In a near future where emotions are “standardized,” feelings are commodities with fixed price tags. Fang Zhe is an underground dealer in illegal emotions. Thanks to his rare gift of “absolute empathy,” he can extract, recreate, and even tailor any intense emotional experience for his clients, whether it's grief that eats away at the soul or the euphoria of coming close to death.
But the industry's ironclad rule is “emotional conservation”: every transaction quietly changes the personalities of both buyer and seller. When a monopoly tries to dilute every emotion into a harmless consumer product, and a client asks him to erase forever a painful memory bound up with love, Fang Zhe realizes that what he sells is no longer just emotion.
He's trading in fragments of the soul, and the first thing to be assigned a price may be the part of himself that makes him human, now slowly fading away.
