When words become a curse, third-rate writer Lin Yan is dragged into hell by Rules Forbidden Zone, the novel he abandoned three years ago. Here, every punctuation mark can kill. School rules boasting a “100% excellence rate” devour students, supermarket price tags describe how you will die, and he must use the “Rule Editor” to fight the Alpha System, which controls everything.
His golden finger is also a death warrant: burn through his draft and rewrite life and death!
Strike through “No running” and the blood-vine pursuer comes to an abrupt halt.
Rearrange the chapter order, and the BOSS runs amok ahead of schedule, turning on the capitalist conglomerate.
Use “To be filled in” to dig out a blank safe zone. The price: every comma he changes deletes 500 words from his draft. If the draft runs out, he will become the rules themselves.
Livestreaming is an abyss: more than 100 “Run!” comments turn into escape arrows, the rich bid for “control of the oxygen supply,” and the viewers turn out to be human consciousnesses from parallel worlds.
The statue crisis at Ivy Middle School, the organ-payment countdown in the deep-sea prison, the endless supermarket's graveyard of time... Together with Su Ling, a mechanical being, and Zhong Zimo, a mathematician, Lin Yan fights his way through five layers of rules:
White rules kill openly; black rules wage battles of perception; red rules are polluted by capital. At last, he tears away the truth behind the “Final Chapter Giant”: it is the Alpha System's true form, stitched together from the corpses of every deleted character. Each step it takes creates a new law of death.
“Words are both a curse and salvation. If the rules are destined to devour us, then let the pen be my blade, and let me write a deception that stakes everything on survival.”
