Ren Yi fell silent for a moment, then raised a hand to his chest and said with mock sincerity, "Actually, I am deeply saddened by the departure of Player 4..."
Just then, Player 10, the old man, stroked his beard and let out a cold snort.
"When all is said and done, your stories are very entertaining, but there isn't a shred of evidence."
"If you ask me, that monster you described is you!"
With that last sentence, Player 10 glared at Ren Yi and barked the accusation directly.
"And that's why I said this is a bit difficult..." Ren Yi met his gaze without a hint of fear.
He tugged at his hair with a trace of irritation, muttering to himself.
"This Anomaly's ability is too underhanded. It's a total frame-up; no matter how I explain it, it looks bad..."
"Anyway, let me just say a few words to you all." After pulling out a tuft of his colorful hair, Ren Yi finally seemed to have figured out how to start.
If he kept this up, he would probably pluck his wig completely bald in no time.
"I hope you can at least consider the possibility that what I'm saying is true," Ren Yi said with a look of helplessness. "Every word I've spoken is the absolute truth."
"If the Anomaly manages to bait you into voting out a human like me today, and you really can't see through it, this game is going to be very hard to win."
"There is no doubt that this Anomaly is the 'Great Anomaly' we mentioned before. Its specific ability is the power to ignore our safe rooms."
"Now, everyone, let's shift our perspective. Put yourselves in the Anomaly's shoes for a moment. What is the greatest advantage of this ability?"
Ren Yi held up two fingers and tapped them together.
"It's that it can kill one person in a double room at will and then frame the other person."
"Remember how we discussed the room situation so much yesterday? Why is there such a complicated set of extra rules?"
"Those rules seemed nonsensical, especially the part about always maintaining double rooms, but now there's an explanation..."
Ren Yi rested his chin on his hand. "This set of rules was designed specifically for this Anomaly."
"Their only purpose is to ensure there are always double rooms available for this Anomaly to kill in!"
"Sometimes it will actually be inside a double room, and other times it will use its ability to phase through rooms to kill. With a mix of truth and lies, it'll play us all for fools until we're dead!"
After he finished this explanation, several people at the table began to show looks of hesitation.
Well, the logic was certainly self-consistent, wasn't it?
Of course, Lu Zihan could only teleport through Rebuttal, so unless everyone was stupid enough to pick a fight, he would need an 'accomplice' in a double room to pull off such an effect...
But then again, no one else knew that.
"As for why it chose my double room, it's obviously because I'm an easy target to frame."
As Ren Yi spoke, he felt like he was almost convincing himself.
Unfortunately, even at this point, no 'Peerless Peeper' had come forward to bail him out.
Was his plan a failure? Had the Peeper not chosen his room?
"But it looks like you won't be seeing the light on the first day. In exchange for me using my life to scout out this ability, I hope you won't forget me when it's time for the final resurrection... provided we can actually win, of course."
Ren Yi stood up from his seat and grabbed two steamed buns from the table.
He still had to maintain his disguise. They hadn't eaten since last night, and he couldn't afford to let a small detail like that give him away.
"Alright, that's all I have to say. Nothing else I say will sway your self-hypnotized brains anyway."
"It's not the speaking phase anymore, and sitting here is just wasting time we could use to find keys. I won't be keeping you any longer."
Ren Yi took a bite of a bun. "Mmph... I'm going to look for keys."
With that, he turned and walked away on his own, leaving the others behind to exchange uncertain glances.
After a long silence, Zhang Qiuqiu, acting as the Leader, finally spoke.
"Should we... go take a look at the scene in his room and see what it looks like?"
Meanwhile, after Ren Yi had walked quite a distance, he suddenly heard a faint, piercing scream from behind him.
He stopped to think for a moment and realized they had probably gone to check his room.
A classic plot development.
Ignoring them, Ren Yi headed to the second floor of the building.
To be honest, the activity area here was exceptionally large. Ren Yi had already scouted several rooms during his walk.
Furthermore, these rooms weren't neatly arranged along the sides of a corridor. Instead, they were connected room to room, with every door on all four walls hiding a new space behind it. It was like a maze; it was impossible to tell where anything was.
Wasn't it a bit of a waste to use such a massive area just to make finding keys more difficult?
In any case, Ren Yi spared a thought to thank the world's will for the effort put into setting all this up.
However, shortly after finishing his two buns, Ren Yi realized a very serious problem.
He was lost.
During the day, all his abilities were restricted, including the spatial awareness he had long grown accustomed to.
For the first time in a long while, Ren Yi began using the inefficient method of his eyes to observe the world.
His vision was confined to a narrow 180-degree field in front of him. Crude optical refraction made the world look flat and blurry; especially in this dim environment, the world degraded into a mess of fuzzy lines.
Without the all-encompassing information feedback provided by spatial awareness, everything before him felt like a drawing pasted onto paper—insubstantial and unreal.
He raised a hand and ran his fingertips over his cheek. The sensation was real, yet it carried a strange sense of detachment.
The temperature of this body and the texture of its skin felt like a temporary vessel he had borrowed, rather than a part of himself.
This 'inefficient' way of perceiving things made him feel entirely uneasy, as if he had been forcibly stuffed into a narrow cage.
He had to consciously breathe, consciously blink, and consciously maintain his balance.
How dreadful!
Ren Yi briefly entertained the thought of just letting them seal him away so he could regain his true senses and watch from the sidelines.
Well, he could perhaps understand why the Board Game Club had gone under.
Shaking his head to dispel these thoughts, Ren Yi pushed open another door in front of him.
Before him was a familiar space—the stairwell he had first encountered when coming up to the second floor.
He had actually circled back.
To Ren Yi's surprise, there was someone else in the stairwell at that moment.
It was Player 11, the woman who spoke so softly but had proposed killing everyone who claimed to be a Lost Soul.
"What are you doing here?" Ren Yi's tone wasn't particularly friendly after circling around for half an hour to no avail.
He had been wandering for quite a while; if he were actually exploring, he should have entered those rooms long ago.
Player 11 didn't seem to notice Ren Yi's impatience. Instead, she smiled very naturally.
"I was waiting for you."
Ren Yi raised an eyebrow.
"Waiting for me?" he asked with a half-smile. "Aren't you afraid I'll turn into a three-meter-tall monster and take your head off?"
Player 11's expression didn't change in the slightest.
"Whether human or Anomaly, no one should have the ability to kill during the day."
"I'm waiting here mainly to tell you one thing."
Player 11 smoothed her long hair.
"I believe what you said just now."
Rate on N.U.
