Keepers of the Ruins

My name is Chen Shi, and I am a cultural relic restorer at the National Museum, specializing in bronzes. The last tripod I built was an important weapon used by King Wu of Zhou Dynasty to suppress the "Xu Yan" of the Yin Shang Dynasty. Eight words are engraved on the tripod: "There are nine ruins in heaven, and people guard one of them." It turns out that historians got it wrong. When King Wu attacked Zhou, he was not attacking King Zhou, but something crawling out of the cracks in Guixu. My parents died in Helan Mountain twenty years ago. The autopsy report said: cardiac arrest. But they all had strange, satisfied smiles on their lips, and the sweet smell of osmanthus cake still lingered in their mouths. Until I saw the same smile on a Western Han Dynasty "Infant Crying Mirror". An organization calling itself the "Association" came to my door and gave me 72 hours to consider: either join or be removed. The only things my grandfather left me were half a piece of hardened osmanthus cake and a piece of blood marrow stone that was said to be able to "define" the boundary between reality and nothingness. Now, the stone is cracked and what is in the mirror is coming out. People from the association are counting down outside the door. Only then did I realize that what the Chen family had been repairing for generations was not cultural relics. It's this world, the walls are crumbling. ——I use a carving knife for repairing cultural relics to repair the ruins of the world. I also want to make justice for my parents.