Shen Yan, an ancient calligraphy restorer at the Yunzhuan City Intangible Cultural Heritage Digital Museum, works with oracle bones, bamboo slips, silk books and faded ink marks day after day. He thought he was just a craftsman who was "prolonging the life" of ancient civilizations in the digital age, until that afternoon when the sun and rain poured down - on a batch of newly unearthed "Cangjie character bone" rubbings, he scanned out a line of hollow lines that did not belong to any known font at all. From the untrustworthy village where the word "trust" has been erased, to the fire of traffic that burns out the word "responsibility"; from Bai Ze's guidance in the world, to the closed loop of time when Zhulong closes his eyes - Shen Yan peels off the sugar-coating of myth in the copies of rules and weird stories again and again, and what he sees is the reflection of the current society: the human heart alienated by traffic, memories cropped by algorithms, and individual responsibilities that are easily shirked. And when he finally stood in front of the scale that weighed civilization, and was promised omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality beyond a red line, he had to make a choice: sit in that position and never feel pain again; or retreat to the human side and become an ordinary person with flesh and blood, who can get hungry, age, suffer pain, and die? This is a decryption of civilization based on Chinese characters, and it is also a modern inquiry about "why we write, what should we remember, and who should be responsible."
