Prisoner of the Rules: Starting at Apartment 704

Think your graduation trip will be all barbecue and karaoke? Lin Chen's graduation trip means getting bundled up in gray fog and tossed into a “rules-based horror instance,” complete with a copy of the Death Rules Handbook that can turn real or fake at any moment.

The rules here are harder to figure out than a girlfriend's feelings: drinking tap water might save your life, but could also get you “haunted by a water ghost”; you mustn't step on a red string, but it can be used to bind the “Night Watcher”; your reflection in the mirror secretly changes your movements; even the market aunties might be “rule NPCs” handing out clues that could save your life. From the start, Lin Chen is bound to a bizarre “Rule Identification System.” While everyone else gambles on the rules to stay alive, he uses the System to scan their “reliability.” But the System keeps secretly draining his energy and hides a cryptic promise: “Unlock core secrets at 30% synchronization.” Who knows if it's a mole sent by the source of the rules?

Everyone on the team has “rule PTSD”: the class monitor has supercharged olfactory senses and can smell “danger”; the logical genius draws “rule mind maps” in a notebook; the reckless classmate dances on the edge of every trap; and “rule puppets” assimilated by the Eclipsing Light Society launch sneak attacks from the shadows. Most mysterious of all are the Balancers, a group of people in blue tunics who hand out green bread as clues while hinting that “the System can't be trusted.” Are they protectors, or “keepers” of the rules?