[You have made your choice. You have 10 minutes to present your defense.] [If your defense fails, the Court of Truth will carry out the death sentence by force.]
"Nothing to do with you?" The gray mask's voice was full of disbelief. Then he said sinisterly, "Human memories don't lie."
The red mask flew into a rage. "Suspect Jiang Qian! Your motive is clear, and the details of your crime are exhaustive. I urge you to be honest with the court and stop sophisticating!"
Jiang Qian understood that perfectly.
"Do Not Sophisticate" had appeared in the dungeon's prompts.
But sophistry and a defense were fundamentally different things.
"I request permission to defend myself," Jiang Qian said decisively.
Ten minutes didn't give him much time to think of a plan, but at least he was safe during those ten minutes.
The giant axe above his head did not come down.
The lofty enforcers looked at Each Other. It seemed they couldn't disregard some rule and forcibly affect the Execution Rack.
When they turned their gaze back to Jiang Qian in the interrogation chair, his expression had already returned to its original composure.
Jiang Qian quickly recalled every detail from the moment he'd entered this room—everything he'd seen, heard, and felt:
They were using my memories to accuse me. They'd emphasized that again and again, making it seem impossible to deny. But after I sat down, I suddenly felt dizzy for no reason, as if an earthquake had struck the Memory Palace in my head, making it impossible to anchor these memories to their causes and consequences...
I'd always been emotionally steady, but when I recalled being beaten by Jiang Yang, rage and loathing had filled my mind, making me want to destroy him.
Had I really killed him?
No. Otherwise, the dungeon's test would have been impossible to solve.
And the method of killing was far too outlandish, leaving plenty of loose ends:
Using drugs would leave traces on the tableware and clothes. Strong cleaners wouldn't remove the bloodstains in the room, and luminol could make bloodstains from years ago glow.
Dismembering a body indoors sounded far too audacious, too. Even if it was theoretically possible, after performing the dissection and cleaning up, would I have had the strength to move more than a hundred pounds of human remains out of there?
How many unknown complications could crop up in the process?
The cleanup, too—if I lost control of even one step, everything would be ruined. It wasn't a complete, logical plan, and it wasn't my style.
If I'd decided to do this, I would have planned it meticulously, considered it from every angle, and kept at it until I came up with the perfect solution...
At that thought, Jiang Qian's gaze paused. In an instant, a thousand thoughts raced through his mind!
The Public Prosecutor in the gray mask tapped his fingers on the table.
He spoke to Jiang Qian in a low, stern voice. "You need to understand the consequences of doing this. Deliberately concealing the truth will only add to your sentence."
Jiang Qian slowly gathered his thoughts. "Fine. I'll stake the rest of my sex life on overturning your verdict."
He was about to lose his skills, so what sex life was he talking about?
Besides, he'd already figured it out.
The gray mask rubbed his brow. "All right. It seems you're not only cold-blooded, but also cunning and deceitful... But it's no use. The law is like a vast net with no holes, and Evil will ultimately be punished."
"Is that so? Evil will be punished..." Jiang Qian's lips curled in a cold smile. "It seems we don't share the same understanding of what evil is."
The gray mask's voice turned sinister as well. "What do you mean?"
Jiang Qian ignored the gray mask's question.
He lifted his head slightly and looked at the Chief Judge in the red mask. "I'd like to ask: sleeping pills are practically insoluble in water, yet my family supposedly took them in fruit juice. Do you think that makes sense?"
The red mask first froze slightly, then slammed the table and snapped, "You did it! Why are you asking me?"
Jiang Qian wasn't angered. His tone remained even. "I just think there's something strange about this memory. Besides, mixing sleeping pills with fruit juice would reduce their effectiveness. In a crime this serious, would I, a cold-blooded and cunning killer, have allowed such a risk?"
"Maybe—maybe you overlooked it! You were just a snot-nosed middle schooler at the time. You were lucky the dose was high enough that no one woke up and stumbled upon the crime scene," the gray mask added quickly.
His faster speech and slightly anxious tone betrayed his unease.
Jiang Qian chuckled, his expression growing ever more relaxed and composed. "The piano wire was unnecessary, too."
"The piano wire? Unnecessary..."
The red and gray masks looked at Jiang Qian hesitantly. Though their masks concealed most of their faces, he could still tell they were tense.
"Just as Occam's Razor says: 'Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.'"
Jiang Qian's smile deepened.
"I already had the Deboning Knife. Why would I need a useless tool like piano wire, which is so hard to use for a one-hit kill? To show off my intelligence?"
"Keep in mind, it's not easy to kill an adult with a single strand of piano wire just 0.7 to 2 millimeters thick—especially when the victim is a strong, physically fit adult man who's skilled at violence and merely asleep after taking sleeping pills. A knife would have been more reliable."
"Brazen! Arrogant!" The red mask slammed the table in anger.
"Criminal Jiang Qian, are you challenging the Court of Truth? That's not a good idea."
The gray mask ground his teeth and spoke in a sinister voice.
"From now on, the cost of confessing has gone up. Besides having your hands chopped off, you'll have to leave your tongue behind."
Jiang Qian remained completely unfazed. "I'm just trying to help the Court of Truth sort out the contradictions in this case. After all, you have neither evidence nor witness testimony. If even the traces in my own head aren't enough to support the claim that I committed a crime, what else can you use to accuse me?"
His words went straight to the heart of the dispute, making the two figures on high shudder.
"Are you going to question even your own memories?" the gray mask asked incredulously.
"Let me correct you: I'm not questioning my memories, but their nature." Jiang Qian raised the corner of his mouth. "I admire this trick—switching the concept of a memory with that of an event that actually happened. Nicely done. Even I was almost fooled."
"What do you mean by that?"
The gray mask raised his voice, but that only revealed his guilty conscience.
"It's simple. This is my guess: the reason this 'murder' exists in my memory is that I really did have the thought. It became part of my memories and was stored in my mind. But I never put it into practice."
"You scrambled my memories in some way beyond the bounds of common sense, making it hard for me to tell which things actually happened and which were plans I'd imagined but never carried out. Then you used a fictional crime to kill me."
"I can't explain how this happened, heh... But since we're here, what's impossible?"
Jiang Qian flexed his hands in their shackles, seeming to savor the series of "sensations" from moments before.
The wire he'd used to hold the barbecued rat; struggling when Jiang Yang beat him; the instant the sleeping pills crumbled into powder as he ground them; the pain and numbness left behind after the piano wire had tightened around his palms for so long...
The sensations mingled together, seemingly real enough to make a lie indistinguishable from the truth.
But a lie was still a lie.
Once you focused on one weak spot, the whole thing fell apart.
"Maybe that's why you didn't just make me 'see' it, but also made me 'feel' it. I'm guessing it was to make the memories feel like established fact, while using sensory stimuli to trigger an emotional response and make me more certain I'd killed someone."
Jiang Qian had made a dazzling turn from defense to offense. He stared at the gray mask, his gaze calm and certain.
"That way, even if there are holes in the memories, a person under threat and overcome with emotion will find it hard to tell truth from falsehood. They'll naturally give up questioning it and start thinking about how to reduce their sentence and avoid death."
"You have quite an imagination... But it isn't true."
The gray mask still wouldn't give in. He tried the same old trick, leading Jiang Qian toward a confession. "Think about it. You hate Jiang Yang! He never treated you like a younger brother. He bullied you, controlled you, and trampled on everything you liked! You already had the idea. What reason did you have not to act on it?"
"There are a thousand women you want to sleep with. Do you sleep with every one of them?" Jiang Qian replied coolly.
"You!" The gray mask's finger trembled, as if he'd been deeply humiliated.
The red mask slammed the table in anger, his voice warping with rage. "You insolent suspect! How dare you show such contempt for the court? Fuck, I'll beat you to death in a minute!!!"
Jiang Qian froze slightly. Hadn't I seen this idiot somewhere before?
Of course, no matter how much the other man tried to hint, coax him, and urge him to confess, he ignored it all.
He'd said everything he needed to say, and he was entirely sure of his reasoning. Unless the other side came up with a new theory that accounted for every detail, there was no need for him to get into an argument.
[10-minute countdown ended] [Defense successful. You will be released without charge.]
Just released without charge?
Hey, that was way too perfunctory. They'd arrested and convicted him by mistake. Didn't he get any compensation for emotional distress...? Jiang Qian didn't think much of it.
"Rumble, rumble."
A heavy rumbling vibration sounded overhead.
The giant axe, which had been almost touching his neck, began to rise slowly. Its blade moved away from his vital point and disappeared above him.
The interrogation chair Jiang Qian was sitting in returned to the shape of a sofa. The broken steel bar still stood beside it.
On the courtroom stage in front of him, the Chief Judge in the red mask began to warp, turning into a demonic face that struggled toward Jiang Qian! Its tongue, covered in barbs, nearly licked his face!
But Jiang Qian swung the steel bar and carved a glaring bloodstain across it.
The gray mask turned into a shadow and slid along the floor, aiming for the opening behind Jiang Qian and trying to ambush him from behind!
Unfortunately, an invisible force held him back.
A deadly attack turned into helpless fury. He could no longer get anywhere near Jiang Qian.
A prompt sounded by Jiang Qian's ear:
[Prompt: The Judgment viewing mission is complete. Main mission updated.] [Main mission: Reach the "Abyss Video Hall" and complete your personal viewing mission (3/7)]
His progress had updated from 1/7 to 3/7.
The scene before his eyes returned to how it had looked when Jiang Qian first entered the screening room.
The screen in front of him had gone dark.
"It's over."
Jiang Qian sighed.
"This dungeon can mess with your memories and doesn't even spare the missing. It's vicious as hell."
He didn't want to spend another moment in the room. He turned and walked out.
Back in the hallway.
Jiang Qian examined the poster beside the entrance to Screening Room 1 once again.
Beneath a massive rack, a helpless victim lay prostrate, at the mercy of anyone who wanted to butcher him...
Jiang Qian touched his neck. He could still feel the icy sensation of a blade pressed against it.
If rage and hatred toward Jiang Yang had clouded his mind just now, he would have suffered the same fate as the victim on the poster, paying a price he didn't deserve.
He had Jiang Yang to thank for that. Jiang Yang had been missing for so long that no one knew whether he was alive or dead. As a result, Jiang Qian couldn't summon much hatred for him anymore.
As for the memory of the murder, rather than being a plan that had gone unfulfilled, it was more like a case of "sowing without meaning to": years ago, after watching a murder movie, he'd been in the mood to imagine Jiang Yang as the target in the plot.
"The key to this trial is keeping a clear head and a firm will, so you won't be distracted or misled by other malicious thoughts."
He fell silent for a while.
He let go of the past that had come flooding back with his memories.
Jiang Qian headed for Screening Room 2.
Capital Public Security Bureau.
Special Affairs Center—Information and Intelligence Department.
Bai Ji saw the progress bar for the ongoing Whispers of the Inner Demon advance another notch and unconsciously stopped drinking his tea.
The progress had already gone past one-third!
He quickly called over the relevant record keeper, asked how many people the Whispers of the Inner Demon dungeon had claimed this year, and signaled that they might have to work overtime tonight.
Including the person currently inside, 15 people had been pulled into Whispers of the Inner Demon this year.
Twelve had died at the very beginning. Three had made it to one-third progress and stopped there, setting the record.
Bai Ji fell silent.
The person currently going through a life-or-death trial in the dungeon was already among the top 20 percent of all trial-takers. He was doing very well.
If he could take another step and push his progress to two-thirds, he'd break this year's record for the dungeon.
But Bai Ji knew this was only his fond hope. The dangers of a Nightmare Dungeon almost never yielded to anyone's expectations.
"Ah! How lucky I was not to have to face a nightmare like this when I drew my card back then..."
Before you continue