Outside the Strange Instance

On the night the apocalypse arrived, a subway train during rush hour became an instance, and the broadcast read out the rules for passengers: obey and live, break them and die.

Everyone followed the rules to the letter, yet people still died in batches, as if on an assembly line.

Only Wen Qi, the subway dispatcher, survived. Before his eyes, every rule displayed the same line of tiny text: This clause does not apply to you.

The rules cannot kill him, but they offer him no protection either. Monsters smell him and tear into him first. When the instance is cleared, the system rules that he never took part.

The whole world memorizes rules to stay alive. He alone reads them like blueprints, breaks them down like work procedures, and borrows them as weapons.

Others ask,