Guo Sheng, dongshan people. He has loved to read since he was a child, but he is too remote in the mountain village to seek advice from others, so that he is now in his twenties and his articles are full of loopholes.
In the past, his family was often haunted by fox spirits, and his clothes and utensils were always lost, and he was also deeply affected by them, and he was very distressed by this.
One night, Guo Sheng picked up a lamp to read hard, but the articles he had written on the table were all scribbled by the fox spirit, and even the lines could not be distinguished.
So he chose the slightly neat editors to read, and looking at the remaining forty or fifty articles, he was indignant, but helpless. After that, he wrote more than twenty articles, ready to ask celebrities for advice, who knew that when he woke up the next morning, he saw that several articles were spread out on the book case by fox spirits, almost all of which were coated with ink, and Guo Sheng was simply angry.
Just happened to have a scholar named Wang Yue who came to Dongshan because of an incident, he and Guo Sheng were good friends, and this time they came to visit by the way. When he saw the ink-smeared articles and asked him what had happened, Guo Sheng recounted in detail the beginning and end of the fox spirit's work, and also took those articles to Wang Yue.
Wang Yuezai carefully examined it, and suddenly found that the smearing of the fox spirit seemed to have some rules, and those words that had been smeared should be deleted.
Wang Yue was very surprised and said, "This fox spirit seems to understand literature, and it is not only not your scourge, but also your teacher." ”
One day two months later, Guo Sheng took out the article he had written in the past again, and suddenly felt that the fox essence was smeared correctly. So he rewrote three more articles on the book to see what strange things would happen.
When he looked at it at dawn, the fox spirit actually painted the article in a mess. After a year of changing and painting, the fox spirit finally stopped applying, but used ink to thicken the dots on the article, full of paper. Guo Sheng did not know his intentions, so he took the article to inform Wang Yue.
Wang Yue took a look at the article and sighed, "This fox spirit is really your teacher!" Such a masterpiece will surely make your career dream come true. ”
Sure enough, this year's county exam, Guo Sheng passed the Xiucai examination. He was very grateful to the fox spirit for this, and often prepared some chicken and rice to feed it. And every time I go to buy some famous articles back, I don't choose it myself, but let the fox spirit choose it. Therefore, when he participated in the examinations at the prefectural and academic levels, he was among the best, and in the township examination, he also passed the examination for a deputy list of gongsheng.
At that time, the articles of Ye, Miao and others were elegant in style, gorgeous in rhetoric, and recited from family to household. Guo Sheng also had a manuscript, when the treasure-like love; but he was splashed with ink by the fox spirit almost no words left, so he drafted several titles, imitating the style of Ye and Miao's articles, and wrote several articles that satisfied him, but in the end they were smeared by the fox spirit, so he gradually did not believe the fox spirit.
But not long after, Ye Gong was arrested and imprisoned for his improper writing style, and Guo Sheng began to admire his foresight again. But every article he wrote was painstakingly conceived by him, repeatedly revised countless times, and finally painted beyond recognition by the fox spirit. He thought that every time he took the exam, he was at the top of the list, and his self-esteem was very high, and he even had some fluttering, so he even suspected that the fox spirit was fooling around.
Therefore, Guo Sheng copied the article that had been pointed out a lot by the fox spirit circle to try it, and the result was all smeared, which made him laugh: "If it is really nonsense, why was it affirmed before, but now it is denied?" After saying this, he began to cut off the offering to the fox spirit, and hid the samples he had read in the box.
Unexpectedly, the box that was locked was opened in the early morning of the next day, and it was found that the template was painted with four black bars as thick as fingers. The first one was painted with five, the second was painted with five, and the rest were not painted.
Since then, the fox spirit has never appeared again. In the subsequent imperial examination, Guo Sheng took a fourth class and two fifth grades, which made him understand that the fox spirit had already placed the omen in the black bars it had drawn.
Complacency will only invite loss, but modesty can benefit for life, which is an eternal and unchangeable truth. Guo Shengcai was a little famous, so he was self-righteous, holding the articles of Ye Gong and others, only copying and imitating without knowing innovation, so that he failed in the imperial examination. Pride and complacency are huge stumbling blocks on the road to success.