Lin Yi, a sociology graduate student, is caught up in a bizarre “Urban Legend Escape Room Universe” while attending an ordinary team-building event at an escape room. Here, influencers beneath their beauty filters turn into man-eating evil spirits, the shadows of keyboard warriors gather into a tide, and ancient legends and modern urban tales all become deadly rules. To survive, he must solve puzzles, collect “sparks of inspiration,” and confront one absurd and dangerous urban legend after another. While everyone else struggles to survive in terror, Lin Yi calmly applies his sociological theories to analyze loopholes in the rules. He discovers that this desperate world is full of familiar “social phenomena.”
And so, things start to take an unexpected turn: he uses “impression management” to rip off the beauty-filter ghost’s mask, and “group psychology” to break the keyboard warriors’ siege.
He uses the Analects to reform zombies, the Classic of Mountains and Seas to summon mythical beasts, and the Eight Immortals’ powers to give Western evil gods a taste of the East! Joined by a remarkable artist who can wield “ink and brush” to bring the beauty of traditional Chinese art to life, Lin Yi embarks on a path to crack the mysteries and rewrite the rules of the strange tales across the heavens, using five thousand years of Chinese wisdom.
When the rules themselves become traps, we’ll use civilization to reshape them!
