Historical records: "In the winter of October of the 29th year of Longwu, the Fucang River broke out and 50,000 dwellings were floated." Behind the historian Mo Hen is a life-and-death game that uses the river as a chessboard and the truth as a bet.
She is the last water mapper on the Fucang River, and she is in charge of a sheepskin painting that is half a day slower than the real thing. A slight change in the drawing can change the course of the ship; a wrong stroke in writing can cause a flood to come back. He is a censor sent by the emperor to patrol the river, and he carries a hundred pages of blank notebooks. If you write a crime and have no official custody for three days, you will be arrested in Dongchang and other provinces; when the page is finished, it is also the day when the black veil falls.
On a night when the battle on the river embankment was pending, she wanted to save the people by changing the route, but she had to lure him into the trap first; he wanted to stay alive, but he had to wait until she was convicted. Under the undercurrent, the salt merchant holds explosive seals, the chief keeper hides the secret information of the Ministry of Industry, and the general keeper of the bandits is self-respecting - each holds a "one-time truth" that can overturn the situation, and they are all waiting for the most self-interested opportunity to detonate.
When the errors on the parchment opened the cracks in history, when the red seal of the river patrol was imprinted with the final number, and behind the 50,000 souls floating away, who drew the waterline that changed life and death in the blank space of the history annals? All the truth is waiting to be revealed in the turbulent floods of the 29th year of Longwu.
Purpose: History is written by survivors, but the truth is made up of the silent. The protagonists have exhausted their wisdom and courage, but they are just playing on a drawing that is lagging and constantly changing. Their victory or defeat will eventually be washed away, revised or swallowed up by larger, ruthless historical trends. This intertwining of powerlessness and resistance constitutes the saddest background of the story. --- While appreciating the precise game, readers can't help but reflect: In the history we read today, behind every number and conclusion, how many helpless choices and silent annihilations were there?