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The Tanner
On Riverside Street, old tanner Yan keeps one hide apart — soft as memory, marked with a child's palm. When his young helper hears the stretching frame creak at night, she follows the scent of river stone and incense to a town secret the river has kept. A quiet horror about what leather remembers, and who is given leave to go.
The Locksmith
An aged locksmith is summoned to open a dead man's brass padlock and finds, among a roomful of hand-forged locks, the mark he thought he had abandoned thirty years before. The truth behind the sealed room rewrites a severed bond: some locks, it turns out, were always meant to open a heart.
The Stonemason
Old stonemason Geng carves a nameless face for Lin Xiu, a girl lost to the cliff. Each night fresh cuts appear on the blue stone in his own hand and the eyes watch him. A red ribbon and a single shoe lead him to the cliff, where he learns what the deposit money and the missing days conceal, and that Lin Xiu may never have sunk into the stream. He leaves his truest chisel and descends. On fog-heavy nights the quarry still hears a chisel tapping, light and slow, as if a face remains unfinished.
The Old Cinema at Midnight
Lao He runs the midnight show and cleans a label-less reel that turns out to be news of a fire thirty years ago that killed seven patrons. On the night of spring's beginning the projector lights itself; the house is full of people in old dress, and after the show a fresh layer of seed shells lies on the floor.
The Night Ferry
Lao Zhou has poled the night ferry for twenty years and each night poles an empty boat toward the far bank once more. On the steps stands a boy in rain boots waiting for his dad; the village sank under the reservoir and the boy drowned years ago.
The Button in the Ash
Charcoal burner Old Zhou finds a worn brass button stitched with the character "Shui" at the bottom of his kiln. He remembers Shuisheng, a young man lost to the river two winters past, and notices the same stitch on the sleeve of Shuisheng's widow, Ahe. Zhou returns alone to an abandoned kiln and reads fresh marks on its wall. He says nothing to the authorities and returns the button to Ahe. The mountain wind thins the charcoal smoke slowly, as if some words are in no hurry to fade.
The Man on Paper
In riverside Qingxi, painter Shen Molin is asked by a widow to paint a memorial likeness of her drowned husband, and told never to uncover it at night. Suspicious, Shen visits on a stormy night and finds the painted smile widening in the candlelight, a charcoal 'wrong' on the frame. He investigates quietly, re-frames the work, returns it with a veiled warning, and on rainy nights sits before his own unfinished self-portrait, certain its eyes hold something his do not.
The Oil Press Ledger
At a riverside oil mill in a fading township, old master Xu is asked to press a strange load of tung seeds by a soft-spoken stranger. Hidden among the seeds is a silver lock tied to a girl who vanished twenty years ago. The visitor proves to be her brother, still chasing the truth his dying mother could not release. Bound by the mill's old code of silence, Xu must decide how much of the past to surrender — and what a ledger can never hold.