Reset Day

This city is sick.

Every seventy-two hours, at precisely three in the morning, the world silently resets. New rules appear somewhere in the city. They aren't written down on paper, but embedded in reality in twisted, cryptic, almost malicious forms. Find them, understand them, obey them, and you'll live another three days.

Those who fail don't die. They disappear, as if they had never existed.

When Gongling Xiaoye first entered the City of Rules, he thought he was a beginner.

Then, deep in the B2 level of an abandoned subway station, he saw a photograph of himself. In it, he wore unfamiliar clothes and stood somewhere he'd never been, with an expression he'd never worn before. On the back of the frame was a line of writing:

“Gongling Xiaoye, Reset Day, Cycle 7. Do not open the wardrobe.”

He had already died here six times. Every reset erased his memories, but his body's sense of danger remained: an instinct tempered by six cycles of life and death, the only legacy to survive across cycles.

Now the seventh cycle has begun.

Rule one: Do not look back.

Rule two: Do not answer anyone when, it uses your voice to ask.

Rule three: ?

Something behind him mirrors every move he makes. A voice overhead repeats every word he says in his own voice. There is always one more step on the stairs than he expects. And in the room that shouldn't exist, the wardrobe door remains shut.

Before each countdown reaches zero, Gongling Xiaoye must piece together the fragments he left behind in the first six cycles, while answering one question:

Is the person he is in the seventh cycle still the same person he used to be?