Borrowed Skin, Buried Love

There is a procedure that can give a person a new face. It works on skin that has already been grafted. The practice is banned and painful, and the face it produces does not hold for long. Ngu Vãn Châu goes through it because she wants to leave her marriage with some dignity. She has loved Tiêu Hoài Cẩn for twenty years. When a fire left him close to death, she had her own skin cut away and grafted onto him, and it saved him. It also left her with a face nobody would recognize, and an infection that set in afterward turned into cancer in its last stage. She has a month. Tiêu Hoài Cẩn woke up believing her younger sister, Ngu Hoán Vân, was the one who had saved him, because Hoán Vân told him so, and he began treating his wife as the cruel one, humiliating her and pushing for a divorce. Vãn Châu agrees to sign. Before she does, with the new face in place, she asks him for three small things. Hoán Vân keeps working against her the whole time, and at one point has her chained up.