Twenty-Two Dead Cards

Lin Yan, deputy captain of the Criminal Investigation Detachment, encountered the most unsolvable case in his eight years as a police officer. In the dead end of the old alley in the early morning, the 24-year-old young man died quietly. There was no trauma, no poison, and no pathological cause of death. Before his death, the deceased had spent all his savings, cut off relatives and friends, quit his job, completely wiped out his twenty-four years of life, and rushed to the so-called "new start" with all his heart. He held a Fool Tarot card numbered 0 tightly in his palm. All his life choices and behavioral trajectories perfectly corresponded to the meaning of the "Fool" card - abandoning the past and falling into the unknown with bare hands. At first, the police characterized it as psychological induction or mental loss, until multiple corpses with the same death state appeared one after another. Victims of different ages and identities all personally erased all traces of society before they died, holding the same Fool Card No. 0. They did not commit suicide. They were all convinced that they were heading towards a new life. As the investigation deepened, Lin Yan finally realized that this was not an ordinary serial murder case, but a set of supernatural rules that was spreading. The twenty-two Major Arcana cards correspond to twenty-two unsolvable life and death situations: when you draw "The Hanged Man", common sense logic is completely reversed, and you can only survive in reverse; when you draw "Wheel of Fortune", your identity and misfortune are randomly shuffled, and there will never be peace; when you draw "Devil", desire is a shackle, and every greed accelerates your sinking. Tarot cards are no longer a divination toy, but a life and death contract scattered into the world. When the phantom of the cards shrouded the city, and all mankind was forced to be involved in this survival game, Lin Yan touched the Fool card that appeared out of thin air in his pocket and finally understood - this was the prelude to the end, and he would eventually break through this difficult problem.