Lin Yan, an inheritor of the Miao Gu tradition from western Hunan, enters Shanghai, the “City of Demons” built from steel and concrete, to investigate the truth behind his grandfather’s mysterious disappearance. There, he takes over the “Folklore Oddities Society” livestream studio his grandfather left behind. But beneath the bustling city’s polished surface, invisible “rules” have already woven a terrifying prison. At midnight, the elevator button for the seventh floor must be pressed within three seconds, or the knocking of a Nuo opera mask will sound at the door. During a livestream, you must never look back at the camera, lest the Gu poison of the “shadow audience” spread through your gaze. Even the smart speaker by the bed may suddenly play a long-lost Miao folk song deep in the night, its lyrics encoding rules that foretell death.
From the floor maze of “The Elevator’s Ghostly Shadow” to the song-request curse of “The Midnight Radio Station”; from the traffic-fueled battles controlled by Gu sorcery on the “Livestream Showdown Stage” to the terrifying illusions where reality and fiction intertwine in “AI-Generated Instances,” Lin Yan discovers that every strange case is a wild collision between folklore and technology. Miao Gu insects have taken root in livestream data, century-old Nuo opera has been reborn on electronic screens, and all the rules ultimately point to a slumbering Chinese-style Cthulhu entity beneath the city: “Bone-Eroding Shadow.”
To break the cycle, Lin Yan must use his grandfather’s Gu sorcery notes as a key and solve riddles with ingenuity amid the gaps in the rules. He must unravel the logical traps of “nested rule instances,” choose between life and death at plot branches decided by reader votes, and distinguish genuine folk taboos from virtual horror illusions in AI-created immersive nightmares. When Miao Gu poison meets smart technology, and ancient Nuo opera collides with modern livestreaming, every rule obeyed or broken will set the gears of the entire city’s fate in motion…
