Rule Horror: One Mistyped Character Means Death

On my first day reporting to the Anomaly Bureau, the HR supervisor didn't give me an ID badge. She just handed me an A4 sheet of paper with seven rules printed on it. The seventh had been crossed out in black ink, with a note written beside it in red: Anyone who sees this rule won't live to clock out.

The Anomaly Bureau deals exclusively with urban ghost stories: an elevator that opens its doors by itself on the thirteenth floor, a phone that rings three times at midnight before claiming a life, and a housing complex with thirty-six households but not a single living resident. Jiang Yan, a contract worker with no official status, has one peculiar talent: he can see fragments of rules that no one else can. The rules are hidden in peeling wall paint, on elevator doors, in the shadows of streetlights. They're half true and half false, with missing characters and lines.

Seeing them is no great feat. The trick is filling in the gaps correctly. One wrong character, and he'll be the one who dies.

Jiang Yan thought this was just a high-risk, low-pay job, until he pieced together his first lethal rule: When the bell rings for the third time, don't answer anyone who calls your name. On the day his containment assignment was settled, he discovered that the records for his first seven days on the job were blank. Three years ago, he had gone missing for seven days.

And someone at the bureau had been waiting for him for eleven years.