When the Nursery Rhyme Begins, Close Your Eyes

At 12:17 a.m., audio restoration specialist Mo Feiyue hears his own name on a children's recording from 1998.

On the tape, the children are singing "Drop the Handkerchief."

But at the very end, a girl's voice suddenly joins in.

"Mo Feiyue, why haven't you come yet?"

The next second, his phone lights up on its own.

[First Nursery Rhyme Realm: Drop the Handkerchief]

[Before dawn, find the person who wasn't mentioned in the nursery rhyme.]

From that day on, Mo Feiyue discovers that the familiar nursery rhymes hide deadly rules.

In "Drop the Handkerchief," someone clearly dies, yet the number of people never decreases.

In "Bouncing the Ball," an apartment building with only seven floors somehow has an eleventh floor.

In "Ten Little Children," one person disappears every dawn, and everyone forgets they ever existed.

Names can be erased.

Memories can be altered.

Even your body can be replaced by another version of yourself.

To survive, you have to uncover the rules hidden in the nursery rhymes.

And every clue ultimately points to the White Egret Welfare Institute, which disappeared long ago.

There, an experiment called "Anchoring Existence" was once conducted.

On a list sealed away for years, Mo Feiyue's name is clearly written in the seventeenth spot.

But when that list was created, he hadn't even been born.

More unsettling still, an old photograph from 1998 shows a man standing there who looks exactly like the adult Mo Feiyue.

When the final nursery rhyme begins, he must find the answer:

If your name, memories, and body can all be replaced, what proves that you ever existed?