Sad Person

Sadness has color. Gray green is regret, dark red is loss, dark blue is longing, and amber is too late. One hundred years later, humans invented the emotional extractor, and sadness became a liquid that could be extracted, priced, and traded. Some people live by selling sadness, and some people rely on buying sadness for entertainment. The poor exchanged it for money, and the rich used it as wine. Wu Lan is the top griever in the industry. He can see the unextracted emotional colors in each person, shed tears for others, draw away the sadness, put it into a glass tube, and price it by the milliliter. He had seen one hundred and thirty-four colors, but could not see his own. He dealt with everyone's grief, never his own. Those emotional fragments borrowed from others accumulated layer by layer in his body, like snow falling in the middle of the night, neither melting nor disappearing. Until a woman shows up. There was no color on her body.