Why is my journey to the world of anime a strange tale of rules?

Even though Goto Ichiri had clearly explained to everyone what they needed to do to survive before being forced to leave temporarily by the "internal medicine doctor," and had even led them to the vicinity of the Jin'yō Apartment, the survivors, who had been painstakingly organized, fell into chaos again after the girl's departure. Many of them hadn't actually listened to or remembered Ichiri's words from beginning to end, so when the situation became critical again, they were completely disoriented and running around aimlessly.

And it is obvious that such a person has no way of surviving.

"Everyone, follow me! Follow me! To the apartment! To that apartment!!!"

However, just as there are those who fail to seize any opportunities from beginning to end, there are also those who listen carefully and stand up at crucial moments.

A tall, strong man shouted to the survivors around him as he ran down the street with his daughter, heading towards the nearby Sheep Apartment.

"Yes...that's right, the apartment! To the apartment! Everyone, get to the apartment quickly!"

Upon hearing this, another survivor shouted and grabbed his gray-haired parents, and they quickly started running.

"The apartment? The apartment! Everyone hurry up and follow me to the apartment!"

The appearance of the leader temporarily restored some order to the chaotic group. Those who had been completely disoriented now had a direction and began to follow the leading group forward.

The monsters naturally couldn't understand what the survivors' change in behavior meant; they simply continued their inflexible killing spree, grabbing those who hadn't calmed down and were still running around aimlessly.

The first person entered the apartment building.

But the other person wasn't the tall man who had called for others to follow, nor was he a survivor who quickly caught up after realizing what was happening. Instead, it was someone who had been following Goto Ichiri from the very beginning, and after hearing Ichiri's words before leaving, he was the first to run towards the apartment, and he never told anyone around him what those words were, clearly intending to escape alone.

Even after stepping inside, the first person to enter turned back, seemingly intending to lock the door. It was unclear whether he wanted to stop the monsters from entering or prevent more survivors from getting in. Whatever his intentions, success was currently impossible.

Bang!

Several men running ahead exerted their strength together, ramming into the apartment door and breaking it open in one go.

The person who initially tried to close the door was knocked away and fell to the ground. Before he could even stand up, he was kicked in the chest, screaming in pain as he fell back to the ground.

More people ventured into the only building lit up in the darkness.

Several quick-thinking women rushed to the counter in the lobby. A middle-aged woman who vaguely remembered what had been said grabbed the register and quickly filled in her name, her husband's name, her children's names, and so on.

Then, instinctively, the survivor didn't want to hand the booklet to the other survivors, but instead tried to put it in her own pocket. Her action was immediately noticed by the others, and a young girl rushed forward to snatch it, but was kicked to the ground and cursed by the middle-aged woman.

Before she could utter a few more curses, a young man came up and punched her, making her nose crooked and causing her to lie on the ground dizzy. He then snatched the booklet from her.

Before the newly arrived survivors could complete the registration process, others reached out to snatch it, quickly escalating into a brawl involving seven or eight people. Even as calls to stop this irrational behavior and attempts to restrain them arose, those trying to take advantage of the chaos to steal the registers further complicated the situation. This didn't even include the issue of the pen used for registration. The pen, originally with the older woman who had been there initially, had fallen to the ground during the struggle and then been kicked around by the fighting crowd; its current location was now completely unknown.

Meanwhile, more people had already entered the Zhenyang Apartment.

Those who survived by not fleeing into the apartment with the others must either possess genuine skill or be exceptionally lucky. After barely escaping the monsters' pursuit, these people discovered the other survivors gathered in the apartment and rushed in as well. The crucial problem was that many of these people hadn't heard what Ichiri had said earlier, or if they had, they hadn't paid attention or even believed me. Therefore, these people, along with other survivors who had already escaped, simply barged into the apartment without registering, running rampant from the first floor to the third floor, the central plaza, and even the basement.

The monsters outside the apartment did not come any closer.

They stopped outside the apartment, silently watching the still chaotic scene inside. Even though a semblance of order had been established not long ago, it had crumbled again upon the arrival of the survivors. Like bystanders in a play, they remained motionless, simply observing.

Then, the strange creatures in the apartment began to appear.

It is unknown who was wandering around on the first floor. After discovering that the door to the room on the first floor could not be opened, they came to the inner square on the first floor and stepped on a corpse lying in the grass without noticing. After stepping on the corpse, they looked down and stared directly into the corpse's eyes.

It is unknown who ran all the way to the second floor, and while trying to turn the doors of the various rooms on the second floor, they accidentally opened the door to the laundry room. Although they immediately heard strange cat meowing coming from inside the door, the survivor did not pay much attention to it and went directly into the laundry room.

It's unclear which group of people broke into the apartment's basement and reached the entrance to the secret passage that Hongxia had opened. They followed the passage into rooms containing different paintings and the corridor connecting those rooms. One of them noticed several room doors whose signs had been removed and which were locked. Then, perhaps out of simple curiosity about what might be inside, or perhaps out of fear of some terrifying monster lurking within and a desire to check beforehand, someone kicked open the locked door with force.

The chaos continues to escalate.

When the first person died in the apartment, no one even noticed because there were no other survivors around.

Then, when someone discovered that something was also active inside the apartment, screams of terror and death thuds erupted once again. At the same time, the struggle for the register in the apartment lobby had barely ended. Several relatively strong men reached a compromise: someone found a dropped pen and picked it up. They planned to take turns signing to resolve the immediate trouble as quickly as possible. But after only a few names were registered, something bloody flowed into the lobby, followed by another wave of death and fear.

On the street outside the apartment, Goto Ichiri saved about 150 survivors before being forced to leave by the "internal medicine doctor".

With Ichiri's departure and the attacks from the monsters, coupled with the fact that many survivors were not in good condition, only a little over 40 people successfully completed the "reach the apartment" mission alone, while the remaining more than 100 people all died on the street outside the apartment.

Entering the apartment doesn't guarantee safety. The arrival of the [Internal Medicine Doctor] has caused increasingly bizarre changes throughout the instance. The scramble for the register and the fact that some people still haven't truly grasped the rules of survival have triggered the unpredictable creatures in the apartment area to go out of control, causing the situation to spiral out of control rapidly.

squeak-

The door to room 109, which should have been locked, has been quietly opened.

Shizuko Ogiyama's bloodied face emerged from behind the door, staring blankly towards the hall.

On the second floor of the apartment building, devoid of any human presence, the faint meows of a cat echoed from one end of the corridor to the other, leaving behind trails of blood-red cat paw prints on the floor.

The survivors who had already received the keys vaguely sensed something was wrong, while those filling out the registration forms and those waiting to fill them out felt nothing. Only a few people noticed that the surrounding temperature seemed to be dropping.

Until they saw the corridor door on one side of the hall open slowly without any wind.

The number of people dying is constantly increasing.

As the number of deaths increased, the monsters within the apartment building grew increasingly frenzied. Especially with many survivors accidentally triggering the rules and unsuspectingly engaging the monsters, the Sheep Array Apartment, which had previously been a place where ordinary people could barely rest, was now becoming more dangerous than under curfew. There were even monsters that didn't meet the current level, possibly reaching the Red Moon level, who somehow found an entrance and started wandering around.

Outside the secret room, there were still more than a dozen players alive, but whether that number would decrease further, and by how much, was unknown.

Goto Ichiri, who was already fighting against the "internal medicine doctor," naturally had no way of knowing what the survivors had done.

Fujiwara Chika, who was rushing back with Yamada Ryo, naturally couldn't have known what was happening beforehand. At most, she only vaguely sensed that something was amiss.

As for the only ones who might have known about the survivors' actions and reacted to them—the Ijichi Nijika sisters and the Fujiwara family of four, who were hiding in Room 303—they were equally unaware of what was happening outside.

The reason they didn't know is quite simple.

Because within this hidden room, inexplicable and eerie phenomena had begun to appear. And these strange phenomena, once they appeared, started to worsen; the temperature inside the room continued to drop, making everyone inside clearly realize that the room was becoming unsafe.

Tap tap—tap tap—

A knocking sound came from the locked monitoring room.

Peeping eyes peeked through the crack in the door of the small bedroom.

Breathing sounds came from beside them, but when they turned their heads, they couldn't find the source of the sound.

In every room, in every place, in every corner, something unusual seemed to be brewing, gradually accumulating power.

Perhaps we should leave the hidden room for a while, at least until these strange phenomena subside. Otherwise, if we stay here, something terrible might happen soon?

Having been fooled by the eerie figure in the surveillance footage, Hongxia was hesitant to confirm the situation outside. However, knowing she couldn't just sit and wait to die, she bit her lip and decided to take a gamble to see if she could escape this crisis.

Chapter Sixty-Seven: The Anomaly Inside the Safe House and the Even Bigger Anomaly in the Apartment.

I could sense that there were other people in the room.

"Huh...huh..."

Hongxia's breathing was slightly rapid, and her small hands gripped the hem of her clothes tightly, unable to suppress her nervousness.

She could sense that this once relatively safe secret room now contained people other than them, or something that wasn't human.

After she locked eyes with the figures on the surveillance camera and realized what they were, the secret room silently began to change. From that moment on, this room, which was supposed to be a refuge from the dangers, gradually became abnormal, as if it were actually the source of the danger.

Tread-

Clear footsteps echoed from inside the closed monitoring room.

Someone was moving around inside, pacing lightly at the doorway, or perhaps peeking through the crack in the door.

Tick-tick-tick-

The clear sound of liquid dripping also came from the direction of the closed bedroom door. It seemed that something was slowly flowing on the ground, but if you listened carefully, you could not identify the source of the sound.

sizzle-

So far, in the living room where everyone is staying, although there haven't been any particularly obvious abnormalities, the lights have started to flicker faintly. And as time goes on, the frequency of the flickering is gradually increasing, as if the lights in the room might go out at any moment.

What will happen next?

Will continuing to stay like this really prevent more serious problems from arising?

Hongxia remembered the rules about the monitoring room she had seen before. She remembered that it stated that if someone saw someone they knew on the monitor, they had to close the monitoring room door and wait for at least three hours before they could enter to check.

In addition, the rule emphasizes that one must absolutely not communicate with anyone seen in the surveillance footage, stating that if such communication occurs, those beings could suddenly appear in the safe house, appearing out of nowhere. The rule list doesn't mention what would happen if this happened, only stating that "the chances of survival are slim." This made Hongxia very uneasy. Even though she had repeatedly reviewed the events and confirmed that she hadn't spoken to anything in the footage, the strange phenomena happening in the safe house still made her suspect and worry that things might have already reached their worst possible stage.

Ultimately, did she really not communicate or converse with those things? Even if she didn't consciously speak to the things in the surveillance footage, what if the conversation actually took place unintentionally, but she just didn't realize it?

"Woo..."

A girl was sobbing softly.

Hongxia turned her head and noticed that it was Fujiwara Moeha, the youngest sister of the Fujiwara family. She was a middle school student, and although her physical development far exceeded that of her peers, she was clearly far from mature enough to handle such extraordinary things as ghosts and monsters. Therefore, the little girl was quite frightened, and her mother, Fujiwara Maho, held her in her arms, comforting her by gently patting her shoulders and back.

The eldest sister of the Fujiwara family, Fujiwara Toyomi, was sitting next to her unconscious father, Fujiwara Daichi, taking care of him. However, this girl, who bore a striking resemblance to Chika but with an even more impressive figure, was not entirely calm and was also terrified by the various anomalies occurring in the safe house.

zizi——

The flashing frequency of the lights is increasing.

The feeling of being watched in the dark by something is becoming clearer and clearer.

Hongxia was absolutely certain that the gaze was directed at her from beginning to end. After all, she was the one who had truly broken the rules here, so the root of these anomalies probably lay with her.

Perhaps, once I leave this safe house, these abnormal phenomena will gradually be suppressed.

Such thoughts surfaced in the girl's mind, and once they appeared, she couldn't tear her attention away from them. The abnormal phenomena in the safe house were becoming increasingly apparent, and whether things would recover after the stipulated three hours was completely unknown to her. On the contrary, these escalating strange phenomena seemed to be showing signs of becoming even more terrifying.

Something has changed.

Being inside the safe house, she couldn't see these changes, but Hongxia was certain she could sense them. As her perception became clearer, some ominous anomaly was gradually spreading as she was trapped in this distorted place and unable to leave the safe house.

If we're talking about the source of these current symptoms, it should be the earthquake that happened not long ago. It was after that that these feelings became more pronounced, and it was after that that a group of people inexplicably appeared on the surveillance footage. It was also after that that these strange phenomena started occurring in the safe house.

So, if something really goes wrong...

"Well……"

She didn't speak, but after feeling the prying gaze, Hongxia couldn't help but shudder.

Just a moment ago, I must have been being watched.

Being watched from somewhere in this room by something extremely dangerous.

Can't go wrong.

With such a clear gaze, the girl could now understand what was hidden within it, thanks to her current level of sensory perception.

So the girl raised her head and looked at Xingge, who had been guarding her side.

Even though she wasn't particularly brave, Ijichi Seika's face was pale at this moment, showing that she was not calm in the face of danger.

Noticing her younger sister's gaze, Xingge was initially taken aback, unsure of what she was trying to do. Then, quickly realizing something from Hongxia's expression, she became serious, reaching out to press Hongxia's shoulder and shaking her head earnestly. Even though she didn't fully understand what Hongxia wanted to do, based on her understanding of her sister, Xingge was quite certain that what Hongxia wanted to do was dangerous and irrational, so she immediately intended to stop her.

Is she really my sister? Even without any verbal communication, I can quickly understand what she wants to do.

Hongxia felt a pang of emotion, but what she couldn't ignore at this moment was the increasingly intense and clear sense of being watched. Therefore, without hesitation, the girl stood up, exchanged a glance with the people inside, and decisively walked towards the door of the safe house.