Route Zero

# Route Zero

*A solo journaling game for the cultivator who has lived it all before.*                                            

  ---                                                                                                                 

You are **Bai Yingqiu** — or a name of your own — a senior disciple of the **Cinnabar Reach**, a cultivation sect on the highest peak of a mountain range whose lower slopes you have not walked in many years. In the life you lived once already: on the sixtieth day of a certain summer, your master died in the alchemy hall of a poison no one could name. On the ninetieth day, the outer war reached the mountain, and the sect that had raised you was scattered like ash. You died holding a sword that had never been sharpened for real use.                    

                                                            

  Then you woke up. Younger. Your master alive again. The mountain still standing. You have been sent back — by whom, or why, you do not know — to the first morning of that certain summer.           

                                                            

  **You have ninety days.**                                                                                           

You may cultivate as you were meant to. You may quietly rewrite it. You may burn the mountain to the ground yourself so nothing else can.                                     

The mountain does not know you know.                                                                                

  

  ---                                                                                                                 

                                                            

## What you need to play                                                                                            

- A standard **52-card deck** (no jokers)                                                                           

- A **physical notebook** — the cultivator's diary        

- A pen or brush (ink of any colour except cinnabar red)                                                            

- **One book from your shelf** — see below                                                                          

- A cup of tea, if you like. Warmed slowly.                                                                         

                                                                                                                      

## How it plays                                                                                                     

Draw one card per in-story day. Journal an entry as Bai Yingqiu, moving through a life you have already lived once. Every prompt adjusts one of two tallies: **Fate** (what happened once) and **Regression** (what you make instead).

**The Verse** — a rule specific to this game. Before you begin, you pick one book from your shelf. Any book — poetry works most beautifully, but a novel, a memoir, even a cookbook works. When a prompt tells you to *consult the  Verse*, you open the book to a random page and read the first line you see. That line becomes something the wind carried to you, or something your master once said, or something you had almost remembered.  Different book on your shelf = different game.                                                                      

  

## Three endings                                                                                                    

- **The Fated Ending** — the sixtieth day arrives. The alchemy hall. Write a letter — burned, not sent — to the version of yourself who died at the mountain's fall.      

- **The Regressor's Path** — you have broken fate. Write the scripture your last life did not know how to compose.  

- **The Backlash** — Fate exceeds Regression by ten tallies. The returning soul cannot hold this body. Ritual close.

Sessions are 15–30 minutes. The full game takes 3–6 sittings.                                                        

                                                                                                                      

## What's inside                                                                                                    

- 52 prompts, one per card, one per in-story day                                                                    

- The *Verse* mechanic — original to this work, released under CC-BY

- Two-tally system: **Fate** vs **Regression**                                                                      

- Three fully-written endings + epilogue ("The First Breath After")                                                 

- A content note and safety framework                                                                               

- Six original interior photographs, editorial still-life style                                                     

- Single-column editorial layout, 26 pages, print-ready PDF                                                         

                                                                                                                      

## Content note                                                                                                     

This is a game about being sent back into the body of the person you were before your world ended, with ninety days to decide what to do with a life you have already lost once.  It touches on: grief carried into a life that has not yet earned it, the weight of foreknowledge, sect politics and  their small cruelties, the death of a teacher, doomed loyalty, and the quiet ambition of trying to save what you once could not.                                                                                                     

There is no explicit violence, no gore, no sexual content. The stakes are spiritual and emotional. No prior  familiarity with xianxia is required.

                                                                                                                      

## About the design                                                                                                 

*Route Zero* draws from the long tradition of Chinese regression, cultivation, and immortal-sect fiction — the stories where a protagonist wakes up in a body they have already outlived. All character, sect, world-building, and mechanical elements are original to this game.                                                                      

The *Verse* mechanic (drawing lines from a book on the player's shelf as procedural narrative fuel) is released under Creative Commons Attribution — you may use it in your own game with credit to *Route Zero (Wrong Route Games, 2026)*.                                                                                                             

  ---                                                       

  *If you play, we would like to know what book you chose as the Verse — and what your Bai Yingqiu did with her ninety days.*