When Su Wan, a 27-year-old antique restorer, was repairing the old German-made clock left by his grandfather, he picked out a faded note from the gear compartment: "Beware of the woman wearing red shoes in three days." She thought it was the old man's trick, until the woman wearing maroon cloth shoes appeared in the old teahouse by the West Lake. The soles of her shoes were stained with sycamore leaves, and she turned around and disappeared into the evening fog. The clock began to tell the time on its own, and the hands always stopped at 3:17 in the morning when her grandfather died of a heart attack; fine red marks appeared on her hands, and her dream was repeatedly invaded by the air-raid shelter from eighty years ago. As the restoration progresses, she discovers that the clock is no ordinary antique at all - it is a "voiceprint recorder" made by her great-aunt Su Jin during the Anti-Japanese War, which contains unspoken last words and the last coordinates of twelve missing professors. The so-called curse is nothing more than the leakage of the mercury arc rectifier, and the recurring woman with red shoes is a letter of distress written by the deceased to his relatives using pain as ink. When she finally took out the corroded audio tape with deerskin tweezers, a piece of waking wood finally fell gently for the girl eighty years ago amid the sound of storytelling in the evening at West Lake.
