The Great Ming's Good-for-Nothing Tanhua

A joke has been making the rounds in Jinling City: whenever the Yangtze River floods, all it would take is throwing the Duke of Cao, Li Jinglong, and the young Tanhua Fang into the water together—their combined worthlessness would surely plug up the river channel. After all, the two of them are widely regarded as the biggest good-for-nothings in the realm. Fang Jing himself doesn't take much offense at the joke. Well, aside from the nickname "Little Tanhua Fang," which strikes him as rather odd—it sounds like the kind of title that might get him arrested. But what can he do? He is, after all, the Tanhua (third place in the imperial examinations) personally appointed by Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang himself... even if his actual scholarship might not even measure up to a lowly tongsheng, the most basic rank of examination candidate. Li Jinglong, on the other hand, is absolutely livid at the comparison: "All I did was lose an army of five hundred thousand men! Why should I be mentioned in the same breath as that good-for-nothing?!"