Wen Jin Qianqiu

When two souls have been immersed in the fragrance of ink and the flames of war for thousands of years, who has hidden the truth in the folds of time? Zhou Chenbi, a professor of classical literature, has been playing games with words all his life, until he discovered a set of coded poems written in blood in the Dunhuang fragments - the handwriting actually coincided with his own handwriting. In order to decipher the "burning case of Qixing Pavilion" hidden in the poem, he had to turn to Xie Linyuan, an expert in ancient book restoration, a geek who is famous in academia for "being able to hear the whispers of ancient books." When the cocoon paper fragments of "Preface to the Orchid Pavilion" resonate eerily with the early translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy" in the evidence room, when the fire of Bianjing in the Northern Song Dynasty overlaps with the cry of the Black Death in Florence in dreams, they gradually piece together a cruel cycle that spans nine generations: -In the first Bianjing Bookstore, the schoolmaster hid the secret letter in the annotated version of "Zhuangzi", and the imperial envoy who was ordered to inspect the book pulled out the burning pages in the fire. -The fifth Medici scribe used poisonous ink to copy the Book of Revelation, and the painter opposite left the same sulfur formula on the bottom layer of the canvas. -Ninth World In the Shanghai Concession in 1944, the bookstore owner and the puppet government translator exchanged half a bookplate amidst gunfire. As the investigation deepened, Zhou Chenbi's wrists showed the same burn marks as those on the Dunhuang fragments, and Xie Linyuan's pupils began to reflect unfamiliar words. When the glass curtain walls of the modern city suddenly reflect the phantom of the carved beams and painted buildings, and when each other tells the details of their childhood that the other has never told, they finally realize that the end of this reincarnation is no longer killing each other, but the words that are kept secret in the fragments of all civilizations: "hold the torch to face the wind, and walk together into the abyss."