Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Lu Wenzhou said that Father had a specific habit regarding his needlework.

In the Shen Family Pre-embroidery, the starting stitch must be hidden, and the finishing stitch must be exposed. Hiding the start is to deceive the world of the living; exposing the end is to settle the accounts with the underworld. Therefore, the final stitch of every Death Portrait would leave a knot the size of half a grain of rice under the left eye of the deceased.

But my portrait had no such knot.

Every stitch looked exactly like Father’s work, except for the position of the final stitch, which fell on the ring finger of the woman’s right hand.

“This is a forgery,” Lu Wenzhou said. “A very good one. It could fool almost anyone.”

“Can you forge it?”

He looked at me. “If I could, you wouldn’t be standing here asking me.”

I believed him halfway.

The other half I reserved for the dead.

After Father’s funeral, Wang Yuanwai sent another invitation, asking me to come to the Wang manor to retrieve the old Fate Paper. He said it was an heirloom of Master Shen and should return to the Shen Family.

Du Niang advised me not to go.

I went anyway.

The stables at the Wang manor were freshly covered in white sand, yet the smell of blood had not dissipated. Seventeen horses had their necks severed overnight; Wang Yuanwai had used them to avert a death he saw in a dream.

When he handed the Fate Paper to me, his fingers trembled.

“Miss Shen, did Master Shen say anything before he died?”

“Who did he see before he passed?”

Wang Yuanwai’s face grew even paler.

“No one. There was only an embroideress wearing a veiled hat who delivered a box of thread.”

I asked, “What kind of thread?”

Wang Yuanwai lowered his voice. “Red Thread spun from the hair of dead people.”

I found that thread box in the backyard of the Wang manor.

The box had been thrown into a well and was swollen from the water. Lu Wenzhou fished it out with a hook. Carved into the bottom of the box was a small character: “Zhao.”

The first line of the Shen Family ancestral precepts was: *Reflect the bone, not the skin; reflect the fate, not the person.*

But Father had never shown me this character.

On the way back, Lu Wenzhou told me something.

“Shen Family Pre-embroidery isn’t fortune-telling.”

I stopped in my tracks.

“When Master was young and drunk, he once let it slip. The so-called Pre-embroidery uses the Fate Paper, the bone structure, and the Red Thread to sew a person’s manner of death into their destiny. Before the embroidery is finished, nothing is set; once it is complete, the person will walk step by step toward the ending depicted in the portrait.”

I could hear my own heartbeat.

“So Father wasn’t saving people.”

“No.”

“He was writing deaths for them.”

Lu Wenzhou did not deny it.

I thought of all those people who came to the Shen Family seeking embroidery.

They thought they were buying a way to avoid death, but in reality, they were buying a Death Contract. Father would embroider the manner of death and then have them avoid one specific link in the chain, making them believe they had escaped their fate. But as long as the finishing stitch remained, they would eventually arrive at the same deathly image through another path.

Wang Yuanwai did not fall from his horse.

But his neck was still destined to break.

I looked back at the high walls of the Wang manor.

A blood-curdling scream suddenly erupted from within.