After looking through the next few scanned images, Yu Sheng could not help frowning.
There were normal story passages and illustrations, as well as obvious misaligned lines and wrong characters caused by poor typesetting or low print quality. Some sections even had blank spaces where content was clearly missing between paragraphs. The beginning was still fine, but the farther he went, the worse it became.
He exited the image page and began editing a message to ask what was going on. But while he was still typing, Baili Qing's message arrived first: "Did you see it?"
"I did," Yu Sheng immediately typed back. "But what happened to the content later on? I saw a lot of typesetting errors, and some parts that were never printed."
"Poor-quality printing. That was why most of that batch of books was recalled and destroyed at the time," Baili Qing replied, as if she had expected Yu Sheng to ask. "But obviously, the council couldn't monitor every corner of Boundary City perfectly, so some books still remained at the far end of the market—and one of them was eventually donated to the welfare home that existed back then... It might have been a charitable asset used to pad a report, or it might simply have been an unintentional act."
After a moment, Baili Qing sent another message: "We found an old council file containing the asset list left behind when management of the orphanage was transferred. It included a record of this 'socially donated book.' To be honest, it wasn't easy to find—we only found its name and publication period. The images I sent you were later matched through other channels in other databases.
"But on the other hand, because most circulated copies had disappeared, the book later became an 'obscure treasure' among certain book-collecting