The Stele Examiner

The history of the Great Yan Dynasty stands upon a single stele. For a thousand years, no one has asked where the words erased from its heart went. Shen Yan is the lowliest restorer in the Stele Survey Bureau. His father died ten years ago in what was called an “accidental fall from a stele,” leaving him half of an old rubbing and a rhinoceros-horn seal. He has only one wish in life: to find out how his father died. On a stormy night, the Ancestral Temple's Dragon-Slaying Stele of the founding emperor cracked. Sent to repair it, Shen Yan saw a word buried deep in its heart, hidden beneath a layer of recasting: “I.” From that moment on, he discovered something no one was willing to admit: he could see every word that had been erased. And behind every word lay a massacre swallowed by the sacred canon, a person erased by the Dragon Court. A thousand years of national history had been stitched together inch by inch through seven repairs to the stele. Who did the stitching, who erased the words, and who was buried beneath them? No one in the Dragon Court is innocent. The soldiers of the Dragon-Suppressing Bureau are hunting him, the rules of the Stele Survey Bureau are closing in, and the lamps of the Rhinoceros-Horn Pavilion are waiting for him. So is the proprietress of a teahouse, holding his father's old seal and waiting for him to ask: What did your father see back then? The truth he seeks isn't on the stele. It's beneath it, buried with seven revisions to history, a dragon-slaying, and a man who confessed to the crime. “I wronged the dragon.” Those three words, carved by the founding emperor himself into the heart of the stele a thousand years ago, were a confession. And this world has never belonged to the imperial clan. It is a debt left behind when the dragon died. The time to repay it is near.