The Historian

There are people in this world whose sole duty is to correct history after it has been altered. Names that appear out of nowhere in the historical records, boundary-marker inscriptions that have quietly shifted, living people listed as "drowned" in a ferry register: whenever the written record is tampered with, reality twists to match. The fortune sticks at Qingstone County's City God Temple reverse good fortune and disaster. The ancestral tablets in the funeral home lose their names overnight. The grain warehouse's expense ledger blames the people for three years of shortfalls. Lu Chen is the last History Corrector. With a silver-tipped ebony pen, he can see the edits in historical records and correct altered accounts with a single stroke. But correcting history comes at a price: with every page he sets right, he forgets a real memory. He is forgetting his father's face, A-Man's voice, and the roads he has walked. One day, he will forget who he is. But before that happens, he must find the person rewriting history. In the first year of Yongchang, at Heyin: a massacre erased by an entire age; a mother who survived but can no longer remember who she is; and an organization concealed beneath layer upon layer of county, prefectural, provincial, and national histories: the Keepers of History. Those forgotten by history are the truly dead. And until their dying breath, History Correctors fight to give them one thing: to be remembered.