The final delivery on a stormy night drags Lin Mo, a delivery rider struggling to keep up with rising rent, into a bizarre mystery spanning seventy years.
Behind the half-open door of Room 1704 in Splendid Garden, there is no hot meal, only a Republican-era qipao that puts itself on and takes itself off. A ghost named Shen Qinghe is concealed within it. Her voice is as rough as sandpaper, and the purplish bruises around her wrists seep dark red fluid. She is searching for another qipao that went missing in the great fire of 1937. Its collar is embroidered with curling lotus vines, and every flower conceals a word.
Lin Mo soon discovers that the search is closely tied to him: the ghost looks like his grandmother, nightmares of the fire haunt him every night at midnight, and the crescent-shaped scar at the base of his grandfather's left thumb perfectly matches that of the mysterious person who took the qipao. Stranger still, an express order suddenly arrives from the old post office of seventy years ago. The delivery address is Room 1704, and the sender's surname is An, the silk merchant said to have vanished in the fire.
When a corner of the qipao appears beneath the bedboards in his rented room, when the uniform of a police station in an old photograph overlaps with his grandfather's figure, and when the words “save” and “kill” alternate in the flames, Lin Mo finally understands: the water-green qipao holds not only Shen Qinghe's obsession, but also a secret three generations of the Lin family have never dared to speak of.
What he doesn't know is that with every word he uncovers, the ligature marks on his wrist grow deeper, drawing him ever closer to the fire that has been burning for seventy years...
