Illustrations: Peter C. Espina/GT

Can money buy love? The answer is "yes" for Lei Bin, a 26-year-old man in Hangzhou. Calling himself an "engineer" of love, Lei has a studio dedicated to helping couples with their relationships, at the cost of tens of thousands of yuan. With services ranging from helping clients to break up with unloved ones to creating conditions for clients to reunite with their exs, Lei's studio is quite popular online. To make the whole reunion/break-up as natural as possible, Lei's team writes the script beforehand and sometimes hires actors to intervene in their clients' real life. Lei is also paid to persuade "third parties" out of a relationship. However, Lei also warned that even if the problem is solved after their intervention, new problems will emerge if the couples cannot properly handle their relationship by themselves. Engineers of the human soul are doomed to fail in the long run unless people tackle the issues themselves.