Gray Erosion descended, and rules became punishments. When a bizarre global-screen decree appeared, “Do not remember your childhood,” Shen Yanzhou watched those who recalled their childhood get torn apart by an invisible force, yet he emerged completely unharmed, someone else’s warm blood splashed across his face, his heart cold as an abyss. A frigid broadcast declared him the sole “vessel of the rules”: the source of the disaster, the “Seed of Rules,” was parasitizing his body, the world’s ultimate antivirus program for purging humanity.
The rules were no lifeless laws, but living parasitic entities. They twisted reality, corrupted perception, and could even erase existence itself through antimemetic annihilation. Humanity was not the victim. It was the “virus” the world sought to expel. Shen Yanzhou was an anomaly walking among people, a lone defier of fate. He could discern the threads of the rules, and wield his will as a blade to alter their cold iron laws. He forcibly reversed “Do not remember” into “You must remember.” The rule that had been tearing flesh apart in the supermarket instantly turned on itself, collapsing amid the eerie laughter of a nursery rhyme. But this power came at a heavy price: every alteration accelerated his fusion with the “Seed of the Abyss” inside him, leaving him to bear the world’s deepest malice. Was he an antibody within the virus, or the purification program itself? In an apocalypse where perception was the battlefield and existence itself a sin, Shen Yanzhou wielded his pen to rewrite the rules, inscribing a faint chance of survival at humanity’s dead end.
