Synopsis of "Spring Deep in the Ink Pages"
Su Yan, a nationally recognized inheritor of the traditional craft of restoring ancient books, stayed up for three days and nights to finish repairing the long-lost Song Dynasty edition of "Secrets of Embroidery". When she opened her eyes, she had become a low-ranking concubine in the Great Yong palace, someone who had just been pushed into the imperial lake and drowned.
While the other palace women saved up to buy rouge and practiced dancing to win the emperor’s favor, she crouched in a side hall sorting through old books so moldy they had sprouted mushrooms. The book-mounting and repair skills she had honed for ten years, engraved into her very bones, first restored the late emperor’s crumbling letters to pristine condition and caught the emperor’s attention. Then she used her ability to identify ink and detect forgeries to expose a plot by the empress’s relatives to frame loyal officials. She even solved, with a homemade paste recipe of her own invention, the centuries-old problem of bookworms eating away at the imperial library.
The Noble Consort mocked her as a fool who only knew how to deal with scraps of paper. The Empress Dowager praised her as the most clear-eyed girl in the palace. Even the emperor, usually cold and indifferent, gradually realized that everyone in the harem was watching for his favor, while Su Yan’s eyes were always fixed on the pile of ancient pages she had yet to mend.
Later, the great families fell and the position of empress stood vacant. Everyone expected her to take the throne of the inner palace, but Su Yan simply submitted a memorial: “I won’t be empress. I want to establish the Literary Institute and restore the lost books scattered across the realm.”
In the end, the Great Yong histories did not include her in the biographies of imperial consorts. Instead, scholars throughout the land respectfully called her Master Su. Rather than remain trapped in the harem as an appendage to the emperor, she chose to become a beacon illuminating Great Yong’s literary heritage.
A time-traveling palace battle novel, pretty good