The Man Who Sold Sadness

In Xinhai City in 2077, happiness can be bought and sadness can be sold. The HeartSense Group has fully commercialized human emotions, turning them into rows of cold “mood capsules.”

Lin Jue is a notorious emotional debt collector whose job is to squeeze the last traces of feeling from the “emotionally destitute.” Sharp-tongued and lazy, he calls the high-tech emotion extractor a “soul vacuum” and is convinced he has become immune to everything, with a heart as still as dead water.

Then, during an ordinary collection job, he is unexpectedly caught up in a bizarre “emotional murder.” The victim is not physically dead, but has had every emotion erased, leaving behind a living shell. The only clue at the scene is a strange, alluring “ghost emotion” that belongs to no known product category.

To save his own skin, and satisfy his damned curiosity, Lin Jue is forced to team up with a mysterious underground emotion tuner and plunge into the murky world woven together by the HeartSense Group, black-market brokers, and resistance organizations. He discovers that what he is searching for is not only the truth, but also the genuine feelings of his own that he has forgotten.

As the world sinks into a counterfeit revelry, can this man who sells other people’s feelings capture the last trace of something real?