In the fifth year of Xining in the Northern Song, a mysterious remnant gazetteer from Longyou is publicly burned in Bianjing’s old book market. Ash drifts west against the wind, and only Yu Zhiwei, a “book doctor” at the Secret Pavilion, can see the words in the flames escaping stroke by stroke.
He uses scraps to mend the book, but falls through the repaired pages into the past preserved within its leaves. There he finds courier riders erased by court historians, rivers that vanished into seas of sand, and a city that exists only in incorrect records. Each character he restores correctly returns a piece of the truth; each one he gets wrong alters the mountains and rivers known to later generations. And the price of entering the world inside the book is Yu Zhiwei’s own memories.
As war in the Xihe region approaches, the court, booksellers, and visitors from the western frontier are all searching for the ancient waterways and roads recorded in the manuscript. Forced to travel together, Yu Zhiwei and Lian Xiang, from a family of book collectors in Shazhou, journey from the Secret Pavilion in Bianjing to the passes and rivers of Qin and Long, tracing the same erased place-name through one ancient book after another. Gradually, they discover that what is truly being fought over is not a border map, but the power to write on behalf of the whole realm.
Thousands of volumes are incomplete, and the mountains and rivers have no voice. Some would use a single character to conceal a century; others are willing to spend a lifetime restoring the names of the forgotten.
