Sewing Clothes for the Yellow Springs

After my grandmother passed away, I returned to the village for the funeral, only to be forced to inherit my family's century-old forbidden craft — corpse stitching.

People who die violent deaths cannot disperse their resentment; only by using specially made bone needles to guide the remaining soul and stitch the body back together can the resentment be calmed and the dead laid to rest. From then on, a drowned childhood friend, a villager who hanged himself, a skeleton found in a well... one corpse after another was carried in front of me.

I thought this was just a cold ritual, until I discovered that beneath every corpse I stitched, the same eerie curse mark appeared. Torn pages from the village gazette, the dying warning of the temple keeper, the cries that never leave from day or night beneath the old pagoda tree at the village entrance... all the clues point to the bloody sacrifice from sixty years ago.

It turns out that corpse stitching is a lie; atonement is the truth. Every stitch I make is strengthening a malignant curse that traps the entire village. And I myself am the final sacrifice of this cycle of curses.

Now that the bone needles are in my hands, do I choose to continue as a puppet of fate and complete this desperate stitching? Or, using my own body as thread, do I pierce through the gloom that has covered the village for sixty years and stitch a new dawn for Huaiyin Village?