Let's Switch! The CEO's Intangible Heritage Embroidery Needle

When I first met Ling Xiao in Yuming Village, I wanted to sew his mouth shut with a needle. Not because he looked down on my Su embroidery, but because he looked unfairly handsome even when he frowned.

Later, I really did it, using my soul to sew itself into his body.

On a stormy night, a landslide blocked the road and trapped us in an old shrine. When we woke, I was in his body, worth tens of millions, and he was in mine, holding an embroidery needle.

Through his eyes, I saw that a man’s “strength” was armor, hiding even his exhaustion; that behind every “I object” at a board meeting were hundreds of families waiting to be fed.

So in his place, I did what he never would: I secured paid menstrual leave for every woman in the company, crossed out “maximize ROI” in a project proposal, and replaced it with “cultural value comes first.” The Ling Group was in an uproar: “Has President Ling been possessed?”

Only after wearing my embroidered shoes did he understand that my “fussiness” during that time of the month was real, dull pain; that the “inefficiency” he mocked held a philosophy of resisting time.

So he made my body do what I hadn’t dared to do: he used algorithms to decipher a lost embroidery technique and bring intangible cultural heritage to Paris Fashion Week; he streamlined complicated processes into tutorials “even Grandma can follow.” The Su family embroidery workshop was stunned: “Has Fei gone crazy?”

The village chief said this was a thirty-day blessing from the Rain God, and a curse as well. If we couldn’t truly empathize with each other, we would remain switched forever. The village’s loving couples were all past body-swappers who had never changed back.

So we had to understand each other completely.

Needlepoint meets code: after this tender trial, will we return to our own bodies in 30 days, or willingly sew each other’s souls into the rest of our lives?