Occult Containment: I Guard the Gate to All Worlds with a Nuo Mask

In the basement of the ancestral home he inherited on a stormy night, a living wooden carving weeps behind a locked door. In an old attic painting, a slumbering tentacle is piercing through the canvas. When an ability-wielding thug crashes through the outer wall, Liu Zhe grips the bronze key left behind by his great-uncle The lock turns. But beyond the door is no storeroom: it’s a strange market beneath a blood moon. A masked vendor shoves a snarling Nuo mask into his arms. “New here? Put it on! That old house picked you to be its caretaker.” Through the fractured vision of the Nuo mask, Liu Zhe sees the old mansion transform into a colossal containment facility riddled with cracks. The wooden carving in the basement scrapes at the door with its fingernails, while rank yellow slime seeps from the attic painting. “Administrator’s Rule Number One: All anomalies will eventually be contained!” As monstrous shadows writhe beneath the blood moon, Liu Zhe turns and locks shut the hole that has just been smashed open. The withered claw of a bandage-wrapped corpse snaps in the doorway. From then on, by day he is a struggling writer; by night, with the Nuo mask on his face, he travels between the real world and the strange market: ▶ Nail a parasitic locust tree covered in human mouths inside Containment Chamber 3 ▶ Trade a painted-skin demon’s hide to a merfolk merchant for spatial rivets ▶ Hang a rampaging ability user upside down in the isolation room and feed them the rules When a crimson rift tears open the sky above the city center, the colossal, ten-thousand-ton “Brain of the Rotting Star” descends. The Ability Management Bureau’s artillery fire bursts like fireworks against its slimy shield. Liu Zhe leaps skyward on shards of space, the Nuo mask’s fangs dripping with the blood of an Outer God. “Do you know why the old mansion needs an administrator?” The grinding of gears rumbles from beneath the mask: “Because the door’s been shut for too long, ” “Someone has to lay ‘them’ to rest.”