Unburned Book

Introduction to the work "Light in the Ashes" In the winter of the third year of Yong'an, the city of Jiangling was destroyed, and scholar Chen Yuan hid in a dye vat to survive. Through the cracks in the wood, he saw soldiers throwing books into the fire. "Jiangling Scenery" compiled by his father curled up in the flames like dying hands. After the city fell, he became a member of the corpse team, carrying the corpses of his compatriots in exchange for two meals of gruel every day. Until an old man found half a fragment of "Treatise on Febrile Diseases" sealed with blood wax in the palm of his hand. "What they protected with their lives should not just disappear." From then on, he started doing three things: Making "paper bricks" in dye vats and hiding classics in the cracks of city walls; Use charcoal to write down the name and story of the deceased on the back of the shroud; Beside the bonfire in the dilapidated temple night school, he taught the refugees to write their names. In troubled times, he met Zhou Tieyi, a defeated soldier who wielded a sword with his left hand, Su Yueming, a female doctor carrying a medical classic, and Hu Muzhou, an orphan carrying a trade map. Starting from an ambush battle, the four of them established a different rebel army—— Map the terrain before fighting, give priority to rescuing books when they are seized, and night classes are as important as medical camps and swords. They discovered that what was more difficult than attacking a city was "not massacring the city", and what was more precious than seizing silver was "keeping memories." When he finally stood in the court of the new dynasty, what Chen Yuan held out was not the jade seal military talisman, but a "civilized ruler" engraved with weights and measures of the past dynasties: "Your Majesty, we can measure the territory, but how can we measure the life and death of a civilization?"