In the second year of Jiaxi in the Southern Song Dynasty, it rained heavily in Lin'an. Book restorer Ying Heng brought an old book box left behind by his late father into the city. He just wanted to find a job copying damaged books in the secret pavilion in exchange for the signboard of his hometown bookstore that would be put up for sale.
But in the moth-eaten layers of a Tang Dynasty volume of "Old Notes on Mountains and Rivers", he read an ink line that had never been written into history books. At the end of the black line there is a long-abandoned inn, a school clerk who failed to return home, and a page of rivers and mountains that were cut out of the world map.
Secret documents are lost, fake copies are rampant, and old cases are reopened. Ying Heng, the female historian Shen Hengwu, and the prosecutor Xie Hu followed the paper pattern, ink color and annotations in the book and entered the secret door left by generations of bookkeepers. Every time a fragment of a book is restored, a forgotten personal story emerges from the cracks in the words; and all clues point to the name that my father refused to say before his death, as well as a book that has never appeared: "The Records of Mountains and Rivers."
He gradually understood: Books cannot rewrite the past for people, but they can leave proof for the unknown. Beyond the walls, there are mountains and rivers; beyond the mountains and rivers, there are still the eyes of later generations.
