Steam-Punk-Style Alice's Park

Yeah. This deduction would only mean anything if the real killer was also among the players and it began right there at the scene.

Yu Xing's eyes flashed. The madness in them was suppressed beneath absolute calm. He felt the scenery before him shudder, and everything in sight shattered like glass.

[The following is information about this deduction game]

[This deduction's prompt is dark red, like congealed blood.]

[Medium Deduction: Alice's Park]

[Type: Mapping Deduction Game]

[Analysis: This type of deduction is based on a real-life case. Its rules and order are distorted to form an absurd space. The degree to which the game's contents relate to reality varies, but the game will ultimately point to some of the truth.]

[This deduction game is for six players]

[This deduction game does not use up real-world time]

After the world shattered into fragments, they were rearranged and reassembled in a chaotic jumble, forming a space completely different from the one before.

The whole process took no more than two or three seconds. During those seconds, Yu Xing couldn't move, like a moviegoer watching a film.

"Great. At least this time I didn't have to deal with the usual routine of everything going black and my consciousness getting ripped away." He muttered under his breath, then stepped out of his confinement as the world took shape and glanced around.

The school, the students, the security guards, the tourists... They were all gone.

In their place was an amusement park. From where he stood, he could see familiar attractions like a carousel, bumper cars, and a towering Ferris wheel in the distance, as well as loudspeakers everywhere.

The strangest thing was that there was no sky.

Or rather, the original sky was completely covered by a hemispherical dome. It was assembled from metal panels, with countless elegant, intricately engineered gears visible through the gaps, turning without pause.

Large metal rings extended from its surface, each holding a massive ornament. The dome was at least thirty stories high.

A gigantic sphere was embedded at the very center of the dome. Warm, brilliant light radiated from within it, much like the sun's, but far gentler.

"What kind of bizarre steampunk aesthetic is this..." Yu Xing gazed upward, wonder in his eyes.

He had never experienced an environment like this firsthand. He'd only seen them in certain games and movies, so he couldn't help being fascinated.

Just looking around, there was not the slightest connection between this place and the crime scene. It truly lived up to its label of [absurd]. The deduction space created by the distortion made absolutely no sense.

After admiring it for a few seconds, Yu Xing's interest in the place hadn't diminished at all, and his curiosity about the case had grown right along with it.

He looked himself over. He was wearing the same clothes as in reality, but the things in his pockets—his phone, keys, ID card, and so on—had all disappeared. They hadn't even left him a tissue.

All he had left was his handsome face... Well, and a kind, beautiful, pure soul—at least, that was what Yu Xing couldn't help thinking.

Perhaps something out there had heard his thoughts and couldn't stand the second half, so it chose to interrupt his shameless self-praise over the loudspeakers.

A hollow female voice sounded from all of them at once. "Attention, dear visitors! Please follow the arrows to Alice's Square within ten minutes to draw your identity cards. Miss Alice can hardly wait to play with you~"

As the announcement played, a dark red arrow appeared on the ground at Yu Xing's feet, pointing straight toward the Ferris wheel.

Yu Xing gave it a curious glance, then cheerfully set off.

He passed the bumper cars and carousel, then went by several extravagantly modern metal plants. They were dark brown, and gears on their branches spun rapidly. Now and then, a pair of transparent glass spheres revealed the machinery inside.

"How interesting..." After observing them for a moment, Yu Xing started wanting to take one of these two-person-tall trees home as a decoration.

But he only had ten minutes, and he had no idea how far Alice's Square was, so he regretfully left the plants behind and kept following the arrows that appeared on the walls and tree trunks.

Before long, he saw a hall of mirrors and spinning coffee chairs. All the attractions had been given a steampunk makeover, making them look incredibly appealing.

At last, Alice's Square came into view.

It was a small, circular plaza enclosed by a knee-high stone fence. The bricks were red and black, with an entrance on each of the four sides.

Inside the fence stood a tall model tower. From far away, Yu Xing could see the large red heart on it, the Gothic clock face beneath it—which was two meters across—and the small red-and-black checkered flags covering the tower.

By the time he stepped into the square, three people were already there.

Two of them seemed to be a couple. The man was of average build, with a mild expression, and looked about twenty-five or twenty-six.

The woman was very beautiful, with delicate features and a lollipop in her mouth. She wore a cheerful smile, though her see-through bangs seemed a little too long and kept poking her in the eyes, so she had to keep fixing them.

The girl affectionately linked arms with her boyfriend and kept trying to start conversations with him. He didn't say much, only nodding or smiling now and then in response.

The other person was a young man with the gloomy look Yu Xing recognized. His cold, single-for-life expression seemed to say, "I'm not someone to mess with. Leave me alone." The whole package gave off the frigid air of a refrigerator. He glanced at Yu Xing.

Well, well.

Yu Xing paused to look. The couple and Zhao Yijiu seemed to be separated by an invisible wall, as distinctly divided as black and white.

Zhao Yijiu: "..." Why did he show up and then not come over? I really don't want to stand next to a couple.

Seeing Yu Xing's barely suppressed grin, he couldn't be bothered to say anything. He simply walked over.

"I knew it was you, Xing."

"So? Happy to see me?" Yu Xing raised an eyebrow at him.

Zhao Yijiu's expression didn't change. "It's fine. Having someone familiar around is better than being on my own. I'd be happier to see any deduction player I knew."

"Sure, sure~"

The rules of this deduction hadn't been announced yet, but Yu Xing was certain Zhao Yijiu wasn't from Single Prism. So no matter how the game played out, one wrong option had practically been eliminated. That put him in a pretty good mood.

The clock above them ticked crisply. Yu Xing looked up. The hour hand was on twelve, the minute hand was just shy of two, and the second hand had just passed six.

Presumably, time here had started counting only when they entered the game. Nine minutes and thirty seconds had already passed.

"The last two are here!" The girl in the couple had been looking around, and she spotted the newcomers as soon as they appeared. Her voice rose a little.

At the same time, two people approached from opposite directions. Yu Xing glanced over and let his gaze linger a little longer on the person on the left.

It was because the man was dressed in designer clothes and had chiseled features. He was the nephew of Wang Cheng—the Wang Jue Zhu Yan had told him about.

So the Wang Jue on the list was indeed him.

Interesting.

Zhu Yan had uncovered suspicions surrounding Wang Cheng, and as it happened, his nephew Wang Jue was a deduction player. The system had also identified the killer in this case as a deduction player. The victim's time of death was uncertain, but Wang Jue had been at Ruibo University at the time.

Yu Xing's thoughts made a quick turn, then tucked themselves away without giving anything unusual off.

"Do you know him?" Zhao Yijiu had keenly noticed the pause in his gaze.

"No." Yu Xing answered casually, then looked at the person approaching from the right. He was also a young man under thirty, dressed in a well-tailored suit. It seemed he had been at some formal event.

All six of them made it within the allotted ten minutes.

As the last person's foot entered the square, the clock on the model tower suddenly rang, its sound echoing loudly.

Every hand on the clock face spun backward, turned counterclockwise all the way to the starting point, and stopped.

"Ding-dong, ding-dong~"

The door on the first floor of the model tower suddenly opened. The little red-and-black bells decorating it rang out sweetly, and a woman emerged from the tower, which was only large enough to fit about nine adults.

She was much bigger than an ordinary human, a full two meters and thirty centimeters tall, but her proportions were perfect.

She had long black hair and wore a red-and-black Lolita dress. She had all the accessories: a headpiece, a necklace, lace gloves, and a slender sash tied in an elegant, adorable bow. Her skirt billowed out, and her fair legs were covered in black stockings from the calves down. Below them were dark red, round-toed shoes, also studded with brilliant gems.

But... aside from her size, it was obvious at a glance that she wasn't human.

Beneath the perfect contours of her face, gears whirred without pause. Her ruby-red eyes were lifeless, and several fine metal seams, visible on close inspection, were arranged symmetrically across her cheeks. Her elbows, wrists, and other joints were ball joints as well.

She looked like a mechanical doll enlarged to one and a half times its normal size.

"Welcome to Alice's Square! I'm your very best friend, Alice. I'll be hosting today's game. Are you all excited?" The large doll calling herself Alice lifted the corners of her mouth into an utterly stiff smile.

She looked like she was the least excited of all.

"Excited! How could we not be?" The girl in the couple clapped enthusiastically, only for her boyfriend to tap her on the head.

"Next, we'll draw your identity cards. After that, I'll announce the game and its rules." Alice's crimson gaze swept across everyone. Then she took a thick stack of cards from the exquisite little gem-encrusted purse hanging at her waist.

The cards facedown, their backs black and embossed with intricate patterns. Alice shuffled them with nimble mechanical fingers, then fanned six cards out toward the deduction players. "Please draw in the order I call you. Don't let anyone else see your card, or I'll punish you. First, Heng."

She called the name of the first person on the list who had agreed to play—the Persona Mask. The man in the couple stepped forward and casually took a card without even looking at the choices.

"Second, Ghost Faith."

The only human girl cheerfully went over, picked through the cards, and finally took the one at the bottom.

Hmm. With a strange name like that, Yu Xing had assumed it would belong to a man...

Next came Zhao Yijiu, then him, Wang Jue, and finally the suited man. They each claimed the names Cold Wine, Xing, Wang Jue, and Ze, and drew their cards.

"Now that you've drawn, you all have your own identities. Please look at your cards." Alice gracefully lifted her skirt and gave a noble's curtsey.

Yu Xing looked at his card. Three words were printed on it in pure white Gothic lettering: Suspect.

Alice continued her explanation. "Among the six cards, there's one Killer card, one Detective card, three Suspect cards, and one Victim card... The Killer card is guaranteed to be drawn by the real-life killer."

"What? What?" Wang Jue seemed like a cheerful sort. He asked curiously, "Is this about that case at my university?"

Yu Xing glanced at him.

The girl whose Persona Mask was Ghost Faith raised her hand too, smiling brightly. "Huh? Excuse me, what does this person mean by the real-life killer? What case?"

Alice's crimson gaze locked onto her.

This person?