When Xi Yanqiu, an ancient book restorer, was restoring a Southern Song Dynasty edition, he uncovered a fragment of a page that did not belong to the book from the cover.
There are no inscriptions by famous writers or lost secrets on the remaining pages, only a half-written confession. What's even weirder is that the ink stains from 890 years ago are still growing slowly between the paper fibers:
"Moutuogang has 30,000 military horses. They are all in the accounts, but there is not a single one in the stalls."
The signer, Ruan Shenyan, was an unknown official in the Jigeku in the 7th year of Xuanhe in the Northern Song Dynasty. He sought verification from future generations through the broken pages, and every restoration annotation written by Xi Yanqiu would become a part of what really happened in his era.
The Jin army moved south, Yanyun fell, and Bianjing fell. Xi Yanqiu originally thought that she could rewrite history based on what later generations knew, but she soon discovered that this ancient book allowed her to fill in the gaps, but not to make things up; it allowed her to save people who had been erased, but it did not allow her to create a peaceful and prosperous age out of thin air. Every time she adds a key name, she will lose a piece of her own memory.
When she actually walked into Bianjing in the seventh year of Xuanhe, she realized that the person the broken page was asking for help was not just one person, but a group of people who had never been remembered by official history. Some people are deleting history, some are trying to make a fortune from the ruin of the country, and some people want future generations to always believe that no one warned, no one resisted, and no one was responsible for this disaster.
A page can contain a city, and a word can kill a person.
This time, what she repaired was not an ancient book, but a human world that had been deliberately torn off.
