Yan Xizhou was born unable to feel fear, or, more precisely, her fear response is to laugh. When her roommate heard “Rule One: Do not answer the knock” in the library late one night and died in terror, Yan Xizhou let out a quiet laugh at the empty air.
Because she had heard the second rule: “Rule Two: Liars will be forever silenced.”
A graduate student of folklore, Yan Xizhou begins investigating the deadly rules that appear alongside “cognitive contamination.” She discovers that each rule corresponds to a “collective fear archetype”: campus taboos, urban legends, family curses... The way to break them isn't to run, but to exploit the contradictions and loopholes between the rules.
As her investigation deepens, she encounters an organization called the “Rule Hunters” on the dark web and discovers that she has been listed as a high-priority subject of observation by the Seventh Division of Abnormal Response. During a haunted museum incident, she deliberately breaks the rule “Do not look directly into the portrait's eyes.” Instead, she triggers a hidden rule: “Anyone who holds the portrait's gaze for more than three seconds may ask one question.” From the mouth of a nineteenth-century portrait, she learns a crucial fact: all the rules originate in a game created by an entity known as the “God of Narratives.”
Now Yan Xizhou faces the most dangerous rule domain yet: the “Seven-Day Loop Apartment.” A new rule must be followed each day, but exactly one of them is a deadly lie. She discovers that her gradually vanishing sense of pain may be the key to solving the final riddle...
She practices smiling at the mirror, because tomorrow she will meet the one who makes the rules.
And Rule Zero reads: “Do not look the God in the eye.”
