Dead End: I Die Every Time I Solve a Case

Shen Du was the best detective in the Qingshan detachment until that early morning. In the secret room case at Bihu Villa, judge Lin Yuan hanged himself in the locked study room. As soon as Shen Du touched the newly replaced latch on the door frame, a wire popped up from the ceiling and wrapped around his neck. He is dead. Then he woke up - 02:57, and the monitor screen was still blank for those thirteen seconds. The phone rang again, word for word: Lin Yuan, dead. He walked into the scene for the second time, was strangled with a wire for the second time, and opened his eyes for the second time at 0:58. The only variable in the loop is the silver ring on the left hand. In the ring lives a woman named Su Chi—the former chief medical examiner who died three years ago and the previous host of the system. Her voice is half a degree lower than it was before she was alive, and every time she exits, she is like a very thin string breaking in the distance, accompanied by a whistle. Su Chi said that this is not a curse, but a "remnant network": a system that generates cases on its own, and its root is written in RULE-00, anchored by a name - Shen Weiping. That was the pseudonym used by Shen Du's father the year he disappeared, and the registered contact person was Gu Shen. Gu Shen was Su Chi's fiancé and the designer of the "Deep Blue Project". After a case that everyone thought was over, he filled in Shen Du as "Host No. 3". Solve a case, die once. What Shen Du wants to do is to turn the wire wrapped around his throat into a noose that strangles the rules in each death.