"By causing another person to enter a state of sleep through any means, you can obtain one 'Sober Mint Candy'..."
"Using this item allows you to remain completely lucid for three hours..."
Guan Tong frowned, pacing back and forth in his living room.
'If this hidden rule is real, and it applies to everyone, then someone is bound to discover it soon.'
'There are tens of billions of people in the world; at any given moment, someone is doing something. When the Apocalypse Rules were announced, who knows how many people were in a fight. If someone had just knocked another person unconscious and immediately received a Sober Mint Candy, they would quickly realize it's a hidden rule.'
'To maintain an advantage, anyone who discovered this hidden rule would likely choose to keep it a secret. But because the trigger condition isn't too difficult, it's bound to be exposed and spread sooner or later... Soon, large numbers of people will know about this hidden rule. What would that lead to? A massive free-for-all?'
'No, that's not right... If I consider this from a national perspective, once the authenticity of this hidden rule is confirmed, the powers that be would definitely lock down the information to prevent a free-for-all. They'd forbid people from going outside and might even temporarily shut down the internet to stop people from fighting each other.'
'In that case, if you wanted to profit from this hidden rule, the optimal strategy would be to knock out as many people as possible before the news spreads and everyone is forbidden from going out, just to get enough Sober Mint Candies. Then you'd lock yourself at home and rely on those candies to get through the seventy-two hours.'
'Something like that...'
Guan Tong shook his head. He had no intention of doing it.
Knowing that anyone who fell unconscious would die, such an act was no different from murder in his eyes.
And it wasn't just killing one person.
Once you started, you couldn't stop.
Because one Sober Mint Candy only kept you awake for 3 hours, while the Sleep Deprivation rule lasted for 72 hours.
In other words, to guarantee a one hundred percent survival rate, you'd need to take one every three hours, for a total of 24 candies. Even cutting that in half would mean 12 candies, which was equivalent to stealing 12 lives.
'To increase your own chances of survival, will you choose to plunder another's right to survive?'
The hidden rule's description had laid the nature of the matter bare.
Guan Tong's choice was "no."
His phone suddenly chimed—not a regular call, but the specific notification sound for a voice call on a social media app.
Guan Tong glanced at it. The call was surprisingly from his class group chat. He answered, a little surprised. "Fang Qian?"
A female voice, filled with anxiety, came from the phone. "Guan Tong, are you home? Are you alone?"
Fang Qian was Guan Tong's classmate, a pretty and quiet girl with thin-framed glasses. Her grades were excellent; she had never ranked below the top three in their class.
"Yeah. What's up?"
"Guan Tong, I... My parents are both at a research institute out of town. All the transportation has shut down, so they can't get back, and I'm all alone at home. The official advisory said it's best not to be alone for these 72 hours, and that talking with someone is one of the best ways to stay awake... So I, I thought of you, because you..."
Guan Tong understood.
His classmates all knew he was an orphan, so it was only natural that he would be home alone right now.
As for Fang Qian's parents, they were a pair of well-known scientists. His classmates had all heard that they were constantly traveling between various Science Academies for work.
With this sudden disaster, her parents were stuck out of town. It wasn't strange that, in her fear, she would think of Guan Tong.
"Do you want to get through these 72 hours with me?" Guan Tong asked directly.
"Um... can I?"
"Yes. Come over to my place now. I'll send you my address."
"That's great! Thank you, Guan Tong."
"Don't mention it. Having someone to talk to will help me stay awake, too."
"Okay... I'm on my way now!"
Guan Tong hung up and sent his address to Fang Qian.
About half an hour later, the doorbell rang.
After confirming through the peephole that it was Fang Qian, Guan Tong opened the door and let her in.
"Guan Tong, sorry to bother you..."
Fang Qian was still wearing her school uniform, white with blue stripes. She walked into the room carrying two bags, looking at Guan Tong a little shyly.
"It's fine. Sit wherever you like," Guan Tong said.
"Okay... I brought some food. Oh, and this."
Fang Qian took a box of instant coffee sticks out of one of the bags. There were a dozen or so left inside.
"I used to drink a packet when I stayed up late doing practice tests. I never thought they'd come in handy like this."
Guan Tong said, "Evening self-study at school doesn't end until almost 9, right? You go home and stay up even later doing practice tests. No wonder your grades are so good."
Fang Qian pushed up her glasses, a little embarrassed, then sat down with Guan Tong in the living room.
She noticed Guan Tong hadn't turned on the TV or put on any music, and asked about it, a little curious.
"It's not necessary yet," Guan Tong explained. "It's like the coffee you brought. That stuff doesn't just create energy out of thin air; it's essentially overdrafting your body. If you drink it now when you're not tired, it won't help when you're truly exhausted because you'll have nothing left to overdraft."
Fang Qian had a moment of realization. "Oh, I see. Hmm, that makes sense. It's the same with music, then. If you play it loud now when you're not tired, it won't have much of an effect when you're actually getting sleepy."
"Exactly."
After that brief exchange, they ran out of things to talk about.
The two of them didn't know each other well; they had probably exchanged less than a hundred sentences in their three years of high school.
Guan Tong picked up a book to read, while Fang Qian, feeling a bit anxious, kept scrolling through her phone, occasionally glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.
'He's so unbelievably calm...'
'The internet and the class group chat are blowing up, but Guan Tong isn't paying any attention at all. He even has the presence of mind to read a book. It's just...'
Fang Qian thought to herself that the reason she had thought of Guan Tong, found his social media account in the class group chat to call him, and even worked up the courage to come to his house, was all because of how he had acted before leaving school.
The way he had slapped Xu Beipeng in class to check if he was still breathing, and how he had ignored the homeroom teacher to be the first one to lead the way out of school... For some reason, all of it made her feel an inexplicable sense of security being near him.
After more than an hour of mutual silence, Fang Qian bit her lip and took the initiative to strike up a conversation with Guan Tong, using information she had just seen online.
"Guan Tong, did you know? A lot of people online are demanding to go to the hospital."
"The hospital?" Guan Tong looked up at her.
"Yeah," Fang Qian said. "Apparently some medical students are saying you can stay awake by taking pills or getting shots with stimulants... Do you think that would actually work?"
"Maybe. But even if you could get through it that way, not everyone would have access. Those kinds of drugs or injections are definitely in limited supply. There's no way they could provide them for everyone."
"That's true. Oh..." As Fang Qian was speaking, she saw something on her phone and exclaimed in disbelief, "Someone is actually thanking the Fire Thief!"
Guan Tong guessed, "Probably someone who wanted to commit suicide."
Fang Qian looked at Guan Tong in surprise, then nodded. "Yeah, the person who posted said they had cancer and were always suffering from the pain. They'd thought about ending it several times but never had the courage. Now, they can just fall asleep and leave this world peacefully and without pain... So they're grateful to the Fire Thief for bringing about the Apocalypse Rules."