In this world, some people are born unable to feel pain, while others are born hypersensitive to it.
Sheng Xia is the former. She has a rare congenital condition called congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA). Not only can she feel no physical pain, but her emotions are a desolate wasteland too. To pass herself off as "normal," she learned to imitate other people's happiness, anger, sorrow, and joy.
Lu Xingye is the latter. He has an extreme capacity for empathy and a hypersensitive constitution. Haunted by the trauma of his twin brother's suicide, he finds the world too loud and too painful, and wraps himself in cruelty and indifference like a hedgehog.
In the summer when they were seventeen, Sheng Xia discovered Lu Xingye's secret. She drew close to him because he had the "pain" and "vitality" she craved so desperately. He accepted her because beside her, his noisy, painful world could finally fall silent for a moment.
They thought they were saving each other, but they didn't know they were drinking poison to quench their thirst.
He tried to give her all his warmth and sensations, to teach her what love and pain were. But she was like a bottomless pit, unknowingly draining away the last of his life.
On the day of the college entrance exams, after the cicadas had reached their loudest, Lu Xingye leapt from the abandoned water tower where they had first met. The instant she saw his body, Sheng Xia felt a sharp, wrenching pain in her heart. It was the first and last time in her eighteen years that she ever felt "pain."
At last, she became a normal person, flesh and blood. The price was that the boy who loved her more than life itself was shattered forever in the summer.
