Crossing the Jiangyuan River

When Lu Chenyuan was twenty-four, his father, Lu Yuan, disappeared during a body-recovery job in the Jianghuai river system, leaving behind only a heavy metal toolbox and a few pages of incomplete notes. A diving instructor, Lu Chenyuan takes over his father’s line of work and becomes the youngest “Ferryer” in the Jianghuai river system, one of the specialists who retrieve the drowned.

But his father’s disappearance was no accident. Lu Chenyuan soon discovers that certain stretches of the Jianghuai river system are governed by “rules”: nonexistent floors, bodies that will not sink, underwater scenes that repeat, and phenomena that defy the laws of physics. These are not simple hauntings, but “anomaly zones” that warp reality. Ordinary people who get trapped in them often never escape.

Fragments of his father’s notes reveal that Lu Yuan was once the most powerful opponent of the rules in the Jianghuai river system. He did not simply vanish; he deliberately “entered” the rules’ deepest layer. Inheriting his father’s sensitive constitution and foundational knowledge of feng shui techniques, Lu Chenyuan begins taking body-recovery jobs along the Jianghuai river system. With every retrieval, he gathers clues his father left behind while unraveling one rule-bound zone after another.

As he investigates, Lu Chenyuan meets Chen Daoyi, a folk feng shui master; Lin Qian, a doctoral student in folklore; and A-San, a survivor harmed by the rules. Their team gradually takes shape, but opposition soon follows. The “Rulekeepers” organization believes that the boundaries of the world of rules must not be touched, and that probing too deeply could cause reality to collapse. They therefore try to stop Lu Chenyuan from going any further.

As his investigations progress, Lu Chenyuan discovers that the rules are mutating at an accelerating rate. Ancient rituals, historical traumas, and the collective human subconscious are becoming sources from which rules form. His father was not simply lost