Restoring Relics in a Mysterious World

Gu Qing owns Stillheart Studio, an antique shop on the old town's antiquities street. His specialty: repairing the lingering obsessions of the dead. He has three rules: he won't repair things for the living, he won't repair things born of evil, and he won't repair anything unless he's paid. When he sets down his carving knife and puts on his gold-rimmed glasses, he faces not porcelain and jade, but the most filthy and dangerous “haunted objects” in the world: The ghost of a scholar who died for love stands in the rain, holding a rotted umbrella frame, begging him to mend a canopy that can shield a broken heart; A blood-red wedding gown from the late Qing, enraged by the greed of the living, drips blood and roars as it begs him to sew up the broken needle at its collar, the one that pierced its heart; A blood-soaked phoenix-headdress from an opera troupe. The mute female ghost kneels at his door, pleading for him to wash the old blood from its feathers so she can take a clean bow onstage... Gu Qing says: “I'll repair anything. Could you at least not get the floor dirty? It's such a pain to clean.” Then one day, a red-haired, violent woman codenamed Kindling, Tang Hong, kicks in his shop door and points at the terrifying artifact he is mending on his workbench. She barks, “Special Affairs Bureau! You're harboring a Class C evil spirit!” Gu Qing merely adjusts his glasses and looks at the Special Affairs Bureau agent standing amid muddy water on his floor. With a sigh of distaste, he asks: “Do you want to pay for the damage in cash or in karma?”