A Quiet Retreat

Twenty volumes of the main text, a desk piled high with unfinished manuscripts, all compiled into this book. At last, I have given Cunxin Studio an answer.

It is said that just outside Jing'an City stood a little cottage with no signboard or plaque, only a few baskets of old books drying beneath the eaves. Its owner, Shen Yan, neither sought fame nor pursued profit. He spent every day doing just one thing: keeping accounts for the people of the world. Not accounts of money or farmland, but of the names later generations had entirely forgotten: who had written a petition for whom, who had taken a blade for whom, and who had died still clutching words they had never had the chance to say.

As a flourishing age neared its end, it was not the people who had rotted, but the layers of rules everyone lived by. A single character in the Confucian classics was quietly changed, the blade held by an eminent family changed hands, and the ledgers were calculated so flawlessly that justice vanished from the world. Those who held fast to the truth were called heretics, while those who lied rose higher with every step. Ask whose fault it was, and it turned out no one was at fault. Everyone was simply doing their duty, yet the world grew more corrupt by the day.

There are princes and nobles, generals and ministers, peddlers and laborers, writers and book burners in these pages. All a humble scholar can protect is one cottage, a few incomplete manuscripts, and a brazier. Here, one character at a time, he records the grievances left unspoken in this world. Shen Yan often tells visitors,