Qiao Wantang has a pair of eyes that specializes in looking at human faces.
She puts on wedding makeup for the living and cleanses the remains of the dead. The depth of the ear piercings, the thin calluses between the fingers, the old marks on the temples, and the years that others cannot see, cannot escape her hands.
Until the same sedan chair brought two different faces within one day.
In the early morning, she personally placed a red mole on Miss Lu's eyebrows; in the evening, a female corpse wearing the same wedding dress was returned to the sedan.
Makeup moles can be imitated, but ear piercings and years on the palms cannot.
What made Qiao Wantang even more unable to let go was that there was a silver egret hairpin stuck in the deceased's hair - it was an old thing left by her sister who had been missing for ten years.
As a result, she secretly hid evidence and concealed her confession, and thus met Pei Cen, the official of Jingzhao Prefecture.
Qiao Wantang believes that the human body cannot lie.
Pei Cen said that what he saw with his own eyes must be verified.
One searches for the truth from the makeup, clothing marks and living habits, and the other approaches the truth from the order of documents, confessions and evidence. They suspected each other and had to investigate side by side.
Replacement of corpses in sedan chairs, burning of embroidered buildings, nameless bones, old records of palace lanterns...
Behind one case after another, the woman's name was bought, sold, replaced, erased, and decided without authorization in the name of "saving her."
What Qiao Wantang ultimately wants to recover is not just the real name of the deceased.
And the sister who no longer wants to be Qiao Zhiyi.
If a person can choose to forget the past, who has the right to force her to remember it?
If a name is both a shackle and evidence that she has lived, who should decide whether to keep it or burn it?
Pei Cen asked her: "Who do you want to save?"
Qiao Wantang held up a lamp and shined it on the numerous bones.
"Let them answer for themselves first."
Purpose: To explore the ownership of name, identity and memory: real salvation is not to decide how to live for a person, but to give her the right to define herself.