There’s a rule in Huanpi Village: when a woman marries, she must change her skin.
The new skin is embroidered with her name, and the old skin is sewn into a lantern. Those who are changed don’t die. They become “molds,” living between skin and flesh.
Lin Zhiqiu is the village’s last skin-sewer. She sews skins onto the dead and stays out of the affairs of the living. All she wants is to save enough money to leave.
Then, beneath Xiu Gu’s corpse, she finds a layer of skin embroidered with her own name.
Only then does she realize she’s on this year’s list of people due for a skin change.
Worse still, she discovers that her grandmother didn’t die of illness. Twenty years ago, she was the last person to try to break the rule. She had a gold needle. “The fourth stitch doesn’t sew skin. It sews the rule itself.” But her grandmother didn’t go through with it, because she couldn’t bear to.
What can Zhiqiu not bear to give up? She doesn’t know.
She only knows that when the village chief stands at her door holding a red lantern and says, “It’s time to change your skin,” she grips the gold needle in her trembling hand.
