In Shanghai, medical aesthetics repair specialist Lu Chenzhou has a secret: every true statement he makes turns his lips a little grayer, until one day he will no longer be able to tell the truth at all.
Six years ago, his wife, Su Wanqing, left him because of a lie. Six years later, she suddenly appears at the clinic with a name: Chen Muye. He is a man who experiments on other people’s lifespans, Lu Chenzhou’s former classmate, and the last person his mother saw before she died.
Following this lead, Lu Chenzhou uncovers a secret his mother had foreseen long ago but never told him. She, too, once possessed the same ability and paid the same price. She left behind a letter, a bracelet, a silent recording lasting one minute and seven seconds, and a dried sprig of osmanthus.
This is not a story about an ability. It is a story about “which words must be spoken, and which, once said, can never be taken back.”
In the end, Lu Chenzhou chooses neither inheritance nor revenge, nor does he choose silence. He simply slips into his pocket the tube of lip balm his mother had used until nothing was left of it. And he keeps living.
