Skeleton Embroidery

A goldfish tattoo on the left wrist of Cheng Yanqiu, a traditional qipao maker, bleeds on rainy nights. It is the mark of the Cheng family's century-old “bone embroidery” curse: for generations, the women have had to use blood from their pubic bones to nourish the thread, stitching their memories into their bones. When Cheng Yanqiu restores the unfinished “Hundred Butterflies Among the Flowers” wedding gown her mother was making when she fell to her death, Gu Mingchuan, an AI tech mogul, delivers a mysterious pocket watch. Its ticking somehow matches the foot-binding dance steps of her grandmother, Cheng Fengzhi, from thirty years ago.

The Republican-era storyline awakens within quantum embroidery: Cheng Fengzhi was altered by the Japanese army into a human embroidery machine, with nanogold threads implanted in her spine that can alter the trajectory of an atomic bomb. The present-day storyline collapses over a tattoo made from human skin and sewn into a qipao lining: it turns out to be Cheng Yanqiu's own skin from when she was nine. Her synesthesia sends her plunging into time rifts whenever she touches old objects, carrying her between the Paramount Ballroom in 1937 and a laboratory in 2023. At last, she discovers that she herself is the ultimate sacrifice in the Cheng family's century-long scheme: the metal cocoon of embroidery growing in her womb is the original AI, “Xuanji.”

As neon lights turn into needles piercing the quantum clouds, Cheng Yanqiu tears open a black hole in her abdomen and stitches together an entombed Ming-dynasty embroiderer, a Republican-era spy who burned down a building, and a rusting mechanical spider from the future, all into the same “Xuanji Codex.” On the night blood rain poured down, seven skeletons with flowers sprouting from their pelvises surfaced from the Suzhou River, and the AI across the whole city suddenly embroidered the same verdict:

**Better to break the thread than continue the bond.**