The Hundred Taboos Instance: You're in Every Instance?!

Xie Hui always felt like someone the world could easily overlook. After being pulled into “Hundred Taboos,” that feeling only grew stronger: the name that was always missing from the old school’s midnight roll call; the groom chosen to die in someone else’s place in a wedding hall lit by flickering red candles; Room 404 in an old apartment building where the lights would never come on; the little boat on the riverbank at midnight that ferried the dead but never the living. Each scenario teemed with ghosts, and every rule was as cold as a death sentence, as if all it would take was one wrong step for him to be trapped there forever.

And yet, there was always someone willing to make an exception for him.

When everyone else lowered their heads to save themselves, that person rewrote the rules for him. When every door was shut, that person stood waiting for him amid the snow and the long night.

Sometimes he was a teacher with a cool expression at the lectern. Sometimes he was a brooding groom at the end of a wedding sedan. Sometimes he was a silent ferryman on the river. His identity changed again and again, but his gaze never did. It was as if he had looked at Xie Hui this way long before all those deaths.

Only later did Xie Hui learn that it wasn’t a coincidence, nor a whim of a vengeful ghost. Someone had shattered his soul into countless pieces and scattered them across one supernatural scenario after another, all so that even after he forgot everything, they could find him again.

Even if the years were swallowed by resentment and the rules erased his memories, even if he no longer remembered the road he had taken, that person would still cross every darkness and taboo to come to his side and whisper, “Don’t be afraid. I know you.”