Inhaling secondhand smoke lets her read memories, but each use raises her foster mother’s nursing-home fees by 5%. Do you want the truth, or your loved ones?
Lin Xi, a lung cancer ward nurse, unexpectedly awakens the ability to read minds when she inhales secondhand smoke. Every wisp of smoke carries the smoker’s most hidden memories. When she glimpses a black-market deal between the medical system and tobacco capital in the final memories of a critically ill elderly patient, the fees at her foster mother’s nursing home suddenly rise by 5% because of her ability. To uncover the truth, she is forced to team up with Gu Chenzhou, an anti-smoking expert, unaware that he is the tobacco tycoon’s illegitimate son, carrying the pain of his mother’s murder and evidence of his family’s crimes.
Gu Chenzhou’s smoking-cessation clinic is key to the anti-corruption investigation, while his mint allergy becomes Lin Xi’s bargaining chip. From pain-relief cigarettes in hospital wards to cross-border smuggling ships, from a hacker’s strike during a live-streamed hearing to a pollution map pieced together from cigarette butts by sanitation workers, the two advance cautiously through a war of data. Ventilators are tied to e-cigarette sales quotas, shortages of targeted drugs force patients to swallow black-market pills, and even teenagers’ memories of “choosing to become addicted” are lies carefully planted by capital.
As Lin Xi’s lung cancer worsens with every revelation, and Gu Chenzhou is forced to accuse the woman he loves of being mentally ill, this battle waged with secondhand smoke as a weapon will measure justice by the rhythm of bloody coughs. And on the operating table, the “healthy memories” he fakes every day become her only painkiller against brain metastases...
When he is forced to diagnose you with a mental illness, what you see in his memories is a boy from his youth, crying as he clutches his mother’s portrait...
