Qi Du is a dream mender. When someone can't finish a dream, he goes in and sees it through for them.
His rules are written on the wall: Work only in other people's dreams; don't touch the living in a dream; get out as soon as the dream is mended, and leave nothing behind.
There's one more rule he didn't write down: For every dream-mark he mends, he must stake a piece of his own memory as a stitch. What he stakes is never returned.
Twelve dream-marks, twelve kinds of dreams: stairs that never end, a mirror that stops being a dream if you change it, barbs that dig deeper the more you touch them, waking up for the sixth time to find yourself in the same bed...
With every one he mends, he loses a little more. So each day he writes his name on the inside of his wrist, then doesn't look at it. He's afraid he won't recognize those two characters as his own.
Ning Ji is the only person ever to walk into the clinic with a dream so pristine there isn't a single crease in it.
He can't interpret dreams. All he can do is count in other people's dreams. Quiet, awkward, and clingy, he was gradually taught by Qi Du to hold a needle on his own.
Later, Qi Du realized that Ning Ji knew his technique far too well.
He remembered every place Qi Du had stopped, remembered that he had stood in the dream for seventeen minutes, remembered that his right hand had been clenched the whole time.
He also understood why Ning Ji's dream was so pristine: that crease had been in Qi Du himself all along.
