Shared Heartbeats: A Twelve-Year Deception

Three months after their breakup, Lin Wan discovered that her heart was still beating in sync with her ex-boyfriend Chen Mo’s. When she was nervous, his chest tightened. When she couldn’t sleep, his heart raced. Even on the night she was rushed to the hospital with acute gastroenteritis, his social media updated at the same time: “A sudden pain seized my heart, like someone grabbed it from the inside.” Even stranger, a child’s voice began coming from inside her heart, bright and mischievous, calling her “Big Sister.” To sever this invisible umbilical cord, Lin Wan sought out the mysterious Doctor K. But while gathering data on Chen Mo’s heartbeat, she stumbled into a carefully crafted twelve-year con. The so-called “parasitic heart” was nothing but an illusion created through suggestion, and the so-called “high-sensitivity receptors” were just labels used to identify prey. And the ex-boyfriend she thought had stopped loving her had spent three years acting out the role of someone “being parasitized,” all so he could pull her out at the very moment she stepped into the trap. “A response delayed by 0.3 seconds isn’t so bad, actually. Because an echo means that someone will always answer the sound you make, even if it takes a little while.”