Yu Zhen had spent his whole life restoring old papers left behind by others. He knew better than anyone that when a page of a book is destroyed, it is not just a few lines that disappear.
An anonymous Song dynasty manuscript was brought into the restoration room. On its pages were Bianjing's streets, washed away by water; account books never recorded in the histories; and a sentence that changed every day: "Proofreader Yu Zhen, died in the winter of the third year of Qingli."
When he touched the damaged page, he opened his eyes in the winter rain of Dongjing, the capital of the Great Song, and found himself a lowly proofreader in the Palace Library, without rank or status. Here, Fan Zhongyan had just submitted his memorial, "Ten Matters in Reply to the Emperor's Edict"; Ouyang Xiu was still campaigning against accusations of factionalism; and the grain ships on the Bian River had yet to be locked in by ice. Meanwhile, someone was altering the famine-relief grain ledgers, making the names of countless ordinary people vanish before the first snow.
Ancient books cannot simply be rewritten at will. Every stroke he added made the paper in the real world a little thinner; every name he saved gave rise to a new blank space in the book.
Yu Zhen did not want to be the one writing history. He only wanted to protect those who had never been remembered by the great men, but had lived just as earnestly, until, amid the watch drums sounding through the city and the rustle of turning scrolls, he could recover the true lost ending of an ancient book.
