Indebted programmer Lin Yuan was kidnapped on a rainy night. When he woke up, he found himself in a rusty iron cage. The electronic screen on his wrist was beating with scarlet numbers: [Ten-day countdown starts - Year of the Rat dungeon rules: Do not eat grains from the warehouse, otherwise you will trigger the plague].
This is a death game where life is used to solve puzzles. The twelve zodiac messengers take turns taking charge of the dungeon, and there is a cycle of ten days. Death is a retrospective, and only those who can solve all the zodiac puzzles can survive. In the Year of the Rat dungeon, he witnessed his teammates turn into pus-producing zombies for stealing a grain of rice; in the Year of the Ox level, "sacrifice" must be used in exchange for the pass key, and former teammates stabbed each other in order to survive; in the forests of Tiger Roaring Mountain, there are giant claws that can tear apart time and space, and on the back of the rule book, there is a line written in blood: "They are not monsters, they are people to be swallowed."
On the verge of death, Lin Yuan awakens the "Containment Prison" system - he can take in dungeon monsters as jailers, the rat demon's keen hearing can locate traps, and the tiger spirit's combat intuition can predict murderous intentions. But he soon discovered that every time he took in a "monster", he would have an extra vertical pupil.
The zodiac totem deciphered by psychology professor Su Qing, the machine blueprints that boxer Chen Gang exchanged for his life, the secret hidden behind the camera by live-streaming internet celebrity An Qi... When everyone was torn between the choice of "sacrifice a few people" and "bury everyone with them", Lin Yuan spelled out the truth in his cyclic memory: the so-called twelve zodiac signs are just puppets used by gods to select sacrifices, and the ten-day cycle is a countdown to the abyss swallowing civilization.
