Antique book conservator Shang Zhaoyin takes on an unnamed, incomplete manuscript. The pages have no title or preface, only a line that appears whenever they are exposed to moisture and vanishes again in an instant: “Not Recorded in Dream Pool.”
When he restores the first name on a fragment, a corresponding record vanishes out of thin air from an archive in the present day. To stop the entire book from continuing to “eat words,” Shang Zhaoyin follows ink stains flowing upstream into Runzhou in the third year of Yuanyou in the Northern Song, becoming a man who should not exist in the government registers.
At this time, Shen Kuo has retired to Dream Pool Garden, and the notes that will illuminate a thousand years have yet to be completed. A seemingly ordinary case of forged warehouse receipts is quietly stripping river charts, astronomical manuscripts, medical prescriptions, artisans’ techniques, and the names of countless common people from the page. Gu Tingshuang, who keeps watch over her father’s old bookshop, believes that history books may record one fewer official, but they cannot make an entire city’s means of survival disappear. The two begin with the sodden warehouse records, pursuing the truth among the backs of pages, layers of ink, and scraped-away names.
They gradually realize that entering an ancient book is not about rewriting history for the people of the past. It is about preserving the possibility of being seen for those who once lived, labored, and made choices.
