In the foggy city of the near future, human emotions are incorporated into the quantitative management system. Every citizen has a "lantern" implanted in his body - a biochip that monitors and regulates emotions in real time. As a top emotional regulator, Xi Chen's daily job is to help clients maintain their "happiness threshold" by fine-tuning their "lantern" parameters. However, during a routine calibration, he discovered that his memory of the past seven years had a delay error of 0.3 Seconds - those career achievements that he was proud of and the last moments with his deceased wife may have been "optimized" by the system.
The investigation led him to get acquainted with Shu Ruoyou, a woman who can use special audio to cause abnormal fluctuations in the "lantern". As the truth emerges, Xi Chen discovers that this city, named after "universal happiness", is domesticating humans into predictable and programmable "happy samples" through the digitization of collective emotions. And he himself is not only the operator of this system, but also the biggest victim.
