Chapter One: Seven Rules and the Eighth Chair

The first time Zhou Ran saw Midnight Zero Pizzeria, he thought it looked like a mouth stretched too wide. Its neon sign hung in the basement of an old shopping mall. More than three hundred guests crowded the entrance, screaming for cameras and waving opening-night coupons stamped with bloody handprints. The media called it the world's first full-sensory immersive horror restaurant: breathing walls, animatronics that remembered names, and storylines generated from each guest's private fears. Zhou Ran saw only the salary—twenty-eight thousand yuan a month, plus a night-shift bonus. It was enough to keep debt collectors away from his mother for a while. It might even make his blacklisted experience as an escape-room designer useful again.