In the second year of Yuanfeng, a map was brought under guard into the court of the Court of Judicial Review.
The map showed a river the authorities refused to acknowledge and a village absent from the official gazetteers. The courier who brought it to the capital died outside the Vermilion Bird Gate, leaving behind only half a sentence: The map is not wrong. The world is.
Lin Shenwei, a copyist in the Imperial Library, was ordered to examine the map. He could remember every road he had ever traveled, yet the government’s household registers listed no place of origin for him. As he investigated, he discovered that on rainy nights, strange ink surfaced between the pages of an old secret-archive copy of the Commentary on the Water Classic. Every road, city, and name erased from official documents was hidden beyond the margins of the ancient text.
Yuan, a female guide from the ancient Fangcheng Road, brought three hundred and twelve thumbprints and claimed that deep in the mountains stood a village that paid taxes and performed labor service, yet had never been marked on any map. To restore the names of these “people beyond the registers” and discover where he himself came from, Lin Shenwei left Dongjing and headed south along ancient rivers, old postal routes, and abandoned passes.
But he soon realized that someone had erased a village not to conceal three hundred lives, but to secretly carve an unknown road through the mountains and rivers of the Great Song.
