Life and death are embroidered with yin and yang, destiny is woven with cause and effect.
On the night of my twenty-third birthday, I inherited my grandfather's shroud shop and also took over the rusty embroidery needle.
"The ancestral motto of the Su family: Yin-Yang embroidery only embroiders shrouds, not living clothes; it only embroiders the souls of the dead, and does not involve living things."
But I broke the habit.
Because I discovered that twenty-three years ago, I was stillborn when I was born. It was my grandfather who used the forbidden technique of stealing heaven and exchanging life. Using thirty years of life as a thread, he embroidered the "stealing heaven and exchanging sun talisman" on my heart, and he saved my breath.
Now, the deadline has expired.
The destiny tattoo on my back began to wake up, and the taboo patterns that should have been on the embroidery chart were all burned into my skin overnight - the blue dragon with closed eyes, the weeping lotus, and the pupilless eye.
The daughter of the richest man in Jiangzhou knocked on the door late at night, with moving ghost faces embroidered on the hem of her cheongsam;
The criminal police captain brought a body bag, and a complete "soul locking array" appeared on the back of the deceased;
In the strange phone call that came in the early morning, my grandfather's trembling voice came: "Xiaojiu, don't believe me now..."
And the needle in my hand began to choose its own color:
The white thread crosses the soul, the black thread asks ghosts, the red thread renews life, and the gold thread seals the gods.
As for the blood-colored embroidery needle that is never touched by anyone - grandpa said that it was reserved for "pupilless eyes".
Later I realized that what the Su family had embroidered for generations was not clothes, but prison cages.
Three hundred years ago, our ancestors used their lives as a thread to embroider an indescribable object into the last page of the "Yin Yang Embroidery Manual".
And my life is the last stitch.
Now, it's about to break free.
