Although the rules were over 2,000 characters long, Takumi did not take much time to finish reading them.
But reading them was one thing.
The mental shock that came from it was another.
'This… this damn… isn't this a rules-type strange tale?! This is absolutely a rules-type strange tale, isn't it, hey!?'
'My youth slice of life, my two-dimensional harem, my generic webnovel crowd-pleaser protagonist treatment — how did it turn into me being a lab mouse in a rules-type strange tale, hey!?'
'Why? Tell me why?!!'
At that moment, although his face strove to remain calm and appeared unruffled, Takumi was already roaring aloud in his heart.
Rule-based horror story.
As a special form of writing that once went viral on the internet, combining reasoning with Kaidan, Takumi had looked deeply into them.
These articles, built on a format of one rule after another, shifting from normal to abnormal, sparking readers' reasoning while also chilling them to the bone — had once fascinated Takumi for a time.
But precisely because he knew what this stuff was, he had absolutely no desire to actually enter a place tied to a rule-based horror story.
'This is sinful! This is deadly! What did I do wrong?!'
Rule-based horror story — things like mental contamination and thought disorder are child's play. They easily touch on overlapping spaces, transpositions, even parallel worlds. Time reversal happens casually. The bosses behind them are often like Cthulhu or some supreme being — incomprehensible and unbeatable. Takumi was no legendary investigator; he was just a small-time, struggling webnovelist. Why make him suffer like this?
Would it be better to just kill himself now and be reborn?
Takumi couldn't help seriously thinking about that question.
And then he couldn't help but remember — in some rule-based horror stories, killing yourself not only doesn't kill you but makes you suffer even more.
'Damn it, those writers who play with rule-based horror stories—can't they be a little gentler? Have they never thought about how miserable it would be if someone unlucky crossed over into the worlds they describe? Can't they show a little understanding for a pitiful protagonist like me who got stuck with a bastard author?'
"Living rules, huh?"
While Takumi's mind on this side was a whirlwind, on the other side Kaguya—who had finished reading even before Takumi—slightly furrowed her brows.
This so-called set of rules was, in every respect, exceedingly bizarre, giving her a very uneasy feeling. Although she had never believed in so-called ghosts and gods, that strange voice earlier and the terrifying experience of losing control of her body had already shaken Kaguya's worldview somewhat, and now, seeing such a peculiar set of living rules, she couldn't help thinking more about it.
"If this set of rules isn't a prank… uh, that reminds me—where is the clock in this room again?"
Thinking of that "absolutely precise" clock mentioned in the rules, Takumi immediately wanted to find the room's clock to confirm the current time.
And right then, he subconsciously lowered his head, and noticed the black watch on his left wrist.
A watch?
'When did I put on a watch?'
It didn't show any brand, had no decorations, and looked like a very ordinary black watch.
Before his gaze landed on the watch, Takumi had felt nothing of its existence, with no sense at all that something was on his wrist. Only when he discovered the watch's existence did he finally feel that there was indeed something on his hand.
Then, when Takumi raised his left hand to carefully examine the watch, he found that the watch face was already covered with cracks, and there was only a single minute hand on a dial with 12 marks—no hour hand and no second hand. At the moment, that minute hand was pointing straight at the zero mark, with no intention of moving in the slightest, and Takumi did not see any buttons or switches that could adjust the hands on this watch.
What kind of weird thing is this?
'Could this be my protagonist's cheat?'
Right away, Takumi thought of that—or rather, facing the miserable situation that might be coming, he could only use such thoughts to comfort himself a little, so as not to sink into too bleak a state.
"Ah—~"
A shrill female scream suddenly rang out at this moment, seemingly from the room next door.
'What's this situation—this stock-trope kind of strange scream that suddenly sounds at the start of the story to drive the plot forward. Don't you think this routine is a bit old-fashioned? Is it that if I go out next I'll find a corpse, then after everyone spouts a bunch of nonsense, a middle-aged man will suddenly collapse to the ground, and then a grade-schooler hiding behind him will start speechifying and identify the culprit on the spot?'
'Eh, that actually wouldn't be bad—it'd be a hundred times, even more than ninety times, better than joining some rule-based horror story game.'
"Should we go out and take a look at what's going on? I'm afraid we're not the only two trapped here."
Takumi lightly coughed and spoke to Kaguya across the table.
Then he noticed that the printed sheet on the table had already been taken into Kaguya's hands; she flipped it over and over, trying to look at it from all sorts of angles, and finally even turned to the blank back to examine it carefully.
Is she trying to see whether there are any hidden words?
'Speaking of which, I had only just gotten distracted for a moment and she silently took the printed sheet away—I didn't hear a sound at all. Are two-dimensional women all this outrageous?'
"Let's go out and take a look at the situation. I'll give you the rules sheet to hold. My clothes don't have pockets, so I can't carry something like this."
Having apparently confirmed that no hidden information existed, Kaguya placed the printed sheet back on the table and spoke calmly to Takumi.
Although she said they should go out and have a look, Kaguya herself did not move her feet. Clearly, she was waiting for Takumi to take the lead and had no intention of going ahead of him. Takumi said nothing about it, simply folded up the printed sheet, slipped it into his pocket, then turned his gaze toward the single wooden door in the room and the doorway on the other side leading to the kitchen. He then walked straight to the damaged door, gripped the handle, and pulled it open.
[Creak—yaa—]
An unbearably harsh scraping sound accompanied the overly heavy movement that made opening it extremely difficult.
The joints of this door were almost completely rusted through, basically jammed to the point of immobility, and could only be forced open by brute strength.
As the door opened, what appeared before Takumi was a small wall clock to the side, and the dilapidated wall barely more than 1 m beyond the door.
This door opened at the end of a long, narrow corridor.
From that narrow, drawn-out, deeply uncomfortable passage, at the end was a right-angle turn leading into another long, narrow corridor.
At the end of that corridor, Takumi saw a half-open toilet—an old-style squat toilet, which looked like it hadn't been cleaned in some time. But at least he didn't see anything disgusting enough to excite some degenerate, so that was a relief. Next to the toilet door was the main entrance, an iron door, somewhat rusted, looking very old.
Takumi tried to recall the structure of this unit: enter through the door—bathroom to the right, a corridor to the left, a right-angle turn then another corridor, then right turn through a door into a small living room combined with a bedroom, with the kitchen off to the side…
What kind of insane house layout is this?
Did the designer of this building have a screw loose?
With that thought in mind, Takumi reached out, grabbed the handle, and pulled the door open at once.
"The lock is broken."
Looking down, Takumi noticed the lock of this door was completely ruined, the lock cylinder unable to spring out, making it impossible to close the door.
At once, a sense of foreboding welled up in him.
Opening the iron door, he stepped into the outer corridor.
Here, it felt even more oppressive than inside the unit, mainly because the corridor itself was extremely narrow, stretching out in a straight line to the left and right. And given how narrow it already was, there were still many cabinets placed in the corridor. These cabinets were tall, fixed as if nailed to the floor and walls, leaving almost no space to climb or grip, with only a small area at the top barely large enough for one adult to lie flat. The corridor was lit with a ghastly white light, shining onto ceilings and walls with peeling paint and cracks everywhere. Along the length of this narrow passage, dark red doors, rust-stained and aged, stood in a row.
On the door Takumi had just come out of, there was a dark red plate marked [204].
Truly the perfect location for filming a horror movie.
The sense of dread in Takumi's heart only grew stronger.