Chapter 372: Death Row Doctor

"Alright, you can vote for me now." Number Six returned to his seat. He expected his masterful criminal techniques to win everyone over, but the survivors around the round table only looked at him with disgust.

A minute passed. Number Six received zero votes.

"Are you sure you aren't going to give me a single vote?" The thin razor blade fluttered like a butterfly at Number Six's fingertips. His face darkened, looking like a jackal preparing to hunt.

Securing at least one vote was his only chance to enter the top five. Zero votes guaranteed punishment; he wouldn't survive the night.

"Your confession lacked any sincerity. You were just showing off." I looked at Number Six Zhang Bei. Everyone here was a lunatic. Although they had admitted to being murderers in the Electric Chair and confessed the details of their crimes, no one showed the slightest remorse. This seemed at odds with the organizer's objective.

"Having murderers vote for and forgive other murderers is inherently flawed. We are the most selfish kind of people, willing to do absolutely anything to survive." The speaker was Number Seven. He sat closest to Number Six but showed no trace of fear, as if he hadn't even caught the threat in Number Six's words.

"Number Seven, give me your vote now, and I'll give you mine later!" Pressing his fingertip against the blade, Number Six Zhang Bei looked at Number Seven with a chilling smile.

Number Seven shook his head, rejecting him outright. "You aren't the best candidate for a partnership, which is obvious from your criminal methods. In my eyes, you barely qualify as human. You are merely a pitiful creature who stops at nothing to satisfy his urges, blending murder rituals with survival mechanisms to turn killing into a source of internal mental stimulation. You are nothing but a slave to your desires, a laughable puppet. What you committed was the lowest form of crime."

Hands shoved into the pockets of his white coat, Number Seven shook his head. "I've been looking for loopholes in this game since it started, and I found several—in the venue, the rules, and beyond. But the most ingenious part of this game isn't the rules; it's the identities of the participants. Every single one of us is a murderer guilty of heinous crimes. Our identities cannot be exposed, yet here we sit, sharing our experiences of killing with each other. Even if we make it out of here alive, what do we do about the people who now know our secrets?"

The corners of his mouth turned up in a slight curve. "Silence them to guarantee our own safety, of course. That is exactly what makes this game unsolvable. It isn't that a single killer is hiding among us; it's that every single one of us is a killer. To put it bluntly, there will only be one winner in tonight's game—the last person left alive."

Many of us had already considered what Number Seven was saying, but no one had dared to voice it out loud.

"Other than Fatty Number Five, who was tricked out of a vote earlier, everyone else here will likely sit at zero votes until the game ends." Number Seven cast a sideways glance at Wang Yuchun, who was nestled in Number Nine's arms. "As for anyone who actually receives votes, there is no need to envy them. If my theory is right, those who secure votes and break the game's balance will definitely be the first to die."

Wang Yuchun felt her skin crawl under Number Seven's stare. She wrapped her arms around Number Nine's neck, pressing her ample chest tightly against him. "There are five spots, and I only want one of them. We could form an alliance."

"An alliance? Alliances are only formed between equals. You are a smart woman who knows how to use everyone around you, but you overlooked one crucial detail. To some extent, the people sitting in this room no longer deserve to be called human."

Number Seven looked at the trembling Wang Yuchun, who was putting on a pitiful act. "If you can't have something beautiful, destroy it—that is the most basic psychological trait of a serial killer. If you had stayed with that foolish fatty from the start, you might have had a sliver of a chance at survival, simply because he's a bit slow and his motive for killing differs from ours. But now you've moved on to someone else, greedily angling for two votes. That encroaches on a lot of people's interests, which is why you won't survive the night."

Number Seven spoke with absolute certainty. I nodded in agreement; his analysis was spot on.

The alarm blared once more. Number Seven stood, straightened his clothes, and calmly donned the helmet.

"As you can see, I am a doctor—a psychological counselor specifically responsible for criminals."

He fished his work ID out of his pocket and tossed it onto the round table without the slightest attempt to hide it.

I activated Judging Eye. The moment the ID hit the table, I clearly read the text printed on it: Henshan Prison, Special Ward, Grade-A Felon Psychological Counselor—Jin Zhouzhe.

"My name is Jin Zhouzhe. To explain my job simply: prisons house all sorts of criminals, and two specific types are the most prone to losing control."

"The first type consists of those serving life sentences or suspended death sentences, and the second consists of those with a confirmed execution date. Outside the prison, they might have been CEOs worth over a hundred million, high-ranking government officials, or just ordinary people with twisted minds."

"My job is to provide them with psychological counseling. Not to help them turn over a new leaf, but to make them accept death."

"Doing this kind of work long-term subtly warped my own mental state."

"There are two seeds inside every person's heart. One represents greed, compulsion, jealousy, suspicion, arrogance, paranoia, and delusion. The other represents responsibility, courage, tolerance, kindness, understanding, and wisdom. The question we all have to face is: which seed will sprout in our hearts?"

"By providing long-term psychological counseling to death row inmates, I inadvertently absorbed some of their beliefs while trying to correct their twisted mindsets. Those concepts quietly accumulated deep within my mind, serving as nourishment for the seed of sin."

"For the first half of my life, I constantly wondered: why did they kill? Why did they commit serial murders?"

"Most serial killers aren't motivated by money or specific personal revenge. They kill purely for the twisted thrill it brings. It seems that murder, and the fantasy of murder, are the only pastimes capable of making them feel comfortable and happy."

"How to further experience this thrill of murder to study and analyze it deeply, and ultimately find a way to neutralize that unique high—that became my favorite problem to ponder at the time."

"Am I being a bit hard to follow? Well, to put it simply: I decided to kill someone so I could experience that legendary thrill for myself."

"A prison is a place far beyond what any outsider can imagine. You see absolute filth everywhere you look."

"I quickly locked onto my target: a man nearing his release who exhibited clear violent tendencies. He was constantly brawling, had a terrible track record, and had been sent to prison in the first place for nearly beating his wife to death."

"I spent three months investigating my prey. He was just an ordinary man, and killing an ordinary man doesn't require much preparation, simply because they never guard against danger."

"Planning a crime is a joyous thing. It is a meticulous, unprecedented game."

"I have listened to the criminal processes of many people and learned about countless unimaginable methods. But the very fact that I heard about them in prison proved that the police would eventually uncover all of them."

"Lethal injections leave needle marks. Forensics can detect oral poison residue in the stomach and intestines. I once met a criminal who dismembered a body and used strong acids and alkalis to dissolve the victim almost entirely, but the police still managed to extract evidence from the sewer."

"The truly perfect crime simply doesn't exist, and the so-called traceless murder is nothing but a joke. That includes everyone sitting here today. The reason you have remained at large isn't because your crimes were masterful, but simply because your time hasn't come. Even if the organizer hadn't kidnapped you and brought you here, you would all be caught sooner or later." Number Seven smiled at the group, completely unconcerned about whether his words would provoke their outrage.

"I digressed. Let us continue with my confession. After synthesizing all the criminal methods I had heard about in prison, I ultimately concluded that the simpler the case, the harder it is to investigate."

"I am a doctor, but I didn't prepare any complicated tools. I simply took a fruit knife I had bought a few years ago, avoided the surveillance cameras, brushed past my prey on a desolate road, and delivered a single fatal stab to a vital organ."

"If there was a single criminal technique in that entire case, it was the exact placement of my blade—lethal, but without causing massive blood splatter."