The Craftsman's Soul Across the Ages

Synopsis of Craftsmanship Across the Ages

Lin Yanci never imagined that being reborn after an accident at a ceramics factory would make him the inheritor of the six great artisan families of the late Qing Dynasty. The moment his palm touched a ceramic tool left behind by his ancestors, memories surged into his mind: the Lin family's porcelain glaze formulas, the Su family's brocade-weaving techniques, and the Chen family's secrets for crafting mortise-and-tenon joints.

At eight, he crouched in his grandfather's pottery workshop and recreated a long-lost “ice-crackle” ceramic shard from memory. The villagers dismissed it as a child messing around. As a teenager, he helped Su Qingyuan, a new transfer student, sort through her ancestors' account books. There he stumbled on half a page marked with an unfamiliar pattern. The sudden pallor on Grandma Su's face when she saw it became the first mystery to haunt him. After failing the college entrance exams, he went to work at a ceramics factory, where his master undermined him and the boss skimmed his wages. All he could do was secretly improve the techniques at night using his memories from another era. He didn't know that a pair of covetous eyes was already watching him: Zhao Tianlei, the owner of a tech company who kept asking about his craft under the guise of “collaboration.” His ancestor was Shen Jing'an, an apprentice who had stolen the Lin family's glaze formula and caused the decline of all six artisan families.

The night a typhoon destroyed the factory, he and his coworkers used a late Qing-era “reinforced wooden frame” method to save the equipment. Su Qingyuan braved the rain to contact the media, and the story of “old craftsmanship saving the day” spread throughout the city. That same night, he finally saw the worry and determination in Su Qingyuan's eyes. The two, once childhood partners in exploring patterns, became lovers who could weather any storm together. After marrying and having a child, they used their savings to open a small workshop, specializing in innovative products that combined “ceramics inlaid with silk.” But when his younger brother Lin Yanfeng rushed to bring in