“A human air conditioner”

“A human air conditioner” is Shen Tang’s private, humorous label for Gu Huaian when his anger seems to make the atmosphere around him colder. The expression is significant because it translates an intimidating change in Gu Huaian’s demeanor into the language of romance-fiction cliché: Shen Tang does not simply fear his displeasure; she compares it with the familiar image of a CEO whose anger functions like a sudden drop in temperature. The joke also reveals the gap between her assumptions about fictional men and Gu Huaian’s more complicated, sometimes unexpectedly restrained behavior.

The Expression in Context

Gu Huaian’s “human air conditioner” quality appears most clearly after Shen Tang, Gu Anran, and another companion are brought back by Gu Huaian following a dangerous incident. In the car, all three lower their heads and remain silent, while Shen Tang, described as the ringleader who nearly lost the child, is too frightened even to breathe loudly. Gu Huaian’s slightest movement makes all three jump, establishing that his anger is communicated less through an immediate outburst than through an oppressive change in the emotional temperature of the space.

Yet the scene initially unsettles Shen Tang’s expectations. After seeing Gu Huaian’s normal expression, she secretly relaxes. Her inner commentary observes that novels describe CEOs as “human air conditioners,” becoming colder when angry, and wonders why Gu Huaian did not seem colder just then. The comparison is therefore not an objective nickname used by the surrounding characters. It is Shen Tang’s genre-conscious interpretation of Gu Huaian, filtered through her familiarity with novel conventions and her habit of measuring real behavior against fictional patterns.

Anger, Discipline, and Comic Reversal

Gu Huaian’s apparent calm does not mean that the danger has passed. He tells the three to remember the lesson and to bring their bodyguards when they go out again. Once he turns directly to Shen Tang, his anger becomes explicit: he challenges her decision to confront several large men alone and asks what she would have done if one of them had carried a knife. Shen Tang immediately lowers her head, acknowledging that her physical confidence has limits even though she believes she could at least run because she was a school sprint champion.

At that point, her private reaction reverses the earlier judgment. She realizes that Gu Huaian really has become colder, confirming that the novel’s description was not entirely wrong. The humor comes from the collision between a serious reprimand and an absurdly literary scale of measurement. Shen Tang processes danger, guilt, and authority through the question of whether Gu Huaian has reached the proper temperature of an angry fictional CEO, while Gu Huaian, unable to hear her spoken explanation but able to perceive her distracting thoughts, grows weary and massages his brow. The expression thus makes the emotional mismatch visible: his concern is practical and protective, whereas her response is comic, self-protective, and shaped by genre memory.

Gu Huaian as the Unexpected Version of the Trope

The expression captures a contrast in Gu Huaian’s characterization. He can make Shen Tang and the others cower like frightened birds, yet he also stops short of remaining furious when he sees their fear. His admonition is concrete rather than theatrical: they must learn from the incident and take bodyguards next time. The “coldness” is consequently not mere cruelty or romanticized dominance. It is the outward sign of fear, responsibility, and controlled anger after a child has nearly been lost and Shen Tang has exposed herself to armed violence.

Shen Tang’s surprise that Gu Huaian does not instantly behave like a fictional CEO is important. She expects the established pattern—anger producing emotional frost—but encounters a man who can moderate that performance, soften when the others become frightened, and then recover his severity when addressing the person whose recklessness most concerns him. The expression preserves the stereotype while also testing it. Gu Huaian resembles the archetype enough for the joke to work, but differs from it enough for the scene to retain emotional complexity.

Recurrence and Narrative Function

“A human air conditioner” belongs to a broader pattern in which Shen Tang uses humorous inner commentary to deflate situations that might otherwise become purely intimidating. Her professional life is marked by scandal, hostile publicity, and constant public performance; even when she maintains a professional smile while black fans flood a livestream, she privately treats the surrounding chaos with tactical irony. Against that background, the air-conditioner metaphor is another way of converting pressure into something observable and manageable.

The phrase also connects Gu Huaian’s authority with the story’s recurring concern with performance. Shen Tang is accustomed to people being packaged by entertainment-industry publicity, where a company pairs her with male celebrities to generate attention and where bad publicity is still treated as publicity. She therefore recognizes emotional behavior as a kind of role or genre signal. Gu Huaian’s anger seems to activate the “cold CEO” script, but his actual conduct keeps interrupting the script through restraint, concern, and exasperated responses to her inner voice.

As a result, the expression does more than provide a joke about temperature. It marks the unstable boundary between the novel conventions Shen Tang expects and the living relationships she is actually forming. Gu Huaian’s anger frightens her, his restraint surprises her, and her metaphor gives that contradiction a memorable form. “A human air conditioner” is therefore both a comic epithet and a compact description of how Shen Tang learns to read Gu Huaian: not as a stock romantic hero, but as someone whose emotional temperature changes according to responsibility, danger, and his difficult concern for her.