In the third year of Yuanyou, Bianjing is lined with bookshops. Xin Qichi runs a book repair shop left to him by his father, mending pages and restoring bindings for others, and laying to rest old books no one else is willing to hear out.
He has a craft he dares not reveal: by bringing clear water, old paper, and lamplight together, he can see the "shadows of books" between damaged lines. These are no supernatural visions, but the hesitation of the hand that wrote them, the sighs of readers, and the lives once illuminated by a page as it was hidden away.
A ledger for a granary, which should have been blank, begins to sprout lines of ink, one page at a time, in the rain. A flood from twenty years ago, casually glossed over; a laborer erased from the register; a scheme to seize land with the help of an ancient book: all return to Bianjing through the cracks in the paper. Xin Qichi discovers that his father did not die by accident. He left behind the final collation note for a book that was never entered into the archives.
From the scattered pages of Miscellaneous Notes on Rivers and Canals, to the vanished Record of Old Tales, and then to a space deliberately scraped away from the Great Song's catalog of books, Xin Qichi has never been trying merely to repair books. He wants the names that were erased to return to the page, and to the world of the living.
