Protagonist Mei Yun spent his past life taking the imperial examinations until he was sixty, failing every time, and finally dying outside the examination hall. After rebirth, he became a three-year-old child in Mei Village. Because his grandmother Zhou Shi favored the second uncle, he was falsely accused of stealing lamp oil and punished to kneel in the snow. Yet he recited the "Three Character Classic", "Analects", and "Mencius" on the spot, shocking the whole family. His grandfather Mei Chunsheng had failed the county examination three times, yet took out the four hundred and thirty wen of "coffin savings" he had saved for seven years to send him to study under Scholar Yu for enlightenment. Mei Yun studied with extraordinary diligence, copying books to earn lamp oil and suffering frostbite on his hands in winter, going all the way from the county examination top candidate, academy examination top candidate, to provincial examination Jieyuan, then to metropolitan examination Huiyuan, and palace examination top scholar, achieving "six-time top scorer".