In the second year of the Jiaxi era of the Southern Song dynasty, rain swells the waters around Lin’an. Book-restoration artisan Ying Heng enters the city carrying an old book box left by his late father. He only hopes to secure a job repairing damaged books in the Secret Archives, so he can buy back the signboard from his hometown bookstore, which is about to be sold off to cover its debts.
But in the worm-eaten layers of a Tang-era volume titled Old Notes on Mountains and Rivers, he discovers an ink line never recorded in the history books. At its end lie an abandoned relay station, a proofreader who never made it home, and a piece of territory cut from the map of the realm.
Missing volumes from the Secret Archives, rampant forgeries, and an old case reopened. Following the grain of paper, the color of ink, and annotations in books, Ying Heng joins female historian Shen Hengwu and investigator Xie Xuan as they uncover the hidden doors left behind by generations of book guardians. With every fragmentary scroll he restores, another forgotten story awakens between the lines. All the clues point to a name his father refused to utter before he died, and to a book that has never seen the light of day: The Record of Hidden Volumes of Mountains and Rivers.
He gradually understands that books cannot rewrite the past for people, but they can preserve proof of the nameless. Beyond the volumes lie the mountains and rivers; beyond them, the eyes of those yet to come.
