Stitching life and death, weaving fate and karma.
On the night of my twenty-third birthday, I inherited my grandfather's shroud shop, along with that rusted embroidery needle.
"The Su family precept: Yin-Yang Embroidery is only for shrouds, never clothes for the living; it is only to ferry departed souls, never to meddle in the affairs of the living."
But I broke the rule.
Because I discovered that when I was born twenty-three years ago, I was stillborn. Using a forbidden art to steal fate from the heavens, my grandfather took thirty years from his own life and used them as thread to stitch a "Heaven-Stealing, Day-Changing Talisman" over my heart, snatching one breath of life back for me.
Now the time limit is up.
The tattoo of fate on my back has begun to awaken. Those forbidden patterns that should have remained in the embroidery manual were branded into my flesh overnight: a blue dragon with closed eyes, a blood-weeping lotus, and an eye without a pupil.
The daughter of Jiangzhou's richest man knocks on my door in the dead of night, a moving ghost face embroidered on the hem of her qipao;
The captain of the criminal police brings me a body bag, and a complete "Soul-Locking Formation" appears on the dead man's back;
An unfamiliar phone call comes in at dawn, and my grandfather's trembling voice says, "Xiaojiu, don't trust the person I am now..."
And the needle in my hand has begun choosing its own colors:
White thread ferries souls, black thread questions ghosts, red thread prolongs life, and gold thread seals gods.
As for the blood-red embroidery needle that no one is ever allowed to touch, my grandfather said it was being kept for the "Eye Without a Pupil."
Only later did I understand that for generations, the Su family had been embroidering not clothes, but a cage.
Three hundred years ago, my ancestor used his life as thread to embroider an indescribable being into the final page of the Yin-Yang Embroidery Manual.
And my life is the final stitch.
Now it is almost free.
