In the third year of Yuanhe, the season is the early summer of "April in the world". The flowers are falling in spring, gradually blooming and falling, and Chang'an in early summer is still beautiful. In this beautiful season, an exam is underway, but no one expected that this exam would quietly affect the history of the late Tang Dynasty, of course, it was a bad influence, a very bad influence.

The late Tang Dynasty was like a terminally ill patient, with three huge tumors growing on his body: the division of feudal towns, the dictatorship of eunuchs, and the dispute between friends. The secession of feudal towns and the dictatorship of eunuchs were the serious after-effects of the infamous Anshi Rebellion, and the largest and longest-lasting party struggle in the history of the late Tang Dynasty, the Niu-Li Party Dispute, had its roots in this examination.

This is a system examination, to be specific, it is a system examination of virtuous and honest outspokenness.

The system examination is slightly different from the Jinshi examination.

"Thirty old Ming Jing, fifty young Jinshi", the threshold of Jinshi is very high, and ordinary people may not be able to jump over the dragon gate in their lifetime. Even if you are fortunate enough to become a jinshi, you have only obtained the qualification to be an official, that is, the so-called "release brown"; If you want to become an official of the imperial court, you must also go through the selection of the ministry, if you are unlucky, it is possible to wait for three or five years, in fact, one of the eight masters of the Tang and Song dynasties, Han Yu of the "decline of the eight generations of Wenqi" has been repeatedly frustrated by the selection of the ministry, from becoming a jinshi to officially stepping into the officialdom, Han Yu has waited for more than ten years. It is precisely because of this that in order to select extraordinary talents, the imperial court broke the routine and opened up the road of system examinations.

Compared with the Jinshi examination, the biggest advantage of the system examination is the integration of selection and selection, as long as you are enrolled in the examination, you can be conferred an official. Therefore, whether it is a young scholar, a white-clothed scholar, or even a person who has already passed the Jinshi examination, and even some people who have already entered the ranks, they are all eager to take the examination in order to win a higher starting point for their political career. Bai Juyi, a famous poet of the Tang Dynasty, took the Jinshi examination in the sixteenth year of Zhenyuan, and participated in the examination twice. In the first year of Yuanhe, he was awarded the title of "Talent and Knowledge".

In the early summer of the third year of Yuanhe, in this system examination called Xian Liang Fang Zheng and Straight Speech, there were three candidates, no, to be exact, the three policy treatises of these three candidates, which became the fuse of a series of historical events, they were Yi Que Wei Niu Monk and Ru, Lu Hun Wei Huang Fu Xiang and Qianshi Li Zongmin.

Wei Guanzhi, a member of the ministry, is an upright person, and he is a little upright.

When he was a teenager, Wei Guanzhi was talented, and the envoys of Hezhong and Zelu Jiedu tried to summon him to the curtain with a lot of money, but Wei Guanzhi refused, he would rather stick to poverty and live a life of eating and drinking, rather than become the staff of those Jiedu envoys. After entering the office, Wei Guanzhi has become a beautiful scenery in the turbid officialdom, like a white lotus, out of the mud without staining. He dared to adhere to principles, did not attach himself to the powerful, did not tend to be inflammatory, and almost stubbornly adhered to his own ethics.

In the last years of Dezong, Jingzhao Yin Li Shi was powerful, and his power even exceeded that of the prime minister, and the promotion and demotion of officials were often decided by his words. Someone once recommended Wei Guanzhi to Li Shi, and Li Shi replied: "This person lives in the same lane with me, and I heard that he is very virtuous, if he can come to visit, I am very willing to recommend him to the emperor." Li Shi also raised the wat board in his hand to show the man and said, "I have already written his name on it." The recommender was overjoyed, and immediately relayed Li Shi's words to Wei Guanzhi, and said: "If you visit Li Shi today, you will be promoted tomorrow and accept the congratulations of your colleagues." In the face of this explicit hint, Wei Guanyi laughed at it, and never set foot in Li Shi's mansion for several years, and as a price, Wei Guanzhi's official position has not been promoted.

After Shunzong succeeded to the throne, Wang Shuwen and others seized power and disposed of the notorious Li Shi, and Wei Guanzhi, who had always refused to attach himself to this traitorous minister, was finally promoted. In the third year of Yuanhe, Wei Guanzhi was appointed as the examiner of this system examination.

On a cool summer night, by the flickering candlelight, Wei Guanzhi slowly unfolded the first scroll and began the marking work that decided the fate of the candidates.

In the examination that determines the fate of a person's life, candidates are forced by great pressure, limited time, and various rules and taboos, and it is often difficult for them to give full play to their true level, so they have to perfunctory the article, resulting in the article being as bland as water. For example, the Tang Dynasty was the pinnacle of Chinese poetry, but there were few masterpieces in the imperial examination room, except for Qian Qi's ghostly and ghostly sentence "The end of the song is gone, and the peaks on the river are green" and Zu Yong's half of "The End of the South Looks at the Remaining Snow", there are no more eye-catching masterpieces in the examination room. This time seemed to be no exception, Wei Guanzhi shook his head slightly, stretched his waist, rubbed his astringent eyes, sighed softly, and helplessly reached out to take another roll with a faint ink fragrance.

His eyes slowly swept over the neat scroll, and the lines of elegant and elegant regular script jumped into his eyes, and Wei Guanzhi's eyes lit up, and he was interested. This article is full of the vitality and courage of young people who are unique to "pointing out the mistakes of Chen Shizheng and having no way to avoid it", and provokes a heavy topic about the dictatorship of eunuchs in the palace and the crises outside the court. Among them, the words criticizing the eunuchs made Wei Guanzhi, who was an examiner, sigh to himself. For a long time, the authoritarian power of eunuchs has been obvious to all, but most officials, even Wei Guanzhi, who has a noble character, dare not speak out about this, but this young man, with his fearless spirit, used sharp words to attack those powerful eunuchs. Wei Guanzhi rubbed this scroll for a long time, and was reluctant to let go, and the owner of this scroll, a young man named Huangfu Xiang, was deeply imprinted in his mind. But Wei Guanzhi would never have imagined that such an exciting article would see three articles in succession on this cool summer night, and the owners of the other two articles were Niu Shengyu and Li Zongmin.

A few days later, the papers selected by Wei Guanzhi were sent to the hands of Pei Yan and Wang Ya, the scholars of Hanlin, and soon to the imperial case of Li Chun, the son of the Tang Dynasty. Of course, there is one exception, and this exceptional person is Pei Jun, the envoy of Jingnan Jiedu.