Silhouette in a Cocoon

[Winner of the Best Plot Award in the Short Story Category of the 2025 Fifth Qimao Realistic Fiction Writing Contest]

Five strangers who seem to have nothing in common are each locked in a corner of an unknown secret room, with animal masks covering their faces.

The bloody words on the walls, blood spreading everywhere, and the girl's corpse falling to the ground in the chaos, followed by a series of bizarre events, all announce that this is a long-planned battle in which the participants are trapped like beasts.

As they work through the carefully designed puzzles, they gradually discover that this is more than a life-or-death contest of intelligence and strength. It is also a psychological experiment deeply connected to every one of them... What does the manipulator, hiding behind the pretext of treatment, intend to do with this "soft weapon" to lead humanity, trapped in information cocoons, to its destination?