Cen Yanchuan, an ancient book restorer, has an almost harsh rule: restoration can only make up the paper, but not the words of the ancients.
During a routine restoration, he took over a fragment unearthed from the ruins of an old waterway in Qinzhou. The name of the volume, the author, and the year were all blurred by water, except for a line of small characters that was unusually clear - "If future generations see Cen Yanchuan, please do not fill this gap."
He didn't make up for it. But that night, the cinnabar seeping out of the missing pages was like a half-open door, sending him into Qinzhou in the ninth year of Xining. It was raining heavily there, and the river embankment outside the city was about to collapse. The new laws of the court and the military supplies in the border areas were entangled into an invisible web; and the fragment of the scroll was not a book recording the past, but a "living history" that would change with every comment he made.
Cen Yanchuan can only walk on the back of the paper as a school editor. He cannot directly change the facts written in black ink. Every time he adds a red mark, he will lose a piece of his own memory. If the fragment is left intact, the people in the book may survive, but the history of future generations may be completely rewritten.
From the water gate in Qinzhou to the post road in Hexi, from a changed copper seal to a flood that should not have happened, he gradually discovered that what the fragments really wanted to preserve was not the fame of a certain hero, but the choices made by ordinary people before the mountains and rivers collapsed. Some people want to destroy this book, because he who controls the river may not control the world, but he who controls the words that record the river can.
When the last page opens, Cen Yanchuan must answer a question: To repair history, should we restore it to its original state, or should we admit that those who were erased should have been written in it?
