Plucking Flowers on a Snowy Night

On a snowy New Year’s Eve, the blind painter Su Yan grabs a stranger’s sleeve and offers a self-destructive proposal: “Will you marry me? I’m very cheap: a progressive eye disease, a spinal cord injury, and a heart that’s collapsing.”

She doesn’t know that Xia Zhihan, the brilliant scientist standing before her in an immaculate suit, has long been the “chief observer” of her life. From half a tube of ultramarine left behind on Paris’s Left Bank to a bloodstained handkerchief backstage in Vienna, from every medical prescription to thermal images of her sleeping late at night, Xia Zhihan has meticulously collected, catalogued, and displayed the broken traces of her past seven years in a private museum.

This marriage is a pathological contract. Su Yan gives up her disabled body and the loneliness of darkness in exchange for top-tier medical care and an accessible future. Xia Zhihan gives up absolute control and resources on a national scale in exchange for a “specimen to be humanized.” A painter who is gradually losing her world, and an observer who has never learned how to love normally, begin to build a kind of warped symbiosis between data and paint, surveillance and touch, cold agreements and burning obsession.

But the cracks were there from the start. Su Yan doesn’t know that the Paris explosion that changed her life was no accident. Xia Zhihan never calculated that the cage she designed would ultimately imprison the observer herself. When the possibility of regaining her sight suddenly appears, and secrets from Xia Zhihan’s childhood laboratory come to light, they must answer this question: in the marriage that began in a snowy bar, who is saving whom? When the light truly shines in, will eyes accustomed to darkness dare to see love in its most primal, imperfect form?