Chapter 261: No Bat Incident (Part 1)

Thunder and lightning, heavy rain, the night of Gotham is always so dark and terrifying. A flash of lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating the Arkham Psychiatric Hospital in the dark night. In the only room with lights on, two people were facing each other.

When Hugo woke up from his dizziness, he saw a figure in a white coat sitting opposite him, looking at him with a concerned expression.

Hugo closed his eyes again, and he tried to move his eyeballs to dissipate the hazy halo in his vision. He saw that the doctor sitting opposite him had green hair and clown makeup on his face.

The green-haired doctor took out a medical record from the bookshelf next to him, looked up at Hugo and said, "Hugo Strange, suffers from severe paranoia and has been hospitalized for three months. This is your second follow-up visit this month. Is your condition better?"

Hugo opened his mouth and said, "Jack, why are you here?"

Hugo looked down and saw that he was wearing a mental patient's restraint suit. He twisted his body hard and said, "... Stop your prank! Jack, what are you doing? Let me go!"

The doctor opposite, called Jack, showed a helpless expression and said, "It seems that your condition has worsened again. You are not still imagining that you are a psychologist and treating all doctors as patients, right?"

"What are you talking about?" Hugo opened his eyes in surprise and said, "I am a psychologist. You are a psychiatrist, and you are the mental patient who likes to call himself a clown. Didn't we cooperate before... Wait!" Hugo shook his head hard, and some fragments of memory emerged from his consciousness. He said, "No, I should be in Schiller's consciousness world now, how could I..." "Are there new symptoms again?" Jack frowned and said to Hugo, "What story did you make up this time?" "Listen, Mr. Hugo, I don't know where you heard those high school and college experiences from, or if you made them up, but no matter how detailed you make them up, you are not the world-renowned master of psychology you imagined." "I really don't want to spend another 20 minutes repeating your life story, but if this is the only way to make you sober, then I can only do this. . "

"Hugo Strange, you are a truck driver, serving a gang on Elizabeth Street. You are not an outsider, but a native of Gotham..."

"On a rainy night, you laughed and attacked the heir of the Wayne family, Bruce Wayne, with a dagger. However, Master Wayne is a good man. He saw that you had a mental illness. Not only did he not hold you accountable, he also sent you here."

"Listen, Hugo, you have to cooperate with the treatment. My time is precious. If the Wayne family didn't pay, I wouldn't treat you here..."

"What? ! I am... What crazy are you talking about? ? ? "Hugo said in disbelief: "The background you mentioned is obviously your own, Jack, don't joke, it's not funny at all, let me go!"

"You see, you are like this. To be honest, your symptoms are quite rare. Once you hear other people's background, you will imagine it as your own. And you are also the most uncooperative patient I have ever seen."

Jack on the opposite side sighed and pressed the button on the table. After a while, another doctor in a white coat came in. He pushed his glasses on his face. Jack waved and greeted him, saying, "Doctor Victor, I really have a headache now."

Jack stood up from the chair, pointed at Hugo and said to Victor, "I know that his medication dosage has reached the limit, but his condition has not improved at all..."

Hugo on the opposite side has begun to sway left and right to try to break free from the straitjacket. He looked at Victor and said, "Victor, are you crazy too? Consciousness space... where is this?"

"Where is this? "

Accompanied by Victor's voice, the room where Hugo was located turned into a square box, which gradually shrank. The four walls supporting the box spread out and flattened. Sections of wood rose from the original walls to build a wooden stage. Two heavy red curtains fell from both sides of the stage.

Looking from the stage, there were rows of auditoriums below. Victor was sitting in the auditorium and asking questions. Schiller with a globe head replied: "This is the 'Inverted Tower'."

"Inverted Tower? What is that?"

"You can think of it as an area in my mind palace, just like a theater."

"The Inverted Tower is located on the 7th, 8th and 9th floors of my mind palace. Of course, as you saw before, I asked the elevator manager to open a back door for Hugo, otherwise he might not even be able to climb up the first step."

"Then why did you teleport him here? What's special here?"

"This teleportation is random. I didn't specify it. He was lucky. ”

“Good luck? What does that mean?”

“I’ve said before that each area in my Mind Palace has special rules.”

“So what are the special rules of the Upside Down Tower?”

"The Inverted Tower is where I think from another's perspective. When I treat patients, I need to stand in the patient's shoes to understand what his current mental state is like, to judge whether his stress threshold can withstand my next question..."

"So there is the Inverted Tower. Here, all the identities you firmly believe in will be reversed. Doctors will become patients, and patients will become doctors."

"So when you treat patients, you will turn yourself into a patient here, and then think from another's perspective?"

"That's right, so I said he was lucky. The rule in the consciousness space is 'what you believe is true is true', but here it is reversed to the opposite of what you believe is true. Hugo, who firmly believes that he is a psychologist, becomes a patient here, and the patients in his memory become doctors."

"Then how can he leave here?" Yin Wens asked in confusion.

"Before, a madman passed by here while climbing the stairs. He gave a very correct demonstration."

"What is that?"

"When you believe that you are a doctor, you will become a patient. On the contrary, as long as you believe that you are a patient, you will become a doctor."

"Similarly, if you believe that there is a staircase leading to the upper floor, then it does not exist. If you believe that there will never be a staircase leading to the upper floor, then it does exist."

"In fact, this is not difficult. Perhaps, for ordinary people, it is a bit difficult to convince yourself to believe in something completely opposite, but for people who have made achievements in psychology, this is not too difficult. This is why I say that he is lucky."

"The only question is how long it will take Hugo to figure out the rules here, find the rules, and leave here."

Victor turned his head back, and his eyes fell on the stage again. At this time, Hugo, wearing a straitjacket, had returned to the ward. Obviously, he was now immersed in great shock and confusion.

The first question he puzzled about was, of course, why was Schiller's consciousness space so fancy?

This is not just a very real problem. Every person, every object, and every detail here is exactly the same as the real world. For a moment, Hugo was really shaken.

Then, the weirdness of this space came next. Generally speaking, something that appears in the consciousness space represents a certain aspect of personality. For example, a pink room may represent love, or it may represent thinking about gender. A pencil may represent a student's career, or it may represent childhood memories.

But now Hugo is a little confused. What does a mental hospital with reversed identities represent?

The things that appear here are no different from the real world, but it seems strange because of this.

But no matter what, Hugo began his career as a mental patient in confusion.

After all, he is a psychologist. He knows what mental patients do in mental hospitals. He tried to secretly spit out the medicine, find a way to open the straitjacket, and even jump off the building, but none of them succeeded because there were too many doctors staring at him, in addition to Jack in clown makeup, there are Victor, Cobert, and Alberto.

Day after day, the rain outside the window of Gotham never stopped, and Hugo did not succeed in getting rid of the surveillance of these doctors. When he was trying to think hard and trying to crack the secret, he suddenly found that this peaceful life was slipping into an unpredictable horror.

When he tried to spit out the medicine again, Dr. Jack, who was wearing clown makeup, asked the nurse to bring a funnel, and then poured a whole bottle of pills into Hugo's mouth. When he tried to open the straitjacket again, they brought huge iron chains to tie him up one circle after another.

Their treatment methods began to become more and more dangerous, from the initial forced feeding of Hugo, to tying him up with iron chains, to tying him to the treatment chair, and then using electric shocks on him...

The rain outside the window of the mental hospital was getting heavier, and the night of Gotham was getting darker and darker, until one night, a figure holding a dagger walked into the door of his ward, and lightning fell outside the window, and the bright light illuminated his face. It was a clown with a crazy smile.

He approached Hugo with a dagger. Hugo screamed and tried to retreat, but the chains bound his hands and he had nowhere to escape.

The Joker cut his face with a dagger and peeled off his skin. Hugo screamed in pain. In the shadows on the wall illuminated by lightning, the dagger fell again and again, blood splashed, and the crazy laughter spread farther and farther...

The laughter and the sound of rain intertwined, and the curtain slowly closed. Victor in the audience rubbed his arm and said, "You know, this movie will definitely be classified as a level for people over 21 years old..."

"Things are out of control, why?" Cobert asked.

"I have said before that the lower the floor, the more chaotic it is, and the higher the floor, the more orderly it is. In the 330-story Hall of Mind, the 7th, 8th, and 9th floors are already very low floors, so the speed of losing control will be very fast."

"The longer you stay there, the more out of control the world will be. After all, this is a consciousness space and a dream. Any terrible thing will happen, just like a person having a nightmare."

Yin Wensi shuddered and said, "This is really a terrible nightmare. A doctor dreams that he has become a patient and is also... "

"To be honest, he disappointed me a little. The madman who climbed the stairs last time solved everything in less than a day. He even made the stairs appear directly in front of him, and he even had time to leave a few kisses to the people on this floor..."

Speaking, Schiller with a globe head tilted his head towards Jack who was dozing next to him, but Jack did not respond at all as if he did not notice his movements.

"If this is really a nightmare, he should have been awakened by now. What will happen next?"

"If he is awakened by the shock, it means that he failed to pass the level and will return to the first floor."

"Then let's see, next. Where will the elevator take him?"