Rule Horror: These Rules Are Protecting You

Zhu Wan took annual leave to stay with her mother in the hospital. They were assigned a room in an old, mostly abandoned inpatient building.

In the drawer of the visitor's cot lay a yellowed copy of the Instructions for Hospitalization:

1. Once visiting hours are over, do not answer the door. No matter whose voice you hear outside.

3. If the fog lights flash three times, do not take the elevator. Use the stairs, and do not look back as you go down.

5. Water the withered flowers in Bed Twelve's pot every day.

7. She will make her rounds at three in the morning. When she tucks in your blanket, pretend to be asleep. Do not open your eyes.

Everyone else in the ward took it for a prank from the old building.

Only Zhu Wan realized that each "death sentence" of a rule seemed to be desperately protecting something.

The person it was protecting had been dead for twenty years.

And the handwriting on the paper was also there on the night her older sister met with an accident ten years ago.