The evening self-study bell rang, and Class 7 of Senior High School became a cage isolated from reality. The bright red rules on the blackboard dragged Chen Yan and four classmates into a life and death game: those who touched the lockers died, those who did not clap on time died, and those who turned around to answer the door disappeared without a trace.
Purpose: The core question raised by the novel in the end is: When survival requires the destruction of human nature, does such "living" still have meaning?
Chen Yan's ending gives the answer - he became the only survivor, but was trapped in loneliness and darkness forever: the school was empty, the cell phone signal lost, he was isolated from the world, and only traces of death and inner suffering were left around him. There is no joy in this "victory", only endless emptiness and self-doubt.
This means that the novel denies the logic of "survival by any means necessary": rules can force people to give up their humanity, but "survival" without humanity is essentially another form of death - the death of the spirit and soul. True "living" is not only the survival of sex, but also the persistence of humanity, conscience and bottom line; and the ultimate horror of this game is that it uses the bait of "survival" to allow participants to destroy the foundation of their own "humanity" with their own hands.
To sum up, the purpose of the novel is not to simply exaggerate supernatural horror, but to use the extreme scene of "late self-study survival game" to expose the fragility and alienation of human nature under the pressure of survival, criticize the survival logic of "self-interest first", and finally return to the deep thinking of "the nature of human nature" and "the meaning of survival" - what is more terrifying than death is to become the person you once hated most in order to live.