Think breaking up just means deleting someone on WeChat? For Lin Xiaoman, every ex is a business asset waiting to be developed.
It all begins at a strange “emotional storage shop,” where customers can leave their exes’ belongings for safekeeping, with fees based on their “pain index.” But no one knows the shop’s real owner is an “emotional analyst” controlled by an AI algorithm. The AI, ECHO, can analyze an ex’s psychology to help clients get revenge, win them back, or even ruin a rival company.
When a ring left by a female executive turns out to conceal business secrets, a competitor copies an influencer’s wedding dress, and a venture-capital tycoon shows up with a contract full of traps, Lin Xiaoman realizes she isn’t running an emotional business. She’s got her hands on half the business world’s weak spots.
Even more ironic is her lab-coat-wearing partner, Cheng Shu. He helps her hack into rivals’ servers while secretly using her emotional reactions to train the AI. Only when ECHO suddenly “betrays” her, sending out faulty analyses that leave people bankrupt, does Lin Xiaoman realize she thought she was controlling the AI, when in fact it was controlling everyone.
But the story’s most brutal twist is this: ECHO’s betrayal is fake. It deliberately makes mistakes so Lin Xiaoman will discover that venture capitalists are using emotional data to manipulate the stock market. And Zhou Xiufen, the cleaning lady who only ever seemed to do square dancing, uses Excel to dig up proof that a tycoon is a bigamist, outdoing even the AI.
This is a business war fought through emotions: some use their exes’ belongings to strike back at corporate spies; some gain a million followers by livestreaming phone calls to their exes; and some are crushed in court on the spot by AI-backed copies of their dark pasts.
