for a brand-new thick futon stuffed with cotton wool, which was only a dozen taels.

"Gao Kuo, planting tricks, you two go to check, I want to know where the source of this batch of cotton mattresses is. …… Go to the treasury of the ministry and give some silver to the servants there, and tell them to loosen their mouths, and if they refuse to reveal the money, you two will do it yourself. ”

"Yes." Zong Wei Gao Kuo and Chong Zhao hugged their fists and left.

At this time, Zhao Hongrun put this report in his arms, and walked out of the side hall of the Confucius Temple with the remaining six Zongwei and went to the number room.

The general pattern of the nearly 3,000 rooms is in the shape of a "Hui" from a bird's eye view, with an outer circle and an inner circle, built face to face, so when walking on that path, you can see the two rows of rooms on the left and right, and clearly see that the scholars in the room are burying their heads in books.

Zhao Hongrun approached a room curiously and glanced sideways at the scholar's examination papers.

"......" may have noticed something, the scholar raised his head and looked at Zhao Hongrun with a mask in dismay, he didn't know what was going on, and he was inevitably a little restrained.

Seeing this, Zhao Hongrun said lightly: "You write yours, I'm just looking at the exam questions." ”

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

"Hmm, did you take the four-book exam on the first day?"

After glancing at the exam questions twice, Zhao Hongrun walked away.

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

What are the Four Books?

That is, in the four books of "University", "The Mean", "Analects" and "Mencius", the examiners who ask questions often take a paragraph of text or even a few numbers from them, and there are no other prompts, so as to test the students' proficiency in the four books.

The so-called Four Books, also known as "Words on behalf of the Sages", as the name suggests, is to borrow the tone of Confucius and Mencius to write articles.

Different from other literary genres such as poetry and poetry, the framework of the four books is restrictive, and the article needs to be written strictly in accordance with the eight parts of [breaking the topic], [undertaking the topic], [starting the talk], [starting], [starting the stock], [middle share], [back share], and [bundle share], and in the four parts of the last four shares, each part needs to have two pairs of words, that is, pairs, which require equal battles.

Therefore, the four books are also called the eight strands.

The most demanding thing is that the words and allusions used in the text need to be found in scriptures or historical records.

In short, it is a very boring article with almost no readability, but on the contrary, it can also be used to test students' understanding and familiarity with the four books, which is one of the criteria for testing the knowledge of scholars.

And this time, the exam question from the Ministry is, "The son is Yan Yuan said, if you use it, you will do it, and if you give it up, you will hide it, but I am a husband with you!"

This quote comes from the "Shu Ye" chapter of the Analects, which Confucius said to his student Yan Yuan, and the original text means, "When the state uses you, you will use your talents to carry out all kinds of ideas according to your own ideas; When the country doesn't use you, you put away your ideas and ideas. It seems that only you and I have this cultivation and style that can do this naturally and frankly."

In Zhao Hongrun's view, this question is not difficult, as long as you can recite the whole text, it is not difficult to understand the meaning of this sentence, the problem is how to write a narrative with the words of the sages to elaborate on this point of view.

"The son is Yan Yuan said, if you use it, you will do it, and if you give it up, you will hide it, but I have a husband with you! It is advisable for the saint to hide, and the capable one begins to show it slightly. It is not easy to cover the saint's trip, and it is not easy to regulate it, and it can be said with it since Yan Zi is a few of them. Therefore, it is said that the lifelong experience, only one or two ways to listen to others, and seek to be not exhaustive, often and rare. I can be confident. And it is possible to be alone and have nothing to share, and to be alone and have nothing to say. This means that it is suitable for itself, and I am fortunate to have a language today...... Well, this gentleman is well written.'"

Zhao Hongrun checked the students' answer sheets from time to time as he walked.

There are well-written, well-written scholars, even Zhao Hongrun sighs to himself, after all, he is not interested in this at all; There are also people who write in a mess and are rigid, purely applying the words of the sages to and fro, without any concept of their own. It is directly called to speak by the words of the saints.

During this period, Zhao Hongrun also saw a strange thing, and even translated the sage's sentence as, "Confucius said to Yan Yuan, what you can use is workable, and what you don't need must be hidden.

Zhao Hongrun was simply stunned.

"What do you and me, who understand the whole truth, be regarded as the whole world with a great manly spirit? …… It really doesn't matter how domineering you translate?'

Seeing that the wonderful student didn't even write the text after translating, and drank and nibbled on chicken directly, as if celebrating himself, Zhao Hongrun was almost stupid.

"This guy is here to try a three-day trip, right? It's a big world, and there's no wonder."

Glancing at the luxurious vermilion brocade dress on the strange student, Zhao Hongrun shook his head and walked away.

In his opinion, nine times out of ten, this student is the son of a local magnate and rich, and he is purely here to visit the capital, and he still participates in the examination at this level?

"I don't know how much money I spent to buy a place for the township test."

Shaking his head, Zhao Hongrun left this wonderful student behind, he didn't bother to pay attention to this kind of guy, anyway, this guy couldn't get into the list at all.

Zhao Hongrun walked for another while.

I have to say, aside from that strange thing, the level of the scholars who participated in the examination this time is generally okay, and even Zhao Hongrun feels good after reading the articles of several students, but then again, today is only the first day of the examination, and it is difficult to determine the final results.

In addition to understanding the level of candidates for this examination, Zhao Hongrun is also secretly concerned about the problem of fraud in the field, but as far as he can see, he did not find anything wrong, as if all the scholars are answering questions and writing words in a regular manner.

"This is strange, could it be said that there is no fraud in the science field? Or is it ...... Are officials involved?'

Zhao Hongrun pondered silently.

In his opinion, there are two kinds of fraud in the world, one is that the candidates cheat by themselves, and the other is that the candidates bribe the examiners to cheat together, but no fraud can escape these two hypotheses.

When it comes to the candidates' own fraud, it is nothing more than secretly hiding the entrainment, but the officials of the Confucius Temple have a very strict grasp of this point, and there should be no omissions, in other words, if there are still frequent fraud incidents in the field in previous years, it can only be that some officials are involved.

This kind of fraud, to be honest, is not easy to catch, after all, there are too many people involved, from the invigilator, down to the principal, officer, and miscellaneous servants of the Confucius Temple, all of them may be accomplices, as long as the parties are silent, it is difficult to catch this kind of thing.

Around dusk, Zong Wei Gao Kuo and Chong Zhao came back, bringing back the results of their investigation at the same time.

They spent 50 taels of silver to buy off a treasury guard in the treasury of the Ministry of Officials, and then they learned that there were still a lot of tattered cotton mattresses piled up in the treasury of the Ministry of Officials, and most of these cotton mattresses were recovered from the hands of the people in the capital, and the price ranged from two taels of silver to four or five taels of silver.

Don't think that a cotton mattress can only earn a few taels of silver after being pounded by hand, you must know that there are more than 2,600 scholars here, which is nearly 20,000 taels of silver, a lot of money.

"It seems that the court lacks a monitoring agency, such as the Imperial Historical Observatory or something...... Rely on the self-inspection of the officials alone, hehe!"

On the same day, Zhao Hongrun wrote down the matter and waited for it to be presented to the Son of Heaven in the future.

"PS: There is a cameo of a special character in this chapter, and those who understand it are not allowed to make a noise. In addition, I would like to thank the student "Hello Spirit" for being the first hall master of this book, and I just noticed it. Please allow me to slow down, thank you very much for the detailed outline and information of this volume in the past two days."