The Final Ten Days: Twelve Prisoners

Indebted programmer Lin Yuan is kidnapped on a stormy night. When he wakes, he finds himself locked in a rusty iron cage. The electronic screen on his wrist flashes crimson numbers: [Ten-day countdown initiated. Year of the Rat instance rules: Do not eat the grain in the storehouse. Violators will trigger the plague.] This is a deadly game where riddles are solved with your life on the line. The messengers of the Chinese zodiac take turns ruling each instance. The cycle lasts ten days, and death sends you back to the beginning. Only those who solve every zodiac riddle can survive. In the Year of the Rat instance, Lin Yuan watches a teammate turn into a pus-dripping zombie after stealing a single grain of rice. In the Year of the Ox, players must trade a “sacrifice” for the key to clearing the stage, and former companions stab one another in the back to survive. Among the tiger-roamed mountains lurks a giant claw capable of tearing through space and time. On the back of the rulebook, a line is written in blood: “They are not monsters. They are the people who were devoured.” On the brink of death, Lin Yuan awakens the “Containment Prison” System, which lets him make the instance’s monsters his prison guards. The rat demon’s acute hearing can locate traps, while the tiger spirit’s battle instincts can predict danger. But he soon discovers that every time he contains a “monster,” another vertical pupil appears in his eyes. The zodiac totems decoded by psychology professor Su Qing, the mechanism blueprints boxer Chen Gang bought with his life, the secret livestreaming celebrity An Qi keeps hidden behind the camera... As the group tears itself apart over the choice between “sacrificing a few” and “making everyone perish together,” Lin Yuan pieces together the truth from his memories of the loop: the so-called twelve zodiac signs are nothing but puppets used by the gods to select sacrifices, and the ten-day cycle is a countdown to the abyss devouring civilization.