Rule Horror: I’m Learning to Archive Things in the Haunted Tales

Li Muxi had long since realized that the world was secretly lying. The supermarket lights would flash three times without warning, and the bags of chips on the shelves would turn into discontinued old versions. A desperate note, written in a six-year-old girl’s wobbly handwriting, would suddenly appear on the door of the neighbor’s apartment, which had been empty for four months. People who should have died in fires would smile, offer her a piece of chocolate, and ask if she wanted some candy. No one else noticed any of it. Only her memory remained an unfading ruler, recording everything in perfect detail, from the glass she broke when she was three to every time the past was altered. Then one day, countless eyeless eyes emerged from the darkness and asked if she wanted to become an “Archivist.” The instant she signed her name with a rust-stained fountain pen, she glimpsed the other side of the world: forgotten obsessions became horrors, people who were erased became sacrifices to the rules, and her task was to seal away every anomaly that spiraled out of control. While others ran around in terror inside the horrors, she complained about shoddy stage sets and crookedly welded handrails on the bus. While others trembled before the rules, she used her perfect memory to find loopholes in every word and tore the enforcers’ traps to shreds. She thought she was just another wage slave, until a black card bearing the name “Chief Archivist Shen Qing” fell into her palm. Her mother’s disappearance had not been an accident, and the memories engraved in her bones had never been a coincidence. When the fangs of the Law Wraiths pierced the dimensional barrier, and countless people’s existence was being silently erased, Li Muxi tightened her grip on the fountain pen. Rules are both cages and the sharpest of blades. Those forgotten by the world, those truths buried in darkness: she would archive them all.