When Yan Yanchi was sorting out the last batch of books for an ancient book restoration institute that was about to close, he received a fragment of a Northern Song Dynasty book of unknown origin.
There is no title on the title page, but the sound of tide is hidden on the back of the paper. Under the repair lamp, a line of ink words slowly appeared on the originally blank seventh leaf: September 17, the second year of Qingli, the schoolmaster Yan Yan entered the volume late.
He thought it was a prank until the camera couldn't capture the words, and there was an extra corridor in the warehouse leading to the rainy night. When he woke up again, he was already in Kaifeng in the first year of Qingli, and became an unknown scholar in Tianzhang Pavilion who should have died of illness ten years ago.
The Northern Song Dynasty did not immediately change with his arrival. What really changed him was that the fragment was recording something that should not be recorded: there would be a "natural disaster" in the Northwest Qingqu, seven thousand stones of military rations would sink to the bottom, tens of thousands of refugees would be pushed to the edge of war, and official history books would attribute everything to abnormal rain.
To return to the future, Yan Yanchi must first find the missing three leaves of the fragment; to make the fragment complete, he must walk through the deleted places with his own eyes. There is history in books, and there are people outside history. Every time a page is added, an unknown person regains his name; every time a place is changed, there is an unpredictable crack in the rivers and mountains that will be known to future generations.
This is a story about ancient books, rivers and mountains, and testimony. It does not treat history as a piece of paper that can be modified at will, but returns every stroke to the people who actually lived.
