On a stormy night, Su Li receives the terrible news that her grandmother has suddenly died at the ancestral home in western Hunan.
When she opens the door, the candles in the funeral hall go out at once. The inside of the coffin is covered in scratch marks from fingernails.
Her grandmother, who should be lying in the coffin, is now suspended from a beam, embroidering.
A wooden box among the belongings she left behind contains seven skeins of thread made from human hair, each wrapped around a bloodstained yellow talisman.
The moment Su Li touches the thread, strange memories surge into her mind:
In the depths of winter in 1943, seventeen-year-old Lin Xiugu is forced to embroider a "ghost wedding dress" for a warlord's dead wife. But on the corpse, she stitches her own birth date and hour.
The moment the bloodstained needle pierces the coffin, the same blood-red markings appear on the back of Su Li's neck...
"Stitch the dead, stitch their passage beyond; ninety-nine stitches bind the yin soul."
As the thousand-year-old embroidery frame in the ancestral home's cellar begins turning on its own, Su Li realizes:
Her grandmother spent seventy years stitching 996 death curses onto the living,
and the final unfinished curse is slowly spreading along Su Li's spine.
