In the early years of the Republic of China, inside Yunzhige, Shanghai's renowned hair ornament house, the concubine-born Su Wanyue crouched beside a well in a back courtyard, using a withered twig dipped in the juice of fallen flowers to shape her eyebrows. This was the only way she could "touch" her mother's keepsake, a jade hairpin. Three days earlier, her stepmother, Madam Liu, had accused her birth mother of bringing misfortune and thrown her corpse, wrapped in a straw mat, into the Suzhou River. All that remained was half of a broken hairpin, locked around Wanyue's wrist.
Who could have guessed that on the night of her coming-of-age ceremony, Madam Liu would set a trap and force her to try on the "Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix" hairpin on behalf of her legitimate elder sister, Su Minghua? The moment the gold hairpin, adorned with kingfisher feathers, touched Wanyue's hair, blood trickled from the broken jade ornament. The half hairpin suddenly grew hot, and the candle flames throughout the room turned into blue threads that wrapped around everyone's throats! More horrifying still, she saw blood-red curse marks rise along Madam Liu's temples, while the half of a jade token her mother had pressed into her hands before dying fit perfectly into the hairpin's hidden clasp...
It turned out that the Yunzhige family had guarded the secret art of spirit hair for generations. Hair could serve as a conduit to ferry souls, prolong life, and glimpse the secrets of heaven. Madam Liu had murdered her mistress and stolen the hairpin to perform a blood sacrifice and prolong her own fading life. The half jade token on Wanyue's wrist concealed the true "Thousand Mechanisms Key". Her hair was a "living coffin" capable of reversing the balance between yin and yang.
As Madam Liu's nails dug into the back of her neck and Su Minghua screamed "Witch!" while brandishing a pair of scissors, Wanyue lowered her eyes and smiled, twirling a lock of hair around her fingertip. In an instant, the crabapple blossoms throughout the courtyard bloomed in reverse, and each petal reflected a piece of the past: her mother hadn't drowned; Madam Liu had used a hair curse to pin her beneath the well for thirty years. The vermilion mole on her elder sister's forehead was no mole at all, but a blood parasite raised on an infant's hair...
"Today, I will use your hair to repay the debt you owe my mother."
