My name is Shen An. I run a funeral shop on Huaiyin Street, dealing exclusively with the dead.
My grandfather passed down three rules: never paint a portrait of the living, never dress the dead, and never prepare a headless corpse for burial. I haven't broken any of them in twenty years.
Until one rainy night, a woman in a red wedding dress knocked on my shop door and handed me a faceless photograph.
“I hear your yin-yang brush can paint souls. Paint me a face.”
I took the photograph. I didn't know then that it concealed the secret my grandfather had guarded for sixty years, the entire life of a woman whose face had been flayed, and the thing sealed underground by the five old-established businesses on Huaiyin Street.
