God's Imitator

This conclusion startled even Huang Shengjie himself.

But he had no choice but to keep following the logic through.

”There is no Evidence Room in this game, and there are no pre-designed pieces of evidence created by the Imitator. The Imitator never intended to design it that way, and had no reason to.

”So this game’s core mechanic is not ’solving a case.’ It’s a ’possibility attack and defence.’

”It’s not a confrontation between players and the Imitator. It’s a confrontation between the four Actors.

”The four Actors are not ’discovering the truth.’ They are ’creating the truth.’

”The final truth looks somewhat improbable and stitched together precisely because it is not a pre-determined truth designed by the Imitator. It is the outcome of a fierce contest between the four Actors.

”The game’s opening rules were deliberately misleading. The Character Dossier prop was shown on screen, made to look a few pages thick, to deceive every player into thinking this would be a game with a rough story framework.

”But in reality, there is none.

”I was originally thinking that Lawyer Lin’s dossier was probably almost entirely blank, which is why he spent the whole game on the back foot.”And I assumed Tang Qing’s dossier was densely filled with plotted narrative, which is why he was setting the pace throughout and could always locate the right follow-up evidence after each Recess.

”Feng Yuguang probably thought the same thing, which is why he was completely at a loss and couldn’t respond to anything.

”But in reality, Tang Qing’s dossier was almost certainly blank too, and simply told him the rules for ’creating evidence.’

”Which is why he immediately understood the game’s true mechanic and began pressing the other players with confident aggression.

”What the ’Detective’ and ’Wealthy Merchant’ were really supposed to do was not find evidence but decide on a narrative direction and then customise the evidence they wanted.

”Of course, this customisation had to operate within certain limits. You couldn’t just invent anything.

”If Tang Qing had produced a knife at the very start and set it up with the blood of the couple on the blade and Lawyer Lin’s fingerprints on the handle, that clearly would not have been permitted, because it would have jumped entirely outside the bounds of the established narrative logic.

”Including the General Power of Attorney that Tang Qing produced: it mentioned only a law firm designated by the husband, but not Lawyer Lin’s name by name.

”That’s not because Tang Qing didn’t want to name Lin Sizhi directly. It’s because he couldn’t. That level of direct fabrication was not permitted under the rules.

”But beyond those constraints, players were free to improvise.

”When the ’Detective’ and ’Wealthy Merchant’ designed their evidence, they could simultaneously embed two layers of information: surface information, which is what the ’Verify’ function would reveal, and deep information, which Verify could not surface, but which genuinely existed.

”Just like the Lion King Card: Wang Yongxin deliberately split the surface information from the deep information, which served a dual purpose. It misled Tang Qing into thinking it was evidence favourable to himself, while leaving Lawyer Lin a window for a counter-attack.

”Lawyer Lin had already worked this out. The reason he deliberately broke up his insurance-related points across two separate rounds was to test this very mechanism.

”Tang Qing may also have sensed that Lin Sizhi was probing. But he believed his own advantage was overwhelming. As long as he kept producing evidence and building a coherent chain, he could simply bury Lawyer Lin under the weight of it.

”Or perhaps he had recognised Lawyer Lin as a difficult opponent, and decided to push for a quick conclusion even at the cost of less polished evidence.

”He first deliberately included a forged policy, to provide an additional explanation of exactly how the husband deceived the wife into signing the real ones.

”And then later, he dropped the pretence entirely and produced a whole folder of documents. Three separate agreements, and he still claimed it counted as a single piece of evidence.

”Because he needed that one round to accomplish two things simultaneously: close off the remaining issues with the case, and smear Lawyer Lin in the process.

”Meanwhile, what Lawyer Lin appeared to be doing was passive defence. But in reality, he was also attacking.

”’Professional knowledge testimony’ and ’physical evidence’ occupy the same level.

”When Lawyer Lin said a particular inference was inconsistent with the law, what he said became true.

”In other words, he held the authority to interpret legal provisions.

”By the same logic, Feng Yuguang as a doctor actually held the authority to interpret the effects of medication: whether a particular drug could achieve psychological control was, to some degree, a result that could be shaped, determined by Feng Yuguang’s testimony.

”He was simply too passive to realise this.

”Testimony must also operate within certain constraints, just as evidence does. You cannot simply say anything.

”Both sides could only propose new evidence or testimony based on the progression of the case and the evidence already established.

”This is why Tang Qing and Bai Zhilan so frequently requested verification of Lawyer Lin’s testimony, just as the jury members frequently verified the physical evidence.

”Because verification itself was part of the attack and defence: whichever side’s evidence or testimony was confirmed as genuine had effectively eliminated certain possibilities that favoured the opponent. It was like taking territory in a battle.

”Both sides were sharp and would avoid pushing into spaces that had already been foreclosed, which is why in the vast majority of cases the verification results came back as genuine.

”Tang Qing once produced a General Power of Attorney, which was confirmed as a forgery upon verification.

”If it had been confirmed as genuine, Tang Qing might already have won.

”Why was it ruled a forgery? Because this piece of evidence had, to some degree, contradicted the two insurance policies verified earlier as well as Lawyer Lin’s testimony.

”Once those two policies had been verified as genuine, a certain fact had been established: the husband needed to go to extraordinary lengths, using a forged policy, just to trick the wife into signing ten-million in legitimate policies.

”Under those established facts, no matter what the husband did, there was no way he could also have gotten the wife to sign a General Power of Attorney.

”In other words, when evidence and testimony conflict with each other, this game has hidden rules for determining which is true and which is false.

”For example, if the ’Detective’ produces two pieces of evidence in sequence and they contradict each other, with the first already confirmed as genuine, the second will be confirmed as false.

”The same applies to professional testimony: if a piece of testimony has already been confirmed as true, any subsequent evidence that contradicts it will be ruled false.

”Lawyer Lin clearly also understood this mechanism, which is why he remained calm when Tang Qing tried to implicate him. He simply pointed out that the document was illogical, which also functioned as a further reinforcement of the ’Lawyer’s testimony’ at the level of the game’s mechanics.

”That made it impossible for the evidence to be genuine. Even if it had been genuine in Tang Qing’s original design, the game’s mechanics would have ruled it false.

”Of course, the game’s rules protect the Actors. Even when something is ruled false, the ruling wouldn’t describe it as ’forged by the Detective.’ It would be expressed as ’forged by the husband.’

”So Tang Qing would never be exposed directly. He could always cover for it with alternative explanations.

”Everyone with a sharp eye inside the courtroom understood what was really happening, but the vast majority of audience members couldn’t see it.

”In any case, Lawyer Lin kept using legal principles to foreclose Tang Qing’s theories. Tang Qing was forced to fabricate more and more evidence to fill the gaps, but in doing so, he was falling step by step into Lawyer Lin’s trap.

”For example, once Lawyer Lin established that the wife’s assets were insufficient to qualify for ten million in coverage, Tang Qing was forced to produce the wife’s bank statements and asset documentation.

”But before that, Lawyer Lin had already closed off many possibilities.

”Because the wife had been deceived, she must have been naive and unworldly. She couldn’t have been a powerful career woman like a senior corporate executive or business owner.

”If the wife came from wealthy parents, those parents would never have been completely uninvolved in her marriage decisions.

”So Tang Qing’s only option was to use bank statements to establish the wife’s income level, and patch the logic by adding that her parents had died and left her property.

”But this was exactly the trap. Because this locked the wife’s occupation into a fairly narrow range.

”Only grey industries or social media influencers can generate that kind of income that quickly without obvious professional credentials.

”And at that point, Lawyer Lin released the specific details of the Lion King Card, completely locking in the wife’s identity and achieving the reversal.

”By that stage, the wife’s occupation had effectively been fixed in place, corroborated by multiple pieces of evidence. Even if Tang Qing produced new evidence, say a labour contract proving the wife was a senior executive, it would certainly be ruled false.

”I had been wondering why the final Truth Vote came out with such a strange distribution.

”Now I understand.

”A player like Chen Yumei had simply not grasped what had actually happened. She thought Tang Qing could keep pressing, and that a new Recess with fresh evidence could overturn Lawyer Lin’s argument.

”But Tang Qing knew that was impossible.

”Because the chain of inference had reached a dead end. Pushing forward any further would only make things worse for him. His only option was to stop.”