Fu Qian wasn’t looking for anything extraordinary when that letter arrived. It wasn’t marked urgent, didn’t carry any official seals, and honestly looked like the kind of spam people usually delete without opening. A warehouse manager position in Lincheng City. That alone sounded ordinary enough. What didn’t make sense was the rest of it—an annual salary that bordered on absurd, generous benefits, and the promise of remote work whenever possible. Then there was the last part, buried neatly at the bottom: a vague warning about “occupational risks.” No explanation. No examples. Just enough to feel deliberate.
His first reaction was irritation. The kind you feel when someone assumes you’ll fall for an obvious trick. Still, curiosity won out. Fu Qian wasn’t desperate, but he wasn’t exactly content either. After hesitating longer than he’d like to admit, he signed the work badge included with the letter.
Everything went dark.
When he came to, Fu Qian was no longer anywhere close to Lincheng City. He stood inside a warehouse so vast it felt endless, its ceiling swallowed by shadows. Weak lights flickered overhead, barely revealing long corridors of shelves stacked with uniform silver-white boxes. There were no windows, no sense of time, and no exit in sight. The air itself felt heavy, pressing against his chest in a way that made breathing feel deliberate. This, apparently, was his new workplace.
Orientation didn’t make things clearer. The materials he was given were cold, mechanical, and unsettlingly vague. His responsibility was to manage stored items. What those items were wasn’t specified. Instead, there were warnings—mentions of hallucinations, psychological instability, and abnormal phenomena caused by the “special nature” of the goods. It was the kind of information that should have come before a contract, not after.
The reality of the job becomes impossible to ignore when something goes wrong.
A containment box malfunctions, and from within emerges a blood-red eyeball, alive and watching. Alarms don’t blare. No backup arrives. Fu Qian is simply informed that a “leak” has occurred and that he must enter a containment scene to resolve it. The instructions are blunt: survive for one hour. That’s it. No explanation of what he’ll face, no strategy guide. Only one statistic is highlighted—SAN Points. His sanity, measured and tracked. If it hits zero, the consequences are final.
The containment scene doesn’t resemble anything logical. Pain comes first. Endless, inescapable pain. A strange old man appears, administering what he calmly refers to as treatment, though it’s nothing more than drawn-out torment. Fu Qian can’t fight back. He can’t run. Every attempt to resist ends the same way. Failure. Death. An evaluation afterward that coldly lists his mistakes as if he were being graded on office performance rather than survival.
Each failure chips away at him. His SAN Points drop steadily. Reasoning doesn’t work. Lying doesn’t work. The old man seems to see through every thought before it fully forms. The evaluations sting more than the pain, stripping him down with quiet precision. And yet, despite everything, Fu Qian keeps going back. Quitting isn’t presented as an option.
When his SAN Points fall dangerously low, he realizes brute force and clever talk are equally useless. Whatever governs this place follows rules, just not human ones. Searching for another angle, he does something extreme even by his own standards. In the real world, he subjects himself to a childbirth pain simulator, pushing it to its absolute limit—not to punish himself, but to learn. To understand pain deeply enough to remain conscious inside it.
That endurance becomes his tool.
Back inside the containment scene, things don’t suddenly become easy. He experiences brief moments that feel almost peaceful—a moonlit courtyard, silence that feels earned rather than imposed. Then it’s gone. Another unseen blow. Another failure. Still, something changes. With each attempt, fragments of understanding form. His perception sharpens. Details that were once invisible begin to stand out.
Later scenes introduce other presences—creatures that don’t fully belong to any shape he recognizes, guarding places that feel important for reasons he can’t yet explain. The moon appears again. Doors refuse to open unless approached correctly. The world responds less to strength and more to awareness.
Slowly, Fu Qian begins to sense that this warehouse, these containment scenes, and even the horrors inside them aren’t random. They follow a structure, alien but consistent. And surviving here isn’t about winning—it’s about learning how far the rules can bend.
The warehouse manager position was never just a job. It’s a trial, a filter, and a transformation all at once. As Fu Qian continues, it becomes clear that whatever waits ahead won’t simply test his sanity—it will reshape what he believes survival even means.
