Cracked Inkstone

In the seventh year of Xuanhe's reign, a young man named Yanci from Bianjing was appointed by Huizong to join the painting academy for his painting of "Thousands of Mountains Stained with Ink". He believed that a splash of ink could bleed the mountains and rivers of the world, and that an ancient hairspring could outline the character of a man of lofty ideals. Until the golden soldiers' iron hoofs crushed the silk of "Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains". That snowy night, he watched helplessly as the master used blood as ink and used a broken pen to leave the last picture of a lonely crane on the palace wall. On the rocks of Caishiji, Yan Ci, who was in his thirties, unexpectedly met a young man who was as high-spirited as he once was. He actually taught him to use gold wire to inlay the Zhaohe inkstone that was broken into two halves - "Painter, see clearly. What we are repairing is not a stone, but the bones of the river." From meticulous flowers and birds to military maps, from green landscapes to bloody battlefields, Yan Ci finally understood in his dilapidated hometown that the true way of painting should use fate as the ink to redraw the backbone of an era.