Qiao Jibai, a restorer of ancient books, receives a fragment of a Northern Song manuscript with no known provenance. It records the waterways of Bianjing, but twelve pages have been neatly cut out. At the bottom of a page, only half a sentence remains: **"After the waters recede, the names must not."**
While restoring a smudged ink mark, he hears the sound of a page turning from the other side of the paper. When he opens his eyes, he is in the Chongwen Institute during the Daguang era of the Northern Song, a copyist without even a name on the registers. The female historian Mu Qingwu is investigating a map of the waterways that was cut out of official records. The elderly copyist Ruan Zhiheng guards a volume of The Old Records of Hebei that no one dares to read, while the institute's director, Pei Jian, seems to have known all along that this book would return from the future.
Qiao Jibai soon discovers that the manuscript is no mere record of history. It is a city of books, hiding the people and events that have been erased. Every page he restores brings another impossible fragment of the past to Bianjing; every typo he corrects causes something in the world beyond the book to vanish.
Before the ancient book falls completely to pieces, he must find the twelve missing pages and discover who wrote a flood down as an auspicious sign, and who erased the names of hundreds and thousands of ordinary people from history. But when his own name appears on the final page, Qiao Jibai finally understands: those who enter ancient books have never been mere readers.
The story is grounded in the bookshops, government granaries, waterways, and palace city of Northern Song Bianjing, while missing pages, typos, and editorial notes in ancient books open the door to fantasy. It is a historical adventure about memory, power, and the names of ordinary people. The main story can extend to 300,000 characters, with later arcs set in the world of bookshops, along the Yellow River, in the book-printing towns of Jiangnan, and in a "second round of proofreading" after the story returns to modern times.
