In the cold winter of the 16th year of the Republic of China, Su Wanning, the successor of Su's embroidery workshop in Suzhou, received a secret order to exterminate a family.
Warlord Sun Chuanfang forced the unfinished embroidery "Picture of Winter Plum Blossoms in the Snow" to suddenly show blood stains, and seventy-two embroiderers were hanged at Changmen Pier. Su Wanning picked up the ancestral golden needle, only to discover that the gold thread with plum patterns could actually bite blood and identify its owner - the gilt plum blossom button left behind by her missing father, the blood-stained broken hairpin of the Northern Expeditionary Army spy, and the seven-treasure glaze on the sword of the Huo family commander, all resonated eerily with the embroidery.
It rains at night in the house, and the corpse of an Oriental officer emerges from the lotus pond, with a token that should have been at the Huo family stuck in his heart; at Lingyan Mountain Temple, the blood-soaked "Plum Blossoms and Snow Pictures of Rivers and Mountains" reveals secret documents from the former Qing royal family; at Paramount in Shanghai, the golden chrysanthemum pattern shaking off the sleeves of a famous actress implicates an old Japanese pirate case that has been buried for three generations in Suojin Embroidery. When Su Wanning untied the last stitch of the "winter plum lock", a defense map of the Northern Expeditionary Army was revealed under the embroidery - only then did we know that in the past ten years, the Su and Huo families had long been woven into a dark web across the south of the Yangtze River.
The seven-treasure glazed sword leaked from the Forbidden City, the human skin embroidery hidden in Sun Chuanfang's study, the hundreds of gold-wrapped skeletons in the Huo family's old residence... The beauty in the troubled times used a needle as a blade to pierce the most shocking truth in the Splendid Killing Scene - it turns out that the gold embroidery locked up was never wealth, but the heinous injustice caused by the human sacrifice during the Japanese Rebellion a hundred years ago.
