The Ferryman of Time's Folds

My new work is here! You’re welcome to read it on Tomato Novel. I hope you enjoy it. Your support keeps me writing, and I’ll do my best to tell every story well! Story synopsis:

Lin Yan, a 32-year-old restorer of ancient books, accidentally touches the gilded pattern between the pages while restoring a rare Tang dynasty manuscript. She falls into a “fold in time,” an in-between space suspended between reality and the past, where countless fragments of souls remain stranded, unable to return because their “unfulfilled obsessions” still bind them.

She discovers that she is the only “ferryman” able to travel between the fold and reality. Whenever she restores an old object imbued with a powerful obsession, she can awaken the memories of a soul fragment and help it resolve its fixation so it can return to its proper place. Meanwhile, the related “regrettable events” in the real world quietly right themselves.

Just as Lin Yan is getting used to her role as a ferryman, she receives a special assignment: restoring a silver pocket watch from the Republican era. The soul fragment belonging to its owner turns out to be that of her grandmother, who died young. The fragments of memory reveal that her grandmother did not die in an accident. While trying to protect a manuscript documenting a family secret, she was caught up in an antiquities smuggling case in the 1940s. Even more astonishingly, the manuscript conceals the origin of the “fold in time.” Now a mysterious organization is trying to control time and rewrite history by plundering old objects and devouring soul fragments.

As Lin Yan searches for scattered pages of the manuscript in the real world and evades the mysterious organization’s pursuit, she pieces together her grandmother’s memories in the fold in time, uncovering her family’s connection to it. Along the way, she meets someone else trapped in the fold, who possesses the ability to foresee