In Bianjing during the Xuanhe period, the peach blossoms beside Jinming Pond were in full bloom. Ni Quan, the son of an aristocratic family, accidentally rescued an old Confucian who was in dire straits at the Xiangguo Temple Market and received as a gift a torn manuscript of poems inscribed with the word "Shu Yu". He didn't know that this graceful text imbued with female talent would become the ignition of civilization inheritance in troubled times. As the Jin soldiers marched southward, Ni Quan took his manuscripts with him and made the acquaintance of bibliophile Zhao Mingcheng, hermit Zhu Dunru and other figures on the way, and gradually realized the cultural weight behind his manuscripts that transcended personal joys and sorrows. From Bianjing to Jiangning, from Lin'an to Wuzhou, a series of clear, beautiful and profound words and phrases have become the cultural context connecting the broken mountains and rivers. Ni Quan discovered that the real "legacy" is not in the paper, but in the tunes sung by the old women in the teahouses, in the fragments written silently by the fleeing scholars, and in the ordinary people who still insist on "living elegantly" in desperate situations. This novel will use more than 73% of the dialogue to humorously and solemnly tell a story about how civilization survives the hardest times in the softest way.
