Chapter 579: The Face Court |
Could it be that the whole "wish fulfillment" thing was fake? That the sinister black smoke and those voices in his head were essentially in cahoots, their common goal being to seize his body and replace him?!
It was highly possible!
The so-called "mind reading" of the black smoke...
Could very well be because it was in league with those voices in his heart!
Those voices could read minds, so this black smoke could also know what he was thinking!
In an instant, Jiang Ye's caution was cranked to the max!
He completely cast aside the earlier announcement from that court.
All he could think about was how to defeat this most terrifying final boss!
However...
The next moment, Jiang Ye felt his vision go dark!
At the same time, the prompt sound from earlier rang out in his mind again—
[Ding!]
[Welcome to the first stage of the "Face Court"!]
[Your identity is: the 18th Juror!]
[Your clearance conditions are:]
[1. The defendant dies.]
[2. All jurors reach a unanimous decision.]
[Your time limit for clearance is: 30 minutes.]
[Now, the clearance begins!]
[Countdown 29:59... 29:58...]
The first thing Jiang Ye saw when his vision returned was the bright red countdown number in the upper right corner.
A 30-minute countdown.
What the hell? Without even giving any background story, they wanted him to clear this within 30 minutes!
It felt like time was really tight!
And...
Because of his suspicion of the black smoke, he even started to wonder...
Was this "Face Court" really related to the original body Zhou Qiming mentioned, which was trapped in the [Court of Disorder]?
Or was it just bait set by the black smoke?
What would happen to him after he cleared it?
And if he failed to clear it... what would be his fate?
Just as he was thinking this, a voice suddenly popped up in Jiang Ye's mind again—
"That black smoke is you. It said it would help you fulfill your wish, so of course it wouldn't trick you."
This was... the voice of that arrogant, confident persona—the first one Jiang Ye had silenced!
So that voice hadn't disappeared after all; it was still lying dormant inside his body!
Jiang Ye pondered the words of that voice, and his suspicion grew even deeper!
The black smoke is me?
And combining this with those voices in his heart, all claiming to be him...
So that sinister black smoke and the voices in his head really were in cahoots!
Just as he was thinking this, that arrogant voice in his mind chimed in again:
"What you're suspicious of... is yourself!"
Suspicious of himself?
Time was running out, so Jiang Ye couldn't be bothered to argue with the schizophrenic voices in his head. He immediately surveyed the current situation.
He was in a very large meeting room.
Right in the center of the room was a thick, black rectangular wooden table, surrounded by 18 seats.
Besides the rectangular table, some workstations were lined up against the walls of the meeting room.
Jiang Ye was sitting near a workstation by a window on the north side.
Apart from him, the other 17 workstations were also occupied.
They...
Were probably the other 17 jurors.
Among these 17 "jurors," five looked like normal players.
The other twelve were red-eyed puppets with Jiang Ye's face.
As for these red-eyed puppets, Jiang Ye still couldn't sense them as his clones.
However, unlike the mindless zombies crawling out of the grave mounds in the Burial Ground, they were sitting at their respective workstations, flipping through documents on the desk, just like normal humans...
So did these red-eyed puppets have consciousness?
Or were they just NPCs in this "Face Court" stage?
As Jiang Ye pondered this, he suddenly noticed his own reflection in the window glass. He didn't look much better than the red-eyed puppets!
His eyes were also naturally red!
In fact, they looked like burning flames!
And his body seemed charred black!
He looked more like a black puppet than a red-eyed puppet!
In fact, given the eerie nature of his body, he looked like a demon crawling out of hell!
This...
Time was tight, so Jiang Ye didn't dwell too much on the changes to his body.
Soon, he shifted his focus to the documents on the workstation.
There was no computer or any electronic tech equipment on the desk.
Even the text on the documents was handwritten, not printed.
The first piece of paper contained a very rough case summary.
The defendant in this case was a serial killer who had been on the run for over a decade.
He had traveled to many places, committing crimes in a string.
The blood on his hands amounted to 12.5 lives!
Oh, the point five was the fetus of a pregnant woman.
Besides the pregnant woman, there were elderly people, children...
This psychopathic killer showed no discernible pattern.
Even he himself admitted that he had an antisocial personality and killed people for thrills.
The 12 people he murdered were all innocent and weak.
As a result, 12 families had been dealt a heavy blow.
Currently, the evidence pointing to the murderer was very solid.
Even the murderer himself had confessed to the crime.
There were no remaining doubts about the case.
However...
In the world background of this "Face Court," no death sentence had been carried out in this court for over a decade.
That meant, even if this murderer was guilty of monstrous crimes, the court would ultimately not sentence him to death.
Instead, based on past precedents, he would likely receive a life sentence, meaning lifelong imprisonment.
According to the world background, this so-called "life sentence" could even be considered protection for the murderer.
Because prisons with life sentences had the strongest security in the world.
In other words...
Once a convict entered a life-sentenced prison, they could basically live out their natural lives there.
This...
What the hell!
It was only then that Jiang Ye realized...
The true meaning of "Face Court" was the abolition of the death penalty!
And his clearance goal seemed to be to make this court, which had already abolished the death penalty, reinstate it!
Never mind whether it could be permanently reinstated.
At least in this trial, the death penalty had to be restored.
Because his clearance condition seemed to be the defendant being executed!
But...
Jiang Ye quickly shifted his thinking—
The clearance condition only said "the defendant dies," not that it had to be by execution.
It also didn't say the unanimous decision had to be for execution.
So...
Could he kill the defendant by some method other than the death penalty?
Following this line of thought, he searched through various documents on the workstation.
The materials on the desk were fairly comprehensive.
He quickly understood the juror system in this "Face Court" background and realized the purpose of the 30-minute time limit.
Of course, he also gained a deeper understanding of how difficult it would be for him to clear this stage.
In the "Face Court" background, the only way to carry out a death sentence was for all 18 jurors to agree to it.
Otherwise, even if one person objected, the death sentence would not be carried out.
Among these 18 jurors, 12 were permanent jurors.
That meant they served as jurors for every court session.
These 12 were obviously those red-eyed puppets.
According to the juror information, they were all staunch advocates for the "abolition of the death penalty."
With them in place, getting the "Face Court" to execute the death penalty was completely impossible!
To make matters worse, according to the juror system, during these 30 minutes, the jurors had to stay in this meeting room and couldn't leave.
Meaning...
Jiang Ye could only access the documents and had no way to reach the "defendant" mentioned in the clearance conditions!
Any method of killing the defendant by other means would probably be impossible!
It seemed the only way to clear the stage was to have all members vote for the death sentence, causing the defendant to be executed!
After fully understanding the situation of this stage, Jiang Ye took a deep breath.
As his mind raced, he still considered two possibilities—
The first was the conventional route.
Find a way to make all the jurors vote for the death sentence, using execution to kill the defendant.
The second was to take an unconventional path.
Find a way to kill the defendant by other means.
On the juror side, they would all vote against the death penalty.
Both plans had their own difficulties.
The difficulty of the first plan was convincing the jurors.
The difficulty of the second plan was killing the defendant.
Jiang Ye couldn't reach the defendant himself, but maybe he could try to have someone else kill him?
The documents on the workstation also included information on the victims' families, stacks and stacks of it, recorded in great detail.
Many of the victims' families had publicly expressed strong desires for the defendant to be executed.
From this perspective, the victims' families might be useful.
But among the dozens of family members, who could help kill the defendant within 30 minutes?
Even if some family member had the ability, now that he was trapped in the isolated juror meeting room, how could he contact the families outside?
Jiang Ye quickly scanned through various documents on the workstation, trying to find a breakthrough from the pile of family information.
The countdown number in the upper right corner made him incredibly tense.
At first, seeing the almost complete detailed documents on the workstation, he felt pleasantly surprised.
But the more documents he read, the more frustrated he became.
The more information there was, the more useless junk might be mixed in!
On the surface, the detailed family records might seem like a potential breakthrough.
But they could also all be useless information!
After quickly flipping through them, Jiang Ye didn't rush to analyze who might be usable.
Instead, he turned his attention back to the other 17 jurors in the meeting room.
The 12 permanent jurors...
Based on Jiang Ye's guesses about the "red-eyed puppets," they probably couldn't be persuaded by words at all!
Reasoning with them was likely futile!
As for unreasonable methods...
Jiang Ye had a few ideas.
The first idea was whether he could use some method to control these red-eyed puppets.
For example, turning them into clones!
As long as they were clones, sharing consciousness with him...
Then having them all vote for the death sentence wouldn't be difficult.
The second idea was to replace these staunch "death penalty abolition" permanent jurors.
In the documents on the workstation, among the rules related to jurors, there were mentions of "juror avoidance principles."
For example, if a juror had some relationship with the defendant or the victim.
Then that juror had to recuse themselves, and another juror would be brought in.
This was using the proper procedure to replace jurors.
Jiang Ye also thought of a more violent scenario—
Could he replace jurors by having some of them die?
However, even with new jurors, it would be hard to guarantee they weren't new red-eyed puppets, new abolitionists.
So, the plan to replace the 12 red-eyed puppets with other jurors was clearly very risky with unstable returns.
But following this line of thought, Jiang Ye came up with another possibility—
Since other jurors could be replaced...
What about himself, the juror?
If he were no longer a juror, he might be able to leave this juror meeting room!
If he left and his freedom of movement was no longer restricted...
Maybe he could go kill the defendant himself.
However, leaving the juror room also carried extremely high risks.
While inside the juror room, he could control or even decide the unanimous opinion of the jurors, thus fulfilling condition two.
But once he left...
He would no longer have control over what happened in the juror room.
It was very likely that condition two could not be fulfilled.
After all this deliberation, Jiang Ye quickly realized—
In the first stage of the "Face Court," fulfilling either condition one or condition two alone wasn't difficult.
The hard part was fulfilling both at the same time.
Pursuing one condition would lead to losing control of the other.
It felt like "you can't have both fish and bear's paw."
At the same time, thinking deeper, Jiang Ye realized—
The situation for "having both fish and bear's paw" required having two of himself!
If one "him" could stay in the juror room to control the jurors' opinions...
And another "him" could leave the juror room to kill the defendant...
Then both conditions could be fulfilled simultaneously!
So...
Was the solution to this stage to have him generate a clone?
The amnesiac Jiang Ye didn't actually know how to generate clones.
The only method he knew was using the [Clone Kills Clone] effect...
But earlier, killing red-eyed puppets in the infinite grave mound zone hadn't triggered the [Clone Kills Clone] effect.
Now, it probably wouldn't work either.
Still, there were five other normal humans in the juror room. Could he make use of them?
Just as Jiang Ye was wondering if he could turn one of the five normal jurors into a clone...
A voice that belonged to him rose from the depths of his heart again:
"There's no need to make it so complicated."
This time, it was that aloof, lofty voice.
Jiang Ye was still mostly wary of the voices in his heart.
With time running out, he initially didn't want to bother with them.
But after a moment's thought, he replied to his heart:
"What do you mean? Have you already figured out a way to clear the stage?"
Though he said this, what he was thinking was—
Was this voice in his heart going to try to compete for control of his body by denying him and striking him down again?
How could a voice in his heart figure out a clearance plan before he could?
Just as he was thinking this, the voice in his heart, as if it could read minds again, said directly:
"Haven't you already thought of the clearance plan yourself?"
"The simplest plan is to use clones."
"As long as all the jurors here are clones..."
"Then naturally, this 'Face Court' can restore the death penalty."