It is difficult to paint the skin and bones, but it is difficult to paint the heart. It is difficult to sew the soul together with the corpse.
I am the shopkeeper of the Painted Skin Inn on the Desert Border. I specialize in painting the skins of monsters and ghosts and sewing the souls of the dead.
I have sewn three thousand pieces of skin in twenty years, but I cannot sew the truth.
My face is borrowed, this life is rented, and I am just a stand-in made of thirty-six dead skins.
When the headless female corpse opened its mouth to show its face, the emperor was holding a jade seal to buy skins, and when I grinned at myself in the mirror, I finally understood: the biggest curse of a leather painter is not to meet a ghost, but to discover that he is the biggest... Skin to be painted.
Thirty-seven "I"s are alive at the same time, who is the true entity?
I use my scars as my eyes and my heart as my brush to draw the last face that truly belongs to me.
