Cen Yanwei has revised countless ancient books and knows that the paper will age and the ink will fade. Only the deleted words are the most difficult to bury.
During an ancient book restoration case, he discovered a river that did not belong to any era in the interlayer of a fragment of a Northern Song Dynasty book. The river flowed out from the cracks in the paper, brought him to Bianliang during the Qingli period, and turned him into a school clerk on the roster of Chongwen Academy who should not exist.
Here, the pages of the book will leave human fingerprints, and the lost hydraulic engineering diagrams are hidden in the lines of poetry. What the court wants to investigate is not a case of corruption of ink, but the truth about a period of disaster that was excavated from the history books. Cen Yanwei must find the eight missing pages of records between the breach of the Bianhe River, rumors on the border, and a burning operation targeting ancient books.
But with every page he adds, his name in this world fades away; when the last page returns, will he be able to go back with the truth, or will he become a person who has never been recorded in ancient books?
