*“When an embroidery needle pierces time and space, are you the cinnabar mark that saves the world, or the infernal flames that consume the heavens?”*
While restoring an ancient embroidered painting, Su Mingyue awakens a thousand-year-old secret art of the Su family. Her birthmark becomes a lock, and her embroidery needle gains a spirit. A painting titled "The Nine-Tailed Fox at Play in the Water" drags her into a cycle of reincarnation. The silver-haired prisoner beneath Leifeng Pagoda is somehow bound to her by blood. The ancestral jade pendant holds the sins of the Su family's forebear, who cut out her own heart to suppress a demon. And a possession curse from the Imperial Preceptor's lineage appears on her best friend, Lin Xiaoman.
To uncover the truth behind “Phantom-Color Embroidery rewriting history,” she is forced to travel with Xie Wujiao, a mysterious soul-locker. An inverted bronze tower beneath West Lake, a human-skin thangka inside the prayer wheel at the Jokhang Temple, and a forbidden “bone embroidery” technique recorded in a Dunhuang fragment... Every ancient embroidered work she restores releases another layer of erased history.
But the Su family's ancestor had suppressed far more than the nine-tailed fox.
When the blood moon hangs overhead, the embroidery frame reeks of rust from a severed dragon horn.
As she repairs a Dunhuang Flying Apsaras painting, a bodhisattva in the mural suddenly turns around and says, “You owe me a body.”
And when she finally gathers all nine fox-bone embroidery pieces, the soul-locking needle in Xie Wujiao's chest begins to count down. It turns out that in every cycle of their thousand-year reincarnation, whenever he draws close to her, he relives the pain of being nailed down by the woman he loves...
[The Thousand-Year Embroidery Scheme: Three Twists]
◆ The heartwarming facade: modern embroidery traditions and cultural relic restoration
◆ The bloody truth: embroiderers fed demons with their souls, and the nine-tailed fox was the guardian deity sacrificed to them
◆ The ultimate conspiracy: the twenty-four solar terms correspond to twenty-four evil beasts, and Su Mingyue is the final sacrifice needed to restart the world-ending formation
