The Engraver

On the first day Wenlin Bookshop began printing, apprentice Ye Banzhang inspected a book and found an inserted page that shouldn't have been there.

He couldn't read, but he could recognize the shapes of characters and the strokes of a blade. The characters on the inserted page looked like those in his master's ledger, but the blade strokes were not his master's.

If he raised the alarm, the bookshop would be finished. If he stayed quiet, more pages would keep appearing. He hid the page, and from then on, every book that passed through his hands pointed back to the fire ten years ago.