Cen Yanwei has restored countless ancient books. He knows that paper grows old and ink fades, but the hardest words to lay to rest are the ones that have been erased.
After completing the restoration of an ancient text, he discovers, in the lining of a damaged Northern Song manuscript, a river that belongs to no era. It flows out through a seam in the paper, carrying him to Bianjing during the Qingli reign and turning him into a low-ranking proofreader listed at the Chongwen Institute, a man who should never have existed.
Here, pages retain people's fingerprints, lost hydraulic diagrams are hidden in the rhythms of poems, and the court is investigating not a case of embezzlement but the truth about a year of disaster, excised from the history books. Between a breach in the Bian River, rumors of trouble on the frontier, and a campaign to burn ancient texts, Cen Yanwei must recover the eight missing pages of the record.
But with every page he restores, his name in the present grows fainter. When the final page is returned to its place, will he be able to go back with the truth, or will he become someone who was never recorded in the ancient books?
