A Flute Painting Beneath the Moon

Lin Mo, an ordinary young man, buys a faded old painting at a secondhand market. In it, a lady’s robes flutter, and a faint light seems to shimmer in her eyes. One day, pink ripples suddenly seep across the paper, and the lady steps right out of the painting, bearing a promise made a thousand years ago.

Lin Mo’s life is turned upside down. He follows the spirit of the painting into dimensions invisible to ordinary people: in a Bian embroidery workshop in Bianjing, threads weave mountains and rivers beneath his fingertips; in a Nanzhao tie-dye shop, indigo dyes ancient motifs into cloth; backstage at a shadow-puppet troupe in Chang’an, the shadows conceal the secrets of dynastic change; deep inside the caves of Dunhuang, the flowing ribbons in the flying apsara murals are being torn by an invisible hand.

It turns out that foreign forces have long coveted the spiritual power within China’s intangible cultural heritage. They are trying to alter the essence of these traditional crafts and sever the roots of Chinese culture. From the misty Jiangnan region to the lonely smoke rising over the desert, Lin Mo and the painting spirit follow the trail together. They see through disguises in the finest Suzhou embroidery stitches, repel secret attacks with the notes of an ancient guqin, and glimpse the full conspiracy through the cutouts of paper art.

As ancient crafts awaken amid crisis and the spirit from the painting becomes bound to the fate of a young man in the modern world, a battle to protect the genes of civilization slowly unfolds across China, following the lifeline of its intangible cultural heritage.