Wen Renyan, an ancient book restorer, took over a fragmented scroll with no origin.
The title of the volume is "The Golden Chamber at Night". The color of the paper is like old snow, but the ink lines look like they have just dried. There is only one sentence in the repair notes left by my grandfather: Don't complete the last page of it.
That night, the sound of water suddenly leaked out from the missing characters under the repair lamp. Wen Ren's inkstone followed the sound of water and turned into the scroll, and landed in Bianjing City in the seventh year of Xining in the Northern Song Dynasty. He became an undocumented school clerk in the Secret Pavilion. Everyone in the city remembers a different past, except for a fire that should have gone down in history, but is being erased one by one.
He discovered that ancient books are not static paper, but a breathing city. The deleted words will become nameless people; the rewritten year will cause the river to change its course; and every time he corrects an error, he will have to bear the real consequences for the people in the book.
Accompanying him is the girl's school book Shen Jiuzhao who is in charge of the "missing page". She knew every secret door in the volume, but she never refused to tell where she came from. The beacon fires on the border, the bursting of canals, and the night sailing of ships, the mountains and rivers of eight hundred years ago are unfolded one after another in the remaining pages. Wen Renyan gradually understood that his grandfather had also entered this book and left his name on the last page.
Some people want to burn all unsatisfactory records so that there is only one "correct" history book left in the world; some people would rather history will always bear scars than let living people be written as footnotes.
When the Zhaoye Golden Chamber is closed again, Wen Renyan must choose: restore everything to the original manuscript that no one can question, or write those people who should not be seen into the true origin of the mountains and rivers.
