The Shroud Tailor Shop: I Can Bridge the Worlds of the Living and the Dead, Past and Present

The day Zhang Ye's body temperature dropped to thirty-four degrees, he fainted while selling blood at an unlicensed clinic. In his pocket, he found a business card that had appeared from nowhere: 【Zhang's Funeral Clothes Shop · Tailor Zhang】. Written in blood were the words: Report for work within three days. Anyone who shows up late is no longer human. He pushed open the door. The owner was dead, and ninety-nine funeral robes hung on the walls. Each one had been made from a failure. He was forced into a black funeral robe, and the stitching techniques and memories of ninety-nine generations of yin-yang tailors flooded his mind. His fingers moved on their own. A silver needle, steeped in yin energy, glided across the fabric. When he finished the first robe, the dead person's lingering obsession surged into his mind as images. The moment he laid the spirit to rest, the funeral robe opened its eyes. “You did a good job. Your first customer will come in three days. Go meet them in my place.” What he inherited was more than a funeral clothes shop. It was a legacy that used body temperature as postage. Every robe he sewed lowered his temperature a little. At thirty-two degrees, his joints would begin to stiffen. Below thirty, rigor mortis would spread through his body. At twenty-five degrees... he'd freeze to death behind the counter, just like his master. Before he froze to death, he had to find that one stitch: the “Life-Sealing Stitch.” But the dead weren't the only things on this path. There was a real estate developer who'd been buried alive, begging him to sew a funeral robe that could “make him breathe again”; a chaotic experimental subject stitched together from the soul fragments of over a hundred victims; a “natural blank” that had been starving for centuries beneath a stone chamber and was beginning to stir; and a nameless old man who had spent more than a century stitching mountains, waiting for someone to pass a needle from one side of the world to the other. One by one, the people on South Street entered his web: Shen You, an outcast from Mount Longhu, said his craft was “good for something”; a tailor made by his master...