Since the Great Yu split a jade disc while taming the floods, Ye Xuan has borne the mandate of heaven, wandering through the cracks in five thousand years of history. He saves Bi Gan, leaving behind **seven coins of benevolence** as proof of the Shang dynasty's decay; helps Sima Qian preserve **bamboo slips from the blood prison** to record the Xiongnu's secret history; and even mixes meteorite dust with a hallucinogenic drug into the tattoo of “loyalty” on Yue Fei's back, planting the seeds of a tragic fate. The Tushan woman Xiwei follows him like a shadow: she takes rubbings of the *Classic of Mountains and Seas* hidden in the bricks of Epang Palace, verifies the dragon-scale list of regicides on the wordless stele, and deciphers the African ceramic-patterned sea chart aboard Zheng He's treasure ships. Through the written record, she traces Ye Xuan's footsteps across time.
Ye Xuan intervenes in history with a strange sense of humor. He gives Li Bai a magnetic levitation wine pot to fish the Sui Emperor Yang's sunken silver mirror from the water, only for the drunken poet to recite, “Do you not see the Yellow River's waters descending from the sky?” He advises Du Fu to turn his thatched cottage into a bed-and-breakfast, only to end up in *The Thatched Roof Torn Away by the Autumn Wind*. The marks on the jade disc grow denser with each passing century: **rites in collapse** (Zhou), **women's rights** (Tang), **greed and delusion** (Ming)... When the marks reach ninety-nine, the salt pillars by the Humen Opium Destruction Pool crystallize into Lin Zexu's tearful remonstrance (Chapter 98). At last, Ye Xuan gathers the glimmers of humanity needed to mend the heavens.
