The Art Restorer: Pines Stand Firm Through Winter’s Chill

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A Ming dynasty painting concealing a severed finger draws restoration expert Shen Ci into a mystery spanning twenty years. Arsenic lurks beneath the paint on the scroll, and the people who deliver the painting die one after another. Coordinates for Lop Nur appear under ultraviolet light, pointing straight to the place where her father vanished. Detective Jiang Du investigates the deaths and discovers that every clue is tangled around the same name: the Suihan Society.

Deep in an underground palace at Lop Nur, Shen Ci finds the Society's initiation painting, made on human skin, colored with blood, and painted with bone. It depicts five members of a scientific expedition, including her father. On the back are the words: “The sixth person must guard the painting and never leave, for all eternity.” Su Wanzhou has guarded the painting in the underground palace for twenty years. Her twin sister, Su Wanqing, volunteered to become “painting material,” trading herself for her younger sister's freedom.

This reveals the Suihan Society's four-hundred-year secret. At the end of the Ming dynasty, palace restorer Zhou Mengzhang witnessed Qing soldiers plundering the land. With twelve artisans, he swapped forgeries for the real thing and smuggled more than three hundred national treasures to a hidden refuge deep in the Yunnan mountains. They likened themselves to pines and cypresses, guarding the integrity of the previous dynasty. But over time, their original mission to protect the treasures twisted into a dark code that used human lives to control others: join the Society by presenting a painting, and if the painting is destroyed, you die. Armed with a Shoushan stone seal, Shen Ci brings together heirs to three crafts: calligraphy and painting, metalwork, and jade carving. She transfers all 327 treasures in the authentic collection to the Palace Museum, consigning the Society's twisted rules to the dust.

The purpose of restoration is to return genuine things to where they belong. Pines and cypresses endure the harsh winter, but even they will one day wither. The nation's lifeline must never be severed.