At 2:17 in the morning, Xi Yanbai, an ancient book restorer, discovered that a page of the Northern Song Dynasty official engraving "Shang Shu Yu Gong" was flooding.
The water only covered the paper, not the tabletop; but the sand poured out from the heart of the page that was written thousands of years ago. In order to save the original copy, he uncovered a patch of paper from later generations and stood on the old path of the Yellow River in the seventh year of Xuanhe's reign. Here in Heyin County, a "Baima New River" appeared out of thin air, and 304 households disappeared from the books: fields were written as rivers, living people were written as refugees, and even the dead were not qualified to leave their names.
Xi Yanbai didn't know how to make salt or steel, nor could he recite the entire history of the Song Dynasty. All he could rely on were paper, ink, editions, maps, and the eyes he had developed over many years of book editing. After teaming up with Ye Chaojin, a female school clerk who copied the petition for someone else, he followed a tampered water line into the river engineering, water transportation and Bianjing authority bureaus, but gradually discovered that the people who altered ancient books did not only live in the Northern Song Dynasty.
Some people steal the answers from the annotations of later generations, and some people bury falsehoods in the blank spaces of history. Every time a deleted name was rescued, an additional line of never-before-seen text appeared in the ancient books in reality; and Xi Yanbai's own name also began to fade from modern archives.
Mountains and rivers can be painted wrongly, but a person's life cannot be regarded as just a painting.
