Chapter 6

Chapter 6

At two in the morning, the Night Patrol began right on schedule.

The entire apartment building felt slightly swollen, as if it had been soaked in water. Dark damp patches seeped through the wallpaper, and the sound of fine chewing could be heard from behind every door. However, a lit passage actually appeared, winding its way from the fourth floor all the way to the roof, finally stopping in front of an old elevator I had originally designated as “leads only to the corpse pit.”

Its nameplate had now been changed to three words.

Observation Elevator.

Xu Zhibai stared at those three words, speechless for a long time. “You changed the corpse pit into an observation deck?”

“I only changed the description of the entrance,” I said, pressing the button. “The destination is still the same place, but the rules no longer classify us as food.”

The way the remaining people looked at me was no longer just trust; it was bordering on superstition. But I knew this was dangerous. In despair, people find it too easy to treat someone who “knows more” as a god. And the fate of those treated as gods is usually to die faster than ordinary people.

The elevator doors opened.

There were no corpses inside, only a massive pane of glass. Outside the glass was not a night view, but the structural skeleton of the Fog Harbor Apartments’ rules. Countless glowing sentences were embedded in the walls like blood vessels; you could clearly see which ones were broken and which ones were being supplemented.

Xu Zhibai murmured, “This looks way too much like a back-end interface…”

“That’s because it is.”

I stared at the thickest strand of glowing text, and my heart immediately sank.

At the very top of all the rule bundles, a new red line had appeared.

[Anomalous Author intervention detected. Reported to Central Control.]

[Rule Hunter estimated loading time: 01:00:00.]

The System had found out after all.

At the same time, a curly-haired young man at the back of the group suddenly lunged toward the glass, his eyes filled with greed. “If these rules can be changed, what about points? What about the exit? Can we farm all of them?!”

Before I could stop him, he reached out to pull at a line of tiny text on the inside of the glass.

“No fighting or grabbing inside the Observation Elevator.”

The moment he touched the words, the entire pane of glass shattered instantly.

It didn’t shatter outward; it collapsed inward.

Countless rule fragments swirled like razor blades. Before the curly-haired youth could even let out a sound, he was sliced into a pile of blurred meat. The others screamed and hit the floor. I grabbed Xu Zhibai and dove into the corner of the elevator, but my shoulder was still slashed open, leaving a long gash.

Fresh blood dripped onto the floor and was immediately sucked up by the glowing text.

The System prompt rang out coldly:

“Warning: Back-end contamination.”

“Locked onto anomalous variable: Lin Zhaowan.”

After the glass sealed itself shut again, the view outside the Observation Elevator was no longer the rule skeleton, but the outline of a giant human face. It had no features; only the area where the mouth should be slowly cracked open, spitting out a repeated judgment:

“Authors shall not interfere with the ending.”

I wiped the blood from my shoulder and laughed instead.

This sentence felt too much like a declaration of war.

If the System simply wanted to kill me, it wouldn’t have given advance notice of the “Rule Hunter”; it would have just erased me. The fact that it had to send an Executor meant it couldn’t execute me directly within the existing rules.

That meant I still had a loophole to exploit.

Five minutes before dawn, the Dungeon exit finally opened. As we walked out of the Fog Harbor Apartments, the System gave its clear-condition evaluation.

“Survivors: 6.”

“Rating: Anomalous.”

“Player Lin Zhaowan has obtained a special mark: Rewriter.”

Xu Zhibai looked at me with a complicated expression. “That title doesn’t sound like a reward at all.”

“It isn’t.” I looked toward the entrance of the new map slowly rising ahead. “It’s more like it’s telling everything that I’ve arrived.”

Behind the entrance was a silent, old school.

There were only four blood-red words on the school’s gate plaque:

Silent Middle School.