At eleven at night, the rules for the night-shift building were posted on the wall:
1. When the light at the end of the corridor is on, do not look back.
2. If someone knocks and claims to be security, remember: there is no security guard in this building.
3. Anyone who breaks the rules will be crossed off the roster.
Everyone was desperately trying to memorize the rules.
Only Chen Yan crouched in the corridor, copying them down one by one. Then he circled two words between the second and third rules.
"There's a loophole here."
Break the rules, and you die.
He never broke them. He edited them.
Ink was his authority, and his pen was his blade: he crossed out typos, patched loopholes, and turned murderous clauses against the monsters themselves.
From the lowest copyist, whose very existence was missing from the records, to annotator, proofreader, and legislator, he kept revising his way up until he reached the title page of the Grand Canon, the tome that kept ten thousand monsters in captivity.
The monster shrieked, "You've broken the rules!"
Chen Yan closed his notebook and shook the ink from his hand.
"I haven't broken a single one."
