Yang Yixian: Ranking the Ten Forbidden Lands from the Start

“Welcome to the world of strange rules. Rule One: Do not look back.”

After Yang Yixian dropped dead from sudden overwork, he was dragged into a world overrun by the uncanny. While everyone else was memorizing rules until they could barely breathe, he found a strange bestiary in his mind. It could scan weaknesses and analyze rules, and even the most terrifying entities had to steer clear of him.

In a hospital at midnight, he melted a nurse ghost with garlic and lulled the wailing infant in the ventilation duct to sleep with a lullaby. In the morgue, Gu Ci, a man in glasses, had stood guard for six days, too afraid to open the door to the passageway. And there was a little ghost with a mouth full of needles, still waiting for the mother who had said, “I’ll be back after I buy some formula.”

The Ten Forbidden Zones, the ten thousand layers of nodes of terror, another self hidden in the mirror: Yang Yixian dismantled the world layer by layer, only to discover that it wasn’t ghosts at its source. It was fear.

“People aren’t fearless. They’re afraid, and they keep going anyway.”

There’s only one rule: Being afraid is the whole point. If you’re not scared, what the hell are you even playing for?

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.