In the fourteenth year of Chongzhen, the snow in She County was colder than in previous years. The down-and-out scholar Lu Zhaoyuan had already given up writing and making a living relying on his ancestral ink-making skills. He was once a talented scholar in the county school, but after failing in the examination room, he became a craftsman tinkering with pine cigarettes. He exchanged the poor pine cigarette ink for a few buckets of brown rice to support his wife and children.
The "Sapphire Case" passed down from his family. Mo was once famous all over the south of the Yangtze River, but his family life fell into dust. When upstart Zhang Dahu came to the door with fifty taels of silver and asked him to remake the "Sapphire Case" to gild the ancestral hall, Lu Zhaoyuan hesitated - it was a vulgar thing he despised and a trampling on the integrity of the literati. But looking at the empty rice jar and his son's frozen hands, he finally took the money.
In the smoky workshop, he poured humiliation, unwillingness and the skills of his ancestors into ink. The pine smoke needs to be refined for seventy-seven forty-nine days, the pearl powder needs to be crushed until it makes no sound, and the strongest musk needs to be taken. He thought this was a compromise with reality, but he didn't know that the picture "Li Sao" on the ink ink had already been engraved on his blood and bones.
When the county magistrate Feng Cheng wrote the four words "The character remains" with his own ink, Lu Zhaoyuan suddenly understood: true craftsmanship never compromises for vulgar things, only the human heart. And what he maintained in troubled times was not only an ancient method of making ink, but also the last line of defense built by a scholar with the fragrance of ink in a collapsing world - to protect his wife and children, preserve his cultural heritage, and let the dim light of the "Sapphire Case" shine for a moment longer in the cold night.
