Shen Heng, an ancient book restorer in the 21st century, spent seven years restoring the fragments of the Southern Song Dynasty's "Jinyulu". However, when deciphering the last secret text, he traveled to Lin'an City in the third year of Jiading. At that time, Xie Zhao, the official who was guilty of "collaborating with the enemy and treason" in the history books, had not yet been sentenced to death, and was still the youngest bachelor of the Hanlin Academy.
Shen Heng sneaked into the Xie Mansion as a refugee and worked as a maid, trying to watch the fall of this controversial figure. However, she gradually discovered:
The "irrefutable evidence of collaborating with the enemy" recorded in historical records was actually a forged trick by Xie Zhao and the main war faction to lure the enemy;
An upright gentleman who once wrote "I would rather be a jade-smashing fellow from Kyushu" got himself a tattoo because his family was wronged, and willingly joined the Privy Council as a hawk, using his stigma as a shield to guard the flames of the Northern Expedition;
In Shen Heng's modern notebooks, the handwriting disappears and reappears as history is rewritten, implying that her existence is a link in the closed loop of history.
When Xie Zhao found out that Shen Heng had uncovered the plot, he put a poison-tempered dagger against her throat: "A historian's pen can cut off a person's head. Miss Shen, do you want to be a knife to pierce the heart, or a boat to cross the soul?"
Intention: He had already turned himself into a fire into the abyss, just to leave a lamp for future generations to illuminate the ashes.