Chapter 1: Fingertip Fitting

The great hall of the old Lu Family estate was so thick with tension you could have carved ice out of the air. Even the light seemed to stall for a half-beat before it reached the floor. Dusk had swallowed the sky outside, and the dim wall sconces threw mottled, fractured shadows across the walls, painting this grand-but-rotting house in shades of cold.

Su Jingnian knelt on the frigid white marble floor, fingertips just barely brushing the pile of shredded fabric that Lu Manman had whipped across the ground like garbage.

It was a mess of stained, jagged scraps of old cloth, reeking of mildew and unchecked arrogance. Every frayed, broken thread hung there like a silent taunt, mocking just how low she sat in the food chain of this top-tier aristocratic family.

The instant her fingertips made contact with the fabric, a high-pitched hum slammed through her skull.

【Loom Soul Weave · Holographic Body Measurement】activated.

Countless pale-blue pinpricks of light bloomed from behind her irises, punching straight through the layers of Lu Manman's impossibly expensive Chanel tweed coat. The light didn't scatter or fade. It wove itself into a mesh, a net, and draped itself over Lu Manman's entire frame like a shroud.

What Su Jingnian *saw* through that mesh wasn't the soft, perfumed elegance of the young miss of a wealthy house. It was a massive, grotesque body buried under layer after layer of fat, the skeleton warping into shapes that didn't belong to any normal human.

The belly fat was stacked like a small mountain. The thighs had enough subcutaneous fat to measure eight centimeters thick. Even the collarbone had shifted off-center by several centimeters, radiating a kind of suffocating heaviness that pressed down on the air around it. At the same time, a complicated holographic pattern map unfurled across Su Jingnian's field of vision—clean, precise lines, each one annotated with the exact cutting angles needed to hide the excess flesh and stretch out the visual proportions.

The body's true data hung naked in the air, absurd and absolute.

Lu Manman looked down at her from above, a diamond-studded champagne flute twirling lazily between her fingers. The crystal caught the light and threw it in tiny, glittering shards against the cruel little smirk curling at the corner of her mouth.

"You actually think *those* muddy hands of yours are good enough to touch high-end fabric?"

Her voice was a blade dragged across glass, sharp enough to make the servants standing in the corners sweat through their uniforms.

She kicked the remaining scraps of cloth toward Su Jingnian with the bare minimum of effort, her eyes dripping with undisguised disgust and envy. The fabric arced through the air in a pathetic, tumbling line before slapping against Su Jingnian's shoulder with a wet, heavy thud.

"Let me make this crystal clear, Su Jingnian. You're a stray dog dragged in from some backwater village. You can't even sew a straight stitch to save your life, and you think you're gonna make a name for yourself in the *Lu Family* tailor's room?"

Lu Manman let out a cold snort, the malice in her tone so thick it was practically visible. Spit nearly flew off her words and onto Su Jingnian's face.

"If you dare turn my custom gown into some kind of ugly, provincial disaster, I'll throw you out the front gate of the Lu Family estate so fast you won't even find a patch of dirt to eat."

Su Jingnian didn't look up. She didn't even bother wiping the dust off her fingertips. She just sat there, perfectly still, her gaze soft and steady as it rested on the scattered fabric, as if every single insult being hurled at her was nothing more than background noise.

In her vision, the rough cloth fibers were already reorganizing themselves on their own. The stitches moved like living things, knitting themselves back together, healing, mending. The wretched, shredded scraps that lay under her fingers were taking on a subtle, flowing grace, as if the fabric itself had started to breathe.

She tuned out Lu Manman's shrieking. Her eyes were locked on the work with a focus so total it almost looked devotional. To anyone else in this room, this cloth was the garbage that a humiliated outcast was forced to deal with. To her, it was the first stepping stone all the way up to the peak of Haute Couture.

The servants had clustered together in the back, their whispered gossip buzzing like a swarm of trapped flies.

"That's the young mistress, the one who just got married in…"

"I heard she was a genius back in the day. Now she's like a clown on a leash."

From the outer edge of the crowd, Li Xiuxiu squeezed through, phone held high. The camera wasn't even on yet, but she was beet-red with anxiety, fine beads of sweat breaking along her temples.

"Manman, you're being *way* too far!"

Li Xiuxiu shouted, throwing herself in front of Lu Manman like a shield, trying to defend her fallen best friend.

"Sis Jingnian isn't fighting back just because she *doesn't* want to. How can you trample her dignity like *that*?"

Lu Manman spun around so fast the motion was almost violent. Her gaze raked over Li Xiuxiu like a blade. The smirk on her face had gone flat, cold, and genuinely threatening.

"Shut your mouth! You traffic-hungry little influencer—you think you're even *allowed* to butt in here?"

Lu Manman jutted her chin up, tall and proud as a peacock strutting its tail. The champagne flute swirled gently in her hand, a quiet dare aimed at every single person in the hall.

"Back off! Or don't say I didn't warn you—I'll have your livestream channel sealed shut, and it'll stay that way for good!"

Li Xiuxiu flinched, shoulders curling inward, but she refused to lower the phone. Her eyes stayed locked on Su Jingnian, knuckles white from how hard she was gripping the device.

In the head seat of the hall, Madam Lu sat perfectly still, an old varnished rosewood prayer bead string working between her fingers. She hadn't even bothered to lift her eyelids. The cold radiating off her was enough to make the servant standing at her back shiver and swallow hard.

Behind her, Lu Yanchen sat back in his high-backed chair, draped in a black suit that fit so cleanly it looked like it had been tailored from a single continuous line. His fingertips tapped the armrest in a slow, metronomic rhythm—*tap, tap, tap*—the sound unnervingly loud in the dead silence of the room.

The face that had been perfectly blank and cold just moments ago now wore a faint, unreadable smirk. He watched Su Jingnian kneeling on the floor, and there was no disapproval in his eyes. No judgment at all. Just the patient, focused interest of a hunter watching its prey.

More than anyone else in this room, he knew exactly what kind of secret Su Jingnian was carrying. And more than anyone, he had been waiting for this exact moment.

Su Jingnian finally spoke. Her voice was cool, flat, stripped of every last scrap of emotion. She wasn't looking at Lu Manman. She was staring down at the fabric in her hands, her tone so calm it was almost unsettling.

"Miss Manman, did you forget? The moment that fabric hit the floor just now, I already altered its physical properties."

She raised her head. Her eyes were clear and ice-cold, locked directly onto Lu Manman's glare-filled gaze.

"It's now a hydrophobic, thermoregulating specialty textile. If you force yourself into it, the visual data on your figure won't just hold. It'll expand. Doubled."

The words hit the room like a detonation. Lu Manman's face went white so fast it was almost comical. The mask of arrogance cracked, a thin, jagged fissure splitting right through it.

She pinned Su Jingnian with her stare. For one flickering second, raw, disbelieving terror flashed in her eyes before humiliation and rage flooded in to swallow it.

"You— you're *lying!*"

Lu Manman shrieked, jabbing a shaking finger at Su Jingnian, her voice cracking and splitting with the effort.

"You dare? I dare you to put it on. Right now. *Now!* Try it on! Or I'll have the butler drag you out of the Lu Family estate, and you won't even find a place to dig up dirt to survive!"

She was past the point of reason. Veins stood out along her temples, and the champagne flute went crashing down onto the marble floor, glass scattering in a spray of tiny, glittering shards.

"I will make you the biggest embarrassment in the entire fashion world. I will show you, *personally*, what real cruelty looks like!"

The corner of Su Jingnian's mouth twitched up. The smile that followed was as cold as frost on glass. The silver needles in her hands snapped to life, threading through the fabric at a speed that bordered on inhuman. The needle's tail sliced through the air, whispering a faint, sharp *fwip* with every pass.

【Weave Fragment +1. Intangible Cultural Heritage stitching unlocked: Mist Fold】.

The moment the final stitch landed, the plain, rough grey cloth underwent a transformation so unnatural it made the air feel wrong. Layer upon layer of delicate pleats swelled across the fabric's surface—rolling and curling like mist coiling through a mountain valley, or like the slow, deep vortex of the ocean floor. The flat, humble material now shimmered with a presence so refined and quietly luxurious it looked like it had stepped straight out of a Haute Couture atelier. Understated on the surface, explosive in its details. Simple on the outside, obscene in its craft.

Lu Manman stared at the garment. Her heart skipped. Terror crashed over her in a single, cold wave. She didn't want to wear it. God, she didn't want to become the laughingstock of the entire internet.

But Lu Yanchen's icy stare and the silent, crushing pressure of Madam Lu left her no other option. She gritted her teeth, jaw clenched so hard it ached, and shuffled toward the garment that looked like opulence on the outside and was a trap on the inside.

The whole room held its breath. Every eye in the hall was locked on her. Lu Manman's hands trembled as she pulled the collar open. The instant the fabric settled against her skin, it felt like something invisible was seeping in, working its way into her very flesh.

The fat she had been so carefully hiding, guided by those eerie, rolling Mist Fold pleats, surged outward. It bloomed horizontally, a perfect and merciless magnification. Every single flaw Lu Manman had ever concealed was peeled open, laid bare under the overhead lights, with nothing left to hide behind.

Her waist and belly had gone out by three full sizes. The gap between her thighs was completely sealed. The whole figure looked like a blow-up ball that had been overfilled with air—bloated, round, and laughable.

The room erupted.

For one solid second, nobody moved. The silence was a vacuum. Then it broke—a wave of strangled gasps, choked exclamations, the sharp *clatter* of a teacup shattering on the floor, all of it piling on top of itself in a single, ugly, beautiful chaos.

Lu Manman yanked at the collar, her face twisted into a mask of panic, a shrill, tearing wail ripping out of her throat.

"Help! Who threw this *garbage* on me! Su Jingnian, you *murderer!*"

She clawed at her own body, raking at the fabric, trying to rip it off. The more she pulled, the tighter it clung. The cloth had fused to her skin, refusing to give a single millimeter.

Su Jingnian rose to her feet. She brushed a ghost of dust off her skirt hem that wasn't even there, her expression as cold and smooth as a sheet of ice. She ignored the accusations, ignored the wailing, and swept a single, level look across the room. Then she turned, heels striking the marble in a steady, unhurried rhythm, and walked toward the door.

Madam Lu shot up from her seat so fast the prayer beads tumbled from her fingers and clattered across the floor in a sharp, bright cascade. The look in her eyes had shifted in an instant—contempt gone, replaced by raw, disbelieving awe.

She fixed her stare on the rough, unassuming garment that was clinging to Lu Manman, its pattern silently correcting and reshaping the wearer's silhouette on its own. A flicker of sharp, focused light cut through the fog in her cloudy eyes. She leaned forward, just a little, as if she could physically reach through the air to study the impossible detail up close.

"What… what *is* this technique?"

Madam Lu's voice was unsteady. In all her decades, she had never sounded anything like this. Reverent. Almost afraid.

"She altered the visual proportions with *stitches alone*. Not even the top masters in this field could pull off something this… this *unholy*."

Su Jingnian reached the far corner of the room. Li Xiuxiu came barreling toward her like a lifeline. Her hands were shaking so badly it took two tries to open the livestream camera. The frame zoomed in fast, locking onto Su Jingnian's sharp, cold profile.

The comment feed detonated. Question marks and exclamation points flooded the screen in a solid wall of scrolling text, stacking so dense there wasn't a pixel of empty space left.

"Is this science or just pure *cheating?*"

"That one stitch from earlier? That was basically a *miracle!*"

"I'd bet fifty cents this is just a VFX trick, someone get an angle, *find the wires!*"

Doubt and awe tangled together, knot on knot, and the tide of attention crashed over Su Jingnian's name and pushed her to a height she'd never touched before.

And in the darkened corner of the hall, Lu Yanchen slowly lowered his phone. His fingertip tapped the screen once, delicate and precise, marking the clip of Su Jingnian's cold, unyielding profile with a single tag: *Priority Watch*.

The faint glow of the screen reflected in the deep, dark wells of his eyes. That razor-thin smirk was gone now, smoothed away and replaced by something heavier. Something that settled into the bones of his expression like gravity. Ownership.

He knew, with the absolute certainty of a man who had been waiting a very long time, that from this moment forward, that quiet, hardened, stubborn genius of a tailor was going to tear off every last scrap of disguise and show the world the blade underneath.