Chapter 4

Chapter 4

In the end, the burly man chose to trust himself.

He pulled open the door to 404 and shouted “Hey, security!” into the hallway. The next second, a hand so pale it was almost translucent reached in through the gap. Its five fingers, looking like bloated, water-logged noodles, snapped around his neck.

He didn’t even have time to scream before he was dragged out bodily.

The door slammed shut in front of us with a heavy thud, followed quickly by the muffled sound of bones being crushed outside.

The archives fell into a deathly silence.

The remaining survivors finally lost the nerve to oppose me.

I spread the register open and flipped through it rapidly. Sure enough, tucked into the back was a setting page I had deleted years ago.

The Administrator Rules.

1. The Administrator has no right to directly kill residents who are officially registered.
2. The Administrator is only responsible for maintaining the rules, not for correcting errors.
3. If an Author-level conflict occurs within a Dungeon, it must be reported to Central Control; private handling is prohibited.
4. The Administrator may enter any door, but they cannot refuse questions posed by an Author.

Seeing the fourth rule, I finally smiled.

This was exactly what I was looking for.

I closed the register, turned around, and headed for the exit.

Xu Zhibai grabbed me. “Are you going out there to die?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to find the Administrator.”

“Don’t the rules say the Management Office is staffed twenty-four hours a day?”

“Exactly. That’s why that part sounds the most like filler. Real clues are always hidden in the sentences that look most like flavor text.”

I picked up the rusty fire axe from the corner, knocked on the door three times, and then opened it.

The hallway was empty again, leaving only a long trail of water on the floor, as if someone had just dragged a soaking wet sack through. I followed the water trail to the very end. The lights in the Management Office were on and the door was open. Inside sat a middle-aged man in a gray uniform, using a needle and thread to repair a cracked ledger.

His name tag bore three words.

On-Duty Zhou.

I stood at the door. “You aren’t the duty clerk.”

The man looked up, his expression calm. “Then what am I?”

“The Administrator,” I said. “The kind responsible for patches.”

The needle in his hand stopped.

Xu Zhibai gasped behind me, likely thinking I had finally gone completely insane. But I knew I wasn’t wrong. The name ‘On-Duty Zhou’ was a placeholder I had come up with back then. Because I was too lazy to think of a real name, I just wrote ‘On-Duty Zhou’ and forgot to change it later. A character thrown together by an author’s laziness was the perfect fit for a low-level, overlooked maintenance module at the bottom of the System.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“To ask a question.” I pointed at myself. “According to the rules, you can’t refuse.”

The man was silent for a few seconds before actually nodding.

I went straight to the point. “Why did my novel turn into a Dungeon?”

“It didn’t ‘turn into’ one,” he said. “It’s a mapping.”

“What does that mean?”

“What you wrote wasn’t a fantasy; it was a transcription.” He pushed the ledger toward me, and a line of small text surfaced on the cover. “You dreamt of this place repeatedly while you were alive, so you wrote those dreams into a story. The System needs people to test its rules in advance. You were one of the chosen recorders.”

A chill ran down my spine.

“Then why am I inside?”

“Because you died.”

He answered calmly, as if he were talking about the weather.

In my mind, a flash of high beams from the final second before the car crash suddenly seared through my memory. It turned out I hadn’t been transported here from reality; I had been recycled by the System after death.

“One last question.” I stared at him. “Can the rules of a Dungeon be changed?”

On-Duty Zhou looked at me and suddenly smiled.

“Author, isn’t that exactly why you came to find me?”