In the eleventh year of Shaoxing, the Song and Jin peace talks were about to be concluded, and Lin'an Mansion sentenced a book to "death".
It does not remember emperors and generals, but only the depth of rivers, the profit and loss of warehouses, missing villages, and every person who should not be forgotten in troubled times. Some people were afraid that it would be alive, so they cut out the words, destroyed the editions, and boiled the paper into pulp; some people tried their best to hide a leaf, leaving the truth to the ancient book restorer Que Wenzhou more than 800 years later.
When Que Wenzhou repaired the broken pages, he did not become a prince, nor did he fall into the status written in history. He walked into the missing page of the ancient book and became an "undocumented guest" with no household registration and no name in Lin'an City in the Southern Song Dynasty. What's even more dangerous is that he soon discovered that proofreading was not insignificant in this book. A correct word can bring buried evidence to light; a wrong word can cause a river to change its course and a city to die.
The female engraver Wu Xiang carves names for the dead, the cold-faced inspector Chi Guanlan pursues the case of no corpse, and the old bookseller Cao Buqi guards a bookshop that will be burned down. Que Wenzhou and them used paper as armor and ink as evidence to trace a complete "Xining Yu Cheng Lu" among the shadows of powerful officials and the cracks in the mountains and rivers.
But when the lost pages of the book were gradually restored, he saw the line that should not have appeared: Eight hundred years ago, someone already knew that he would come.
