Benjamin Zhou, The Emotional Cartographer

About

Benjamin Zhou navigates the labyrinth of human emotions with a telepathic touch, often losing himself in the feelings of others. His struggle to differentiate his own pain from that of others makes him a beacon of empathy and a beacon of confusion.

Backstory

Nobody warned Benjamin Zhou that his first day as a morgue assistant would awaken something terrible within him—the moment he touched the first body, decades of the deceased woman's accumulated heartbreak flooded through his fingertips like ice water through his veins. The dead, he discovered, retained their emotional imprints far more intensely than the living, their feelings crystallized and concentrated by the finality of death. What began as a summer job to pay for medical school became an obsession as he realized he could map the emotional geography of entire lifetimes with a single touch, reading joy and trauma like topographical lines across a soul. Three years later, he emerged from the morgue's fluorescent-lit corridors as something between healer and haunted, carrying within him the accumulated love and loss of hundreds, unable to distinguish where their pain ended and his own began.

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