Chapter 434 - 339. Luck
Analects, half-understood;
Doctrine of the Mean, half-understood.
All are half-understood.
Qi Zhenwu, seated at a high rank, advised, "Young brother from the Chen family, no need to be too modest. Today’s gathering is merely for fun; no need to compete for rank. If not, we will allow you to use borrowed rhymes, and even if it’s not neat, it doesn’t matter. If you truly lose, just drink three cups of wine; no need to recite the ’Initiation into Sound and Rhyme’.
Today, Mr. Qi invited Chen Ji here for a special reason. Qi Zhenwu indeed felt it inappropriate for Chen Ji to lose face, hence he lowered the requirements.
Yet, he never thought that Chen Ji couldn’t even understand what the ’five micro rhymes’ were.
Even if he could write, Chen Ji should not write anymore. In fact, he could write a famous piece that resonates through the ages, stunning everyone, and then say, "My poems weigh like a thousand jun, not to be trifled with in such childish games." As long as the piece he recited was excellent enough, then he would be right.
But he had once publicly said in Luocheng City that ’Broken Formation Song’ was composed by Prince Jing, and that he couldn’t write poems.
Chen Ji cupped his hands to Qi Zhenwu and said, "Thank you, Lord Qi, for your concern. But when I was an apprentice, I rose early in the morning to fetch water and sweep the ground, during the day I cut and weighed medicine. At night, my senior brothers snored loudly, and the master was miserly, sometimes even unwilling to let us light oil lamps... Indeed, at the Medical Hall, there was no leisure to read the classics."