[Mystery and wild speculation + Rule-Based Horror + Horror Game] “Ding! Welcome to the ‘Rule Game.’ Player number 734: Cheng Guo.”
When the cold mechanical voice rings in his mind, former criminal police officer Cheng Guo is standing in the empty corridor of an apartment building at midnight. The first rule is written on the wall in blood: [After 3 a.m., do not look directly at yourself in a mirror.]
This is no hallucination. It is a forced survival game sweeping across the globe. From a silent school riddled with eerie school rules, to a cannibal’s old castle where “dinner etiquette” must be observed, to a mental labyrinth that uses memories as a prison, every instance has rules as unyielding as iron laws. Those who break them meet only one fate: death.
While other players cower in the shadows of the rules, Cheng Guo stares at the bloody words and sneers. Betrayed by rules and stripped of everything in the past, he is best at finding loopholes in seemingly unsolvable regulations.
“Follow the rules?” He crushes the note in his hand that says “No hiding weapons,” turns around, and slips his homemade dagger into his boot. “Let’s just say I’m good at teaching rules to bend.”
While everyone else fears punishment, he calculates contradictions in the rules. While players turn on one another to survive, he plots how to use the rules to strike back. For everyone else, this game is hell. For Cheng Guo, it is a hunting ground for revenge, and a battlefield where the rules themselves can be overturned.
But as he delves deeper, he gradually discovers a truth behind the game’s rules more terrifying than death: those strictly enforced clauses may have been designed from the very beginning to select “sacrifices.”
And he intends to be the one who flips the board.
It's okay to write.