Chen Mo spent three years taking the civil service exam, and finally got in. His workplace is called the Municipal Rules Compilation Bureau. The job sounds rather respectable: writing safety notices for residential communities, duty rosters for hospitals, and operating guidelines for food markets. It's a clerical job, office work, a secure position. His mother brags about it to everyone she meets.
On his first day at work, he found a rather sinister rule in the employee handbook: "Bureau staff must not read the rules they have written after nine p.m." He looked up, wanting to ask about it, but the boss was already hunched over the computer, and his veteran colleague pretended not to hear while holding a teacup. Chen Mo swallowed and didn't dare ask.
The following week, he casually added a line to a community notice: "After ten p.m., please do not look outside through the peephole." Three days later, someone in the community disappeared. A neighbor said that at ten thirty on the night the person vanished, they had seen him standing bolt upright at the door, peering outside.
Section Chief Ma said it was a coincidence and told him not to overthink it. Old Zhou told him to stop making things up. Lin Xiaoman from the Archives Section secretly tugged at his sleeve. "The person who sat at your desk before you has been gone for quite a while."
Chen Mo turned the handbook upside down and inside out. Between the sixth and eighth rules, he picked out a line that had been added later: "Rule Seven: The author must not write a rule whose consequences they cannot verify."
But there was no Rule Seven in the table of contents at all.
And in the hidden compartment of his desk drawer, someone had slipped a piece of paper bearing his own handwriting
"Rule Seven: Do not write Rule Seven."
