Chapter 377: Psychological Suggestion

At Du Yu's first sentence, my heart skipped a beat. 'He's guilty! If that's the case, both of my deductions were completely wrong. Xia Chi isn't the organizer, just a substitute. And Du Yu isn't the hidden twelfth person either, just an ordinary participant.'

My thoughts raced. On the surface, I pretended to listen earnestly to Du Yu's confession, but in reality, I was reevaluating the story of every single game participant. 'Did I miss something?'

Strapped to the Electric Chair, Du Yu looked calm, his voice unhurried. "My name is Du Yu. I'm a lawyer. I had been working abroad and only recently flew back to the country."

"Unlike the rest of you, who murdered or tortured someone to death, I rarely do anything so base. Smart people don't commit crimes. More often than not, you can get everything you want just by using the rules."

"I went abroad five years ago. To survive, I provided legal aid to major Chinese syndicates. I excelled at not-guilty pleas and gained a lot of supporters in Chinatown."

"Over those five years, I twisted the truth and helped plenty of bastards clear their names. Even though I was doing dirty work with consequences far deeper than simple murder, I didn't feel guilty. Nor did I think anyone had the right to judge me. After all, it was just my way of surviving within the rules."

"Alright, that's enough background. Let's talk about my deepest secret."

"Nobody wants to leave their home to help a bunch of heinous bastards. I'm no exception. My sudden departure five years ago was entirely forced upon me."

"It all started eight years ago. I had just finished my dual master's degrees in law and criminal psychology and was starting my first job at a law firm."

"Wanting to quickly make a name for myself, I took on an incredibly tricky case for my very first defense."

"The case itself wasn't complicated. The victim, the plaintiff's daughter, worked at a KTV. After her shift, a bunch of second-generation rich kids dragged her out drinking. The next day, her body was found in Central City Lake."

"There was no clear evidence pointing to the killer. To be precise, everyone who was with the girl that night was a suspect."

"The police investigation was vague and inconclusive, so I tracked the case down myself and found key evidence. Following a courtroom confrontation, the killer was exposed, securing justice for the dead girl."

"The victim's family was struggling financially. They only managed to pay my fee after receiving the settlement."

"Having gained both fame and fortune, I thought I had officially established a foothold in that tier-one city. But a few days later, the law firm fired me. The reason? They claimed my personality was too aggressive and detrimental to workplace relationships."

"I was young, sharp, and didn't know how to keep a low profile. I only learned later that the killer I had sent to prison with a life sentence had a grandfather in the upper echelons of the military and a father who was a major figure. The main reason no one else wanted the girl's case was that all the rich kids from that night had incredibly deep backgrounds."

"I didn't regret losing my job. I could start over. I refused to believe they could cover the sky with one hand."

"The facts proved me terribly wrong. A few days later, my fiancée was stabbed multiple times by a bag snatcher at a train station. She was dead by the time she reached the hospital."

"The thief was caught on the spot by the police, but my fiancée was never coming back."

"The whole incident reeked. I investigated quietly and discovered that the thief had countless ties to that rich kid's family."

"A few weeks later, I finally confirmed it. The thief was a retired veteran who used to serve under the rich kid's grandfather. He was infected with HIV and suffered from dozens of complications; the hospital had long since given him a terminal diagnosis. The entire thing was the rich kid's family taking revenge on me."

"Trying to fight such a behemoth through legal channels was undoubtedly like striking a stone with an egg. So, I decided on a more extreme approach—murder."

"I spent a year investigating the rich kid's entire family, figuring out everyone's personalities."

"The rich kid's real name was Wang Kuai. His father was Wang Jiuyuan, his mother was Yuan Mei, and he also had a younger half-brother in middle school named Wang Xian."

"Wang Xian's mother was supposedly a young model. After giving birth to Wang Xian, she was paid off and sent away by the Wang Family. Thus, Wang Xian's position in the Wang Family was incredibly awkward. His father didn't love him, his mother was gone, and he only had a nanny taking care of him every day."

"Once I understood the situation, I formed a general plan. You don't necessarily have to kill someone with your own hands. The most masterful method of murder isn't about pulling off a flawless or ingenious crime—it's using psychological suggestion to make the target commit suicide."

"The Wang Family's weak point was Wang Xian. He was exactly at the age where he could think independently but lacked critical judgment."

"He was the easiest target for psychological suggestion, the perfect pawn."

"Psychological suggestion isn't as mysterious as people imagine. It's just that the technique carries certain risks; many understand it, but very few master it."

"There are countless examples of psychological suggestion in everyday life. To give the simplest one: if you lock up a group of children diagnosed with stutters, mix in a few normal children, and tell them all that they are stutterers, it only takes a few days for those normal children to develop a stutter exactly like the rest. This is the power of human self-suggestion."

"Psychological suggestion is divided into strong and weak categories. To ensure my own safety, I employed weak suggestion on the boy, which is far more subtle and difficult to detect."

"First, I reached out to him on a chat app as a mysterious outsider. As I got to know his inner thoughts, I offered him advice. Everything I said to him was positive, meant to make him cheerful and lively, but during our conversations, I would inadvertently leak some of my own pessimism."

"Every single topic I raised was carefully selected. While catering to the boy's interests, I intentionally exacerbated the deep-seated pain of lacking parental love."

"He treated me as a lifeline, and all I needed was his trust."

"Without a fully formed set of values, he was extremely easy to manipulate. I started sending him uplifting, sunny movies."

"That's right, you heard correctly. I didn't bombard him with horror films and creepy music to push him to the brink of collapse. I gave him the most positive, flawless inspirational movies."

"Of course, I tampered with all of them."

"Normal videos run at twenty-four frames per second. I replaced the final frame of every single second with a photo of my fiancée, covered in blood, right before she died."

"The eyes and ears are the channels through which memories are written into the brain. Due to the persistence of human vision, he couldn't consciously perceive that single frame. However, the content of the image was imperceptibly carved into his memory."

"If I asked him to pick out my fiancée's photo from a pile immediately after watching the video, he'd be able to find it—even if he had never seen her before—based on the fragments written into his brain. He wouldn't even know why he could do it."

"That is psychological suggestion. I wanted to mold him into a man of glass: outwardly sunny and confident, but internally terrified, fragile, and unable to withstand a single blow."

"A month later, the boy reached out to me on his own. He said he kept dreaming of a woman covered in blood, and sometimes even hallucinated that she was hiding right next to him."

"Listening to the boy's tearful complaints, I knew the first step of my plan had succeeded."

"I didn't tell him how to fix it. Instead, I nudged him to find the cause himself. I also told him to keep watching those inspirational movies to relax, or to try chatting with his parents."

"I knew the boy's situation. His birth mother had taken the money and vanished long ago, his stepmother utterly despised him, and his only reliable source of support—his father—was too busy handling company affairs."

"With no one to confide in, he could only sink deeper and deeper into fear."

"Just as I expected, the boy started searching for answers online. Those self-proclaimed psychic masters and internet trolls became my best accomplices. They twisted the facts and terrified him with tales of vengeful ghosts claiming lives, further reinforcing his self-suggestion."

"As the terror continued to spread, beneath the boy's sunny and cheerful exterior, his fragile, tumor-ridden heart was on the verge of breaking."