Vows Woven by Stitches and Needles

Spoilers warning!*This article contains spoilers for Project: Eden's Garden. Read at your own risk.*

## Chronology

***Vows Woven by Stitches and Needles*** is the prologue (or "Chapter 0") of Project: Eden's Garden. It was released on 17 December 2022 at midnight UTC.

## Plot summary

### Daily Life

The prologue opens with Damon Maitsu, the Ultimate Debater, explaining the concept of Ultimates and his views on them. He has been invited to attend Eden's Garden Academy, a specialized college for academic-based talents. After joining his classmates on the train to the academy, they all collapse due to a gas bomb planted on the train.

Damon wakes up inside a boiler room with Eva Tsunaka. Here, the two find out that they have electric bracelets (the Trinkets) on their wrists. After looking through a vent, they find another student who has collapsed and they reach him upstairs.

Inside the room they had seen through the vent (the dining hall in the dormitories), they find the unconscious student, Wolfgang Akire, along with Grace Madison, who had woken up inside the pantry. The two introduce themselves and the group notices how everyone has a shock bracelet on their wrist. The four students are soon joined by Toshiko Kayura, who had run inside and locked the door to the dormitories after the other students tried to make her "stay put" while they were investigating. Like the others, had woken up next to another person. After some bickering, she offers to introduce the four to the rest of the students.

The group heads into the courtyard, which they discover to be covered by a giant dome with a fake sky projected onto it. There, they meet Eloise Taulner and Desmond Hall, who tells them that the other students had gone inside the building opposite to the dormitories. Leaving Eloise and Desmond behind in the courtyard, the five students enter the main building. Here, they are greeted by a large round room with a giant tree in the middle and five shutter doors that cannot be opened.

After meeting the remaining nine students, they all gather to the courtyard to discuss their situation. Here, Eva is pressed to reveal her talent of Ultimate Liar, which immediately makes some of the other students wary of her. However, the students are suddenly interrupted by Tozu, talking through a speaker, who welcomes them, tells them that they are inside Eden's Garden Academy and gives them directions to enter the dormitory building. Inside the building, they find the corpse of a girl lying in the door of the janitor's closet.

### Deadly Life

After seeing the body, the students immediately panic. However, Eva examines the body and tells the other students that it is just a dummy. Since the students still do not trust Eva, Jean DeLamer offers to examine the body himself. He confirms that the body is fake and finds a tablet explaining that the girl is Cara Koskinen, the Ultimate Teacher's Aide, and detailing her injuries and cause of death. Through a speaker, Tozu tells them that what they see before them is a perfect reconstruction of a crime scene from several years prior and tasks them with reconstructing the details of the crime, excluding the identity of the culprit. He also demonstrates that he can punish the students who defy him through the shock bracelets when Grace attempts to destroy the speaker. Some of the students (including Damon), thinking that it might allow them to return home, decide to investigate.

Damon first reviews the tablet, learning that the victim was stabbed twenty-eight times and had suffered chemical burns to the eyes and scalp. Then, he examines the body and the area next to it, finding a bloody knife, a fully loaded assault rifle, and dry blood under the nails of the victim, whose hands were otherwise completely clean.

He then moves on to examine the janitor's closet. He finds a stepladder right behind the door, a broken digital clock above the door, and a bucket reeking of bleach on the floor. Desmond also informs him that one of the bottles of bleach is empty.

After the investigation, Tozu orders the students to take an elevator by the "Tree of Ignorance". Back in the tree room, after finding the missing piece of a Tozu bust in the room and putting it back in place, the tree opens to reveal a passage to the elevator. The elevator takes them to the trial hall, where Tozu orders the students to take their assigned stands and begin the trial.

### Class Trial

Tozu opens the class trial by explaining the rules and promising that, if the students will solve the murder case, he will allow them to leave that place. After Grace immediately disrupts the trial, Tozu punishes her with a very strong electric shock that leaves her unable to speak for most of the class trial.

During the trial, the students manage to reconstruct the murder. They arrive to the conclusion that the victim, armed with the rifle, had entered the janitor's closet, where the culprit, who was armed with the knife, had prepared a trap for her. The trap consisted of a bucket full of bleach placed on the doorframe by the killer. When the victim had opened the door, the bucket had poured its contents over her head, blinding her. Then, the killer, who was hiding in the back of the janitor's closet, had stabbed the victim to death, ignoring her attempts to fight back by scratching the killer's neck.

However, after the crime has been fully reconstructed, Wenona comments that the killer was likely acting in self-defense, denying that Cara was the actual "victim". Wolfgang vehemently opposes her justification of the killer's actions, leading to a Nonstop Debate where Damon ends up supporting Wolfgang, either by convincing the others to trust his expertise as a lawyer (Pathos Route) or by pointing out the brutality of the victim's wounds and that the time needed to set up the trap shows that the murder was premeditated (Logic Route).

After the students summarize the case to Tozu (who had fallen asleep), he makes his first in-person appearance and officially declares the beginning of the Killing Game, explaining its rules. When the students remind him of his promise, Tozu explains that he meant to let them out of the trial hall, not out of the academy. Grace tries beating Tozu to death before he can start the killing game, but she is promptly shot on the cheek as a warning by the enforcer, Mara. Wolfgang then states that he trusts his fellow students to not participate in the killing game due to their status as Ultimates, which he believes to attest to their ability to be above their own self-interest. While most of the other students agree with him, Eva and Damon oppose him. Eva argues that their status as Ultimates makes them more likely to kill, as Ultimates have placed their talent and aspirations, which cannot be nurtured by staying in the academy, before everything else. Damon, on the other hand, accuses his Ultimate classmates to be attention-seekers who don't deserve their title. The students turn against the two and, as Tozu leaves the trial hall, Damon comes to the realization that he is now trapped in a killing game where everyone else hates him.

## References

1. ↑ What we've been COOKING... | Project: Eden's Garden「模倣」- August 2023 Dev-Vlog #6 at 20:08