校园公约

校园公约 #1

by 榆鱼

很遗憾，你被非自然工程大学录取了。
故事的开始源于一封奇怪的录取通知书，
奇怪的校园守则，神秘的学生会和社团，骇人听闻的规则世界……
全能学长秦洲、小天才学弟林异和天赋各异的其他同学，
规则世界中共度生死，成为挚友。
救赎与毁灭交织，危险与机遇并存，
被卷入“规则世界”的人们，
以一本薄薄的《校园手册》为线索，艰难地寻找着出路……

原作名: 我又弄崩了校园怪谈

318 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2024

Reviews

[Dianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chinese title: 校园公约 / 我又弄崩了校园怪谈[无限]

Not my usual cup of tea as I'm a huge scaredy cat and some of the worlds were super creepy, but overall I really enjoyed following along our main characters as they solved each world.

The premise of the story is very innovative; I don't think I've read anything quite like it before. Our MC, Lin Yi, is admitted to the Unnatural Engineering University, a university with odd rules right from the start. The admission notice comes with a campus rulebook, a book that becomes very important as the environment of the university is explained. Turns out that there are monsters on campus, and each of them corresponds to a rule in the rulebook. Each monster has their own rule world, and students can be sucked into the world via a specific set of circumstances, such as being around an open window or getting your shoes stuck in cement. Once they're in the world, they have to figure out the main plot line of this rule world and also who the monster is (it takes over one of the student participants and guides other students to break the rules of the world) in order to escape. It's kind of like what would happen if you combined a super realistic escape room, one where participants can die, with Werewolf or Mafia. What an interesting concept!

Some of the monsters' rule worlds have been resolved, i.e. students have already gone in and figured out the storyline, so these can be easily avoided. For example, previous generations resolved one monster rule where if you start sinking in cement, you have to take off your shoes and run away to prevent getting sucked into the world. Or another example is that hot water is only available during certain hours, otherwise there's a chance you may get sucked into a different rule world. Even though the students find themselves constantly at risk, they've become more organized over the years and there's a student council that helps protect the regular students. Our ML and the president of the student council is Qin Zhou, who has demonstrated a strong ability to resolve rule worlds.

Most of the story focuses on exploring the various rule worlds alongside our two main characters. The premises for each greatly differ, ranging from a psychiatric hospital to a haunted villa to a city dealing with a serial killer, and I enjoyed learning about each world through the eyes of our protagonists. Later on, the story shifts a bit more to delve into the MC's history and why he went to the Unnatural Engineering University to begin with, and the romance eventually starts as well. Even though the story is a longer one with 200+ chapters, and each chapter is fairly long, I was fully engaged and never bored. It's definitely a page turner; I stayed up late reading multiple nights in a row because I had trouble putting the story down.

Heed the horror tag for this book, as some of the worlds are super creepy, and inevitably there are always some gory deaths. The author does an amazing job of building up the creepy ambiance, for example the MC will often hear sounds of something outside his door coming for him or he'll hear screaming from a neighboring room as someone is killed. The sense of suspense is strong too. I'd say the first world was the creepiest for me and had me second guessing whether to keep reading, but the rest of them weren't as bad, luckily. Otherwise I don't think my heart would've survived!

Our main characters are both super smart, so it was a pleasure to follow along and see how they resolve each world. There's so much they have to pay attention to, since they have to figure out the protagonist of each world as well as the related plotline, all the while maintaining vigilance against all the other players who may be the lurking monster. The monsters don't understand emotion, but they have access to all memories of the person they take over, so it's very easy for them to mimic existing behavior. You need to have very strong observation and logical deduction skills in order to beat these worlds. As I kept reading, I constantly had the thought that if I were to ever get sucked into one of these worlds, I'd be the first one gone. Plus one of the worlds featured a closed time travel loop, so it was quite challenging to keep up and wrap my head around what was happening. I have to give the author kudos for being able to write such intricate worlds and smart characters, it couldn't have been easy.

Some spoiler-ish thoughts ahead as well as a short summary of all the rule worlds:

I had no clue that Lin Yi was a monster himself! I knew something was definitely going on with his alternate personality, so when that was revealed to be the 4-4 monster I wasn't super surprised, but especially because of this I wasn't expecting Lin Yi to be a monster as well. The author really did a good job keeping readers in the dark here, but looking back it makes a lot of sense. Lin Yi, as the 1-3 monster, has the ability to convince others, an ability that he uses multiple times throughout the story. But he uses it so innocuously so you don't think twice about it. Plus he does have a hard time understanding his feelings towards Qin Zhou, which I thought was because he's inexperienced but in hindsight should be attributed to him being a monster as well.

The author did a good job of wrapping up all the plot points. The existence of the 0-1 monster, how Lin Yi came to be, how his parents attended the Unnatural Engineering University many years apart but still was able to raise him as a family of 3, even the origin of his name, everything came together so well! I was seriously super impressed. The ending was a bit dicey for a bit there with LIn Yi's mutual death along the 0-1 monster, but I knew it was a happy ending and the author didn't disappoint.

Here's a quick list of the rule worlds for my reference:

7-7 rule world: a cruel father made his daughter into a vase girl, using this to attract spectators and earn dirty money by opening the Mystery House. He also hired helpers, providing full room and board, so the students bethe employees.

2-6 rule world: There are no ghosts on campus, if one appears... (to be added...). This one follows a girl who's really into ghosts and the supernatural. She hosts her friends at her villa and plays ghost summoning games, but unknown to her, there's a crazy murderer who broke into her home at the same time. This one was really hard because Qin Zhou was the 2-6 monster and he really threw me off with his mind games.

18-6 rule world: a mental patient in a psychiatric hospital killed all of the staff and rebranded the location as a sanatorium, where wealthy clients can come and have their memories transferred into young healthy bodies, i.e. the student participants, via various animals with strong regenerative abilities.

4-4 rule world: a world with closed time loop travel with ties to Lin Yi's mom Yuan Yuan, who died here 10 years ago. The participants are reporters and need to track down the serial killer Shunxi. The time travel happens by falling asleep while touching various objects related to Cen Qian, and they'll spend a couple hours in the past reliving whatever memory is tied to the object. This one was the hardest for me to follow, as one person can revisit the past and be seen by another person who revisits the same past on a different day. This lead to multiple characters wandering around as Shunxi, which was crazy to follow. Needless to say I was quite confused at times.

8-4 rule world: a school-based world in which the monster is a poor cat whose children were stolen and tortured to death by a student who use the dead cats to cast curses on the students who bullied her. This one was hard to figure out because there are two ways to get cursed here, either by receiving the cursed transmission letter or getting a cat curse by the protagonist.

Then they encounter a high level monster in the real world, who drew participants in via an escape room game called Xiushen Academy. The premise of this world is that this little boy was sent to an obedience school by his mom, where he was beaten and starved by the adults at the school with no chance to escape. What's interesting here is that every time one of the 27 participants died, the whole world would "reset" to the beginning again, so they had to learn the correct behavior to avoid triggering the "adults" from punishing them. Because they encountered this monster in the wild, the 0-1 monster finally makes an appearance at the end to try and bring it under his control and get added to the university's campus book.

1-3 rule world: Human life cannot be bought with money on campus. If such a transaction occurs... (to be supplemented). The most difficult world in the campus rulebook. It's been there for many years and has stayed unresolved the entire time. Each student council president ends their tenure by attempting to resolve this world and failing. It's set in a fantastical city called the Never Sleeping City, a ginormous casino/trading hall/hotel complex where money rules and the poor have no rights. What makes this world interesting is that it's the only world to have a fantastical setting, featuring a mermaid who's lost her tail and a castle with a prince and princess. As a participant, you start with pawning off various body parts for money, and your only hope is to increase the money by making it big at the Mermaid Hall casino.

This isn't generally a funny book, but Cheng Yang really cracked me up in the 1-3 world when he discovered that he could make lots of money quickly by making the mermaid cry XP I feel like I have to include that here:

Cheng Yang: "What? Don't look at me like that. I'm fine. I didn't pawn any part of me. I pawned the mermaid's tears."

Looking at the three people in the room, Cheng Yang explained: "'Miss Mermaid' really knows Lin Zhen! As soon as I showed her the portrait, she started crying. Her tears were pearls! I took it to the pawn cabinet and asked the price. I couldn't believe it. A pearl was worth 10,000 yuan. Ten thousand gold!"

Cheng Yang said excitedly, "The unit price is simply unbeatable! I ran back to Mermaid Hall and I told Miss Mermaid a story with Lin Zhen in it. Miss Mermaid burst into tears again when I did. And that's where all this came from."

"Actually, there could have been more was afraid she'd go blind from all the crying."

0-1 rule world: this was tricky to find, as it's a world hidden in a time rewind of the 4-4 rule world by the 0-1 monster using the 4-4 monster's ability. This was sad to read, not only because the 0-1 monster had such a terrible upbringing and the whole world revolves around reliving his memories, but because Qin Zhou and Lin Yi both faced extremely difficult choices. Qin Zhou had to choose between recognizing Lin Yi as a monster and removing everything good in him, or not recognizing him but compromising the safety of all the regular students who came into this world with him. And then Lin Yi eventually had to choose whether to mutually destroy himself and the 0-1 monster, or to live on but that would mean the 01- monster lives on as well along with the Unnatural Engineering University.


I absolutely loved this novel. Would highly recommend to anyone who likes reading books that make them think. Just make sure you can handle the horror elements, which can be quite scary and gory.