When Lin Wanwan, an inheritor of Suzhou embroidery, discovers that her family's heirloom embroidery, A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix, has been deliberately corroded, a life-and-death struggle to protect intangible cultural heritage begins. Facing a hostile takeover by a corporate titan and the challenge of AI embroidery, she wields her needle like a sword and her thread like a strategy, carving out a path through the clash between tradition and innovation...
Maglev Suzhou embroidery dazzles at New York Fashion Week, as smart embroidery needles on a model's hem shift through millennia-old patterns to the music; fabric DNA testing becomes key evidence in court, with silk mitochondrial sequences exposing lies about patent theft; a blockchain embroidery pattern archive comes under hacker attack, only for its encrypted ice-crystal embroidery code to strike back...
From Suzhou embroidery workshops to international runways, from Tiangong Kaiwu in the ancient archives to conductive silk in the laboratory, Lin Wanwan uses endangered crafts like “Three Distinct Embroidery” and “Living-Core Kesi” to defend the embers of civilization amid corporate warfare, technology, and conspiracy. But why does Xie Huaizhou, the young master of the trend-setting national style who once sneered that Suzhou embroidery “deserves to end up in a museum,” show up in the dead of night with military-grade equipment to save the day? When A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix suddenly goes up in flames at the celebratory banquet, the coordinates that appear in the fire will uncover the bloody truth behind the embroidery workshop arson twenty years ago...
“We don't embroider patterns. We embroider the gene chain of five thousand years of civilization.”
