“The dead deserve respect, and the buried deserve peace. But in this world, some corpses die unwillingly and cannot be laid to rest.”
My name is Chen Mo, the only specially appointed corpse seamster at the Jinguang City Funeral Home.
On the day I entered the trade, my master passed down three ironclad rules:
1. Never look in a mirror at midnight. If your reflection has no shadow, you have not returned.
2. Never ask about a corpse's life before death while stitching it. The weight of its karma can crush your soul.
3. No matter how badly shattered the corpse is, the final stitch must leave a thread hanging.
Three years ago, I took on the body of a woman in red, crushed to a pulp beneath a train.
In my youthful ignorance, I defied my master's teaching and added an extra stitch to “seal her grievance.”
That stitch cost me an eye, but in exchange, I gained a “ghost eye” that could see both the living and the dead.
From then on, the morgue became my killing ground.
As I pieced together dismembered corpses, I witnessed a serial killer's frenzy;
As I stitched mummified bodies, I touched a curse from a thousand years ago;
As I repaired charred corpses, I heard desperate screams from within the flames.
They cannot speak, but needle and thread can.
Every stitch is a bargain with a departed soul.
Until one day, I discovered that the million living people in Jinguang City were all living beneath one enormous “human skin”...
(This novel features expert corpse-stitching techniques, Chinese folk horror, and an in-depth exploration of human nature. Not for the faint-hearted!)
