"Needle Eats the Bones of the Southern Tang Dynasty: Qiande Embroidered Soul Tribulation" is a million-word long historical legend set in the last days of the Southern Tang Dynasty. The book uses "needle" as the warp and "blood" as the weft. It draws on the life and death entanglements of three generations of embroidery workers in Jiangning Weaving Bureau to sew a dying dynasty into the star map inch by inch, and finally embroider it into an epic scroll with "the immortal soul of the craftsman".
1. Summary of the story
In the second year of Qiande's reign, the Southern Tang Dynasty professed its vassalage to the Northern Song Dynasty. Li Yu, the later master, was obsessed with auspiciousness and ordered the "Purple Micro Star Picture Dress" to be embroidered within seven days. Zhou Heng, a craftsman from Suzhou, was ordered to join the Jiangning Weaving Bureau. He brought the "warp and weft crossing shadow technique" passed down by his ancestors. He originally wanted to hide the picture with a needle, but he witnessed the torture of "Bang Bang at the Fifth Watch": boiling glue, copper needles, and indigo, devouring the craftsman every night.
Beside the dye pool, the embroiderer Ms. Liu was thrown into a glue boiler because she kept the fragments of the star map. Before she died, she threw the bronze needle to the nine-year-old child laborer A Bao - her child, who was also the last sacrifice of the "child craftsman system" in the Southern Tang Dynasty. Zhou Hengdian sold a sapphire bracelet in exchange for Abao's life, and the two lived together since then:
· In order to save children infected with the epidemic, she secretly changed the star map and gambled with fines and tattoos;
· In order to protect her, Po swallowed needles to fight the violence, and his blood coagulated on the threads;
· Si Tianjian and Zhao Jian are pressing forward step by step, using "Destiny" and "Etiquette" as their blades, trying to drive out all the craftsmen.
In the eighth year of Kaibao's reign, the Song army besieged the city. Zhou Heng's ankle bone was nailed, and the map of the twelve gates of Jinling was still painted in blood, pointing out a way for Abao to survive; in the fierce flames, she pressed the last needle into Abao's palm: "Bite the needle and walk."
The city was destroyed and the Southern Tang Dynasty was destroyed. Abao fled to the south of the Purple Mountain with the broken pictures, and spread the art among the people with broken needles, fetal hair, and broken sapphire. Although the star map is missing, the soul of the needle will always remain.
