"What was going on?"
Zi Shou had assumed that Queen Jiang, virtuous and capable as she was, would surely keep everything stable after he left Chaoge. He did not expect her to earn him any foolishness value, but at least he should have been able to pass a few peaceful months.
He had never expected this. Never!
Zi Shou tossed the newspaper onto the desk. He simply could not understand it.
The characters in the newspaper had been simplified. Although they were not as simple as the simplified characters of later ages, they were far more concise than before. At a glance, he could recognize seventy or eighty percent of them, and every stroke followed a standard.
There were no longer different scripts for the east, west, north, and south. They were all the same.
Even more astonishingly, as Zi Shou investigated further, he discovered that his ability to recognize most of them at a glance was not because he was a transmigrator familiar with simplified characters. Everyone could do it.
It was as though some unseen force were at work. Nearly anyone who saw these characters could recognize them, and they left a deep impression. After seeing them a few times, people could write them down. As long as someone had no intellectual impairment, writing words and forming sentences posed no problem.
Zi Shou had been dumbfounded. At this rate, would universal literacy not be easy?
Queen Jiang was baffled by his question. "Why do you say that, Your Majesty? I sent you a memorial long ago. Did you perhaps not read it?"
Zi Shou: "..."
He really had not read it.
Even after the disaster in which his failure to read a memorial promptly had led to the King of Yue pledging allegiance, he still could not be