When the woman who came to buy a new identity walks through the door, Lu Mingtang is sewing an ear onto a “corpse.”
The ears are made of pigskin, the heads of wood. These are the props her theater troupe relies on to make a living. Lu Mingtang repairs them, but she also takes on another kind of job: staging a death onstage to help a living person disappear.
This time, the woman wants to escape the Wei family.
Lu Mingtang has already collected the sixty taels deposit and checked the wooden knife, the mechanisms, and the getaway carriage. All that remains is to wait for the birthday banquet's performance to begin and the red curtain to fall, so the old woman onstage can slip away unseen.
But when the show is over, Lu Mingtang feels warm blood.
Beneath the white cloth lies the sister she has searched for for seven years.
The fire seven years ago failed to reunite the sisters. Seven years later, someone has delivered her sister's corpse to the execution stage Lu Mingtang built with her own hands.
The troupe is detained at the Wei residence, and the guests at the birthday banquet are still waiting for an explanation.
Lu Mingtang puts down her toolbox and checks the mechanisms again.
She becomes a suspect, and can't even explain why her sister was here.
Stranger still, before her death, her sister had already entered Lu Mingtang's name in the spring theater festival in the capital and left her a letter asking her to put on another play.
Keeping her promise, Lu Mingtang heads to the capital, recruits actors, repairs props, and puts together a little theater troupe that's always short on money. Alongside taking jobs to make ends meet, she must investigate the past her sister left behind, as well as the story the painter Pei Zhi'an has never finished telling.
Then someone brings her a page from an old ledger.
It records every payment she has received over the years for arranging fake deaths, without a single sum missing.
It turns out someone has kept track of the jobs she thought were settled and done.
