I could steal anyone's face, but I lost my own forever.
In the winter of 1943, the Rongcheng theater troupe was massacred by the military, and the troupe leader Qin Xiaotian performed the "shadowless mask change" in public and died as a substitute. Disciple Xu Ge grabbed the facial makeup left by his master in a desperate situation, and was forced to inherit this weird skill from then on - every time he changed his face, there would be an extra "love pattern" on his wrist, and his life would pass by.
He was involved in the military's "face-cleaning team" and dealt with the Japanese and puppets, the Chinese Communist Party and Jianghu forces. He stole faces, changed faces, pretended to be others, and struggled to survive among multiple identities. Until he met the code-breaker Shen Zhiqiu, he discovered that what the Japanese "Spirit" group and the military traitor Lu Yunzhou coveted were not the gold and silver treasures, but the "Thousand-faced Secret Book" engraved with the remains of tens of millions of anti-war martyrs.
Only then did Xu Ge understand: What the master left to him was not a skill, but an atonement. Every face he stole was a forgotten name; the last page he wanted to protect was the collective memory of the entire nation.
This is a cultural defense war without gunshots.
He lives on other people's faces just so that those faces will never be stolen.
