Lin Xiaoman's twenty-nine years is made up of the twenty-seven drafts he was reprimanded by the editor, the shirt that got tangled on the clothesline, and the seventeen seconds of drunken conversation that he mistakenly dialed at a convenience store.
Until the man dyed with Dunhuang paint broke into her summer - Gu Huaizhou, a cultural relic restorer who used mathematical formulas to calculate the distance between clothes, used Buddhist scriptures as painkillers, and fed stray cats late at night. Every fold on his shirt hides the secret of the thousand-year-old mural, but he cannot repair the wound on his shoulder that has been eroded by time.
From the collection of poems being competed for in second-hand bookstores, to the clothesline swinging on the balcony of the old house; from the misplaced umbrella in the rainstorm, to the trembling handwriting on the medical record. They fell into the cracks in each other's lives, like restorers treating broken pottery, using trivial mornings and evenings, unsent love letters, and teacups broken during arguments to fill the colors peeled off by the years bit by bit.
When the white hair climbed up to his temples, Lin Xiaoman finally understood the final romance in his will: "Please use my ashes to mix with Dunhuang mud to fill in all the gaps in the rest of your life."
Motto: The rest of my life is long