While sorting through damaged manuscripts, ancient-book restorer Lin Sheng touches half of a faded opera costume. In an instant, scarlet blood blooms across the silk. Amid the flames of a winter night in Republican-era China, a warlord silences the opera in his throat: "From now on, you may sing The Silk Pouch only for me." In the silver-bell chimes of the forests of western Hunan, a priest's golden silkworm Gu worm burrows into his heart: "If you ever leave the village, I'll have these butterflies eat your eyes." When prayer flags from a snowy sacred mountain wrap around three hundred frozen corpses, and the Mirror of Sin in the underworld reveals the white bones beneath painted skin, he finally understands: the man with blood-red cinnabar at the corner of his eye is the one whose soul of love he personally carved out a hundred years ago. Charred-bone peonies bloom in their flesh, and the cycle of reincarnation beneath the prayer flags has long since ground to a halt. This karmic fire, burning through seven lifetimes, will finally reduce them both to twisted red ash on the wheel of fate.
