Written in My Ink

Han Jing'an is twenty-four, terminally ill, and has only six months to live. On a train, he writes a farewell letter, claims he no longer loves his girlfriend of eight years, Sun Yao, and blocks her. He plans to walk all the way home from the city farthest away, deliver the letter to her in person, and then find somewhere quiet to die. But he doesn't know that his life is turning into “ink,” and anything written with this ink becomes real. He writes, “A little crane flew off into the distance,” and a white crane glides past the window through the night sky. He writes, “A flower withered,” and the pothos on the windowsill instantly dies. He writes, “Let her forget me,” and Sun Yao really does begin to forget him, bit by bit. He, too, starts losing his memories of her. Three forces are locked in a struggle over people who can write “word-spirits”: the Letter Bearers protect them until they finish their final letter; the Letter Eaters seize their letters to gain the power to rewrite reality; and the Silencers destroy both the writers and their letters. The leader of the Letter Eaters, the Keeper of Books, has lived for four hundred years. He needs someone who still has love in his heart to write a final letter that will rewrite his wife's death, four centuries ago. He chooses Han Jing'an. And the chief return officer sent by the Silencers, a cold-hearted man who specializes in destroying word-spirit letters, is Han Jing'an's maternal grandfather, who hasn't returned home in thirty years. In three days, grandson will meet grandfather. In three days, a monster who has lived for four hundred years will take a young man's love. In three days, every letter will find its destination. Han Jing'an has only one last drop of ink. What he has to write is not a farewell, but a love letter.