Wen Yansheng, an ancient book restorer, took over an unmarked and incomplete volume. The title of the book has peeled off, leaving only half of the sentence "Rivers and Mountains Shine at Night" on the cover, but the seventh leaf has been completely removed from the spine. The donor left the only instruction: do not fill in that page.
Wen Yansheng thought it was a hoax by the collector, until the paste formed a river on the back of the paper that had not yet dried up. At the end of the river is written the name of a strange Song Dynasty person, the ink color looks like it has just been taken out of an inkstone. Whenever he aligns the broken pages with restoration methods, he can walk along the Bianhe River in the fourth year of Yuanyou through the paper seams, and see people who were not left behind by the official history: the female historian who copied the river map, the river worker who measured the embankment, and the boat households who guarded the lantern book and waited for the return of their relatives.
That ancient book is not a door to the past, but an archive waiting to be completed. What was deleted from the seventh leaf were the names of hundreds of river workers who suffered a flood. In order to cover up a mistake in the river map, some people used the hands of the government to modify the records; others believed that only by erasing the names could the world avoid accountability. Wen Yansheng must retrieve the evidence scattered in different pages without disturbing the history.
As the restoration progressed, he discovered that the third type of handwriting on the ancient book was actually the same as his own. The old collector of the modern restoration office who never wanted to show up seemed to have known for a long time that "Zhaoye Heshan" would reopen in his hands. Outside the pages of the book, there is a group of people guarding the blank space; within the pages of the book, there is a group of people waiting to be remembered. What Wen Yansheng ultimately wants to answer is not whether he can change history, but whether he is willing to keep the light for the truth when it can only be left in a line of small words.
