Rule Horror: There's Something Wrong with My Recipe

[Rule-Based Horror + Food + System + Healing + Infinite-Flow + Strong Female Lead] While everyone else fights desperately to survive in rule-based horror, I open a late-night diner there. Xu Zhiyan binds herself to An Unreliable Cookbook and is forced to cook for monsters in all kinds of eerie “domains.” The ingredients are outrageous: singing mushrooms, fish that devour memories, and salt crystallized from sorrow. The recipes are even more abstract: “Take three grams of loneliness, a pinch of jealousy, stir-fry over high heat with anger, and serve with a broth of forgotten things.” Her customers are one more terrifying than the next: A woman in red counting floors in an elevator, insisting she’s missing a finger. The passenger in the last row of a midnight bus, forever counting the streetlights passing outside. The thing calling your name from the end of a hallway. Just turn around, and it’ll grow another face. But Xu Zhiyan isn’t afraid. Because the dishes she makes can “eat” the rules. And so things get increasingly absurd: In a terrifying elevator, she serves up a bowl of hot soup. “Drink up, then tell me exactly how many fingers you have.” After drinking it, the woman in red cries for three hours, then eats the elevator’s rules. On the midnight bus, Xu Zhiyan hands over a boxed meal. “Forget counting streetlights. Count the grains of rice in your bowl.” The passenger finishes counting, freezes, then wipes the bloody handprints off the bus window. Until one day, the most terrifying being in the entire world of strange tales, the “Lord of Rules,” comes to see her. He sits silently in a corner of the diner, reads a page of the book, then looks up. “I hear you can make anything.” “Then... make me a serving of ‘love.’” Xu Zhiyan tightens her grip on the cleaver. That stuff isn’t in the cookbook.