Chapter 2822: Weird Feast Nightmare (IV)
Chapter 2796 Weird Feast Nightmare (IV)
Schiller saw that the man who came back to sit next to him was no different from the previous one. He did not seem to notice that only the head on his plate was fresh, but picked up the knife and fork again and started to enjoy it.
But this time when he used the fork to pick the meat on his face, the meat on his face did not fall off, as if it was really just a dish, not his own head.
Some people on other tables had eaten the rotten head one after another. Their heads, like this man, rolled onto the table and were put back on the plate. Then another of them came in and continued to enjoy their own heads.
The person who returned might not be them anymore.
Schiller looked at the menu next to him. There were seven dishes on the menu. According to the order of serving French dishes, they were served one by one, and one dish was eaten after another. They were aperitif, cold cuts, soup, main course, cheese, dessert and digestif.
Schiller came in late, and the aperitif had been served. On Schiller's left hand was a glass of orange-yellow aperitif, but this was obviously unusual, because when Schiller tilted the glass slightly, he found that the wine was viscous and looked like some kind of syrup, mixed with bubbles.
Then the head on the table should be a cold dish, and its name on the menu was "nutrients".
Schiller remembered the ballad that the head had sung before. The ballad was roughly divided into two parts. The first few sentences said that they ate them and gained nutrients, but they were getting fewer and fewer, so in the end they could only eat themselves and eventually grew into towering trees.
The "they" referred to in the first few sentences used personal pronouns, which proved that it did not refer to animals or vegetables, but to people, but it should not be biological people.
Schiller looked around and found that most of the diners sitting at the table were dressed brightly. To be precise, there was no simple person who could stay in the Wayne Hotel. People of Peter's class could not afford to stay in such a hotel.
The restaurant of the Wayne Hotel is also very high-end. It only accepts a limited number of guests at the same time. The chef is famous all over the world and has attracted many gourmets. Celebrities of all kinds often have banquets and small gatherings here, and it has hosted countless wealthy weddings.
So the previous sentence may mean that they draw nutrients from the lower class, but Schiller doesn't think that the monsters here will have any thoughts of pleading for the people. The monsters in the Cthulhu mythology system are not revengeful or complaining. The madness they cause is chaotic and illogical.
These monsters don't distinguish whether people have money or not, and they won't deliberately punish some people because they have money. Everything in the secular world is not important to them. In their eyes, human society is just an ant nest. What is the difference between rich and poor for ants?
And if Schiller is not mistaken, the people in the restaurant now are the richest among the guests of the Wayne Hotel. This monster is not HR, and can it conduct a background check before they enter the restaurant and not let those without money in?
Schiller has a guess, but it is not certain now.
Back to this dish, since there are fewer and fewer "they" in the nursery rhyme, it may be that it has reached the stage of eating itself.
Schiller searched for stories related to the Cthulhu mythology system in his mind, but did not find a very suitable one. On the contrary, the story of the Ouroboros is more suitable for the current scene.
The Ouroboros is actually a snake biting its own tail, always in a state of self-devouring. Jung believed that the Ouroboros reflects the psychological state of human beings, and Schiller believed that Jung was talking nonsense.
This pattern is also given the meaning of "infinite loop", just like what is happening in the restaurant, the man eats a corrupt head, his own head becomes a dish on the plate, and another him walks in and continues to eat his head, like an endless cycle of devouring, which is almost exactly the same as the story of the Ouroboros.
Because it is related to psychology, Schiller has also analyzed this story. His views are similar to the mainstream views, but not exactly the same. Many experts believe that a monster that can devour itself infinitely represents the human desire to be completely self-sufficient.
In the myth, the snake has neither eyes nor ears, but it does not need to see, hear, or have hands or feet. Its self-devouring is a way of moving.
There is no doubt that compared with the omniscient gods in other myths, it seems too weird, even incomplete. It was not born to create or destroy anything, as if it exists just to exist.
But Schiller believes that all this is related to the self. The Ouroboros represents more of an independent self, or a whole reference system with the self as the center.
As we all know, human beings are shaped in the environment, and people can have too many reference points, such as the words and judgments of others, the reflection of social status, the feedback brought by wealth, and even the requirements of morality and law.
Schiller believes that the Ouroboros represents an extreme self, highlighting its own internal cycle and expressing the concept of "I am society", which is equivalent to an active closed strategy adopted by human self after being placed in infinity.
It is just like nothing except me can judge me. I myself am a macroscopic state of motion, moving forward, swallowing, and growing. Everything is accomplished by me, and I do not need anything else as a reference system to judge myself.
The study of narcissistic personality disorder can be extended. The "infinite self" of the Ouroboros is obviously the ideal state of patients with narcissistic personality disorder, because the typical manifestation of narcissistic personality disorder is the infinite exaggeration of self-worth.
People with this kind of personality disorder usually always feel worthless, so they need to gain a sense of security by exaggerating their self-worth, so they always live in the interweaving of inferiority and arrogance.
Psychoanalysis believes that this is a projection disorder. Their psychological power cannot be projected onto anything in the outside world, so it stays inside and becomes narcissistic, but this statement is no longer recognized by the industry because it cannot explain the interweaving state of inferiority and arrogance.
Modern behavioral and object relations believe that patients with this kind of personality disorder mainly have the performance of "not distinguishing between others and me". Because they did not receive enough love from others in their childhood, they believe that they cannot get a sense of security from others. Only by loving themselves and affirming their own value can they bring enough sense of security.
Therefore, they need a higher self-identity, but the self-identity of most people can only come from social recognition, that is, the recognition and praise of relatives and friends, career progress, and wealth.
However, the general degree of social recognition cannot meet their higher self-recognition needs, which will keep them in a low-recognition state, thus generating inferiority complex, and in order to gain a sense of security, they begin to exaggerate their self-worth and behave arrogantly.
The state of Ouroboros, which can completely meet all self-needs by itself, is exactly the state that narcissistic personality disorder dreams of, that is, the self is a society, and it can meet all its own recognition needs.
As mentioned before, the monsters in the Cthulhu mythology system do not have such complicated ideas, so after Schiller analyzed all this, he believed that the abnormality of the restaurant was caused by someone behind the scenes.
This is actually not surprising. In most Cthulhu mythology systems, these old gods and foreign gods are indeed to blame, but to put it bluntly, most of them are man-made disasters.
To be precise, some people dare to do anything for taboo knowledge, and after obtaining taboo knowledge, these knowledge that they cannot control makes them mentally confused.
No one is perfect, and no one's psychology is completely healthy. Some people who seek taboo knowledge are not healthy to begin with, and they will be even crazier after being shocked by this knowledge, and of course they will harm their compatriots.
It can be said that most movies, TV series or novels under the Cthulhu mythology system exclude the factor of man-made disasters, and they really can't cause much harm.
The masterminds behind many such literary and artistic works are basically polluted humans. Just look at Schiller's experience on the 19th floor. Without Jerome following the chaos there, and without the unconscious Gordon laying traps, Schiller would not have been delayed there for so long.
So this restaurant must be the product of a combination of natural disasters and man-made disasters.
And from the cold dish, we can see that, first of all, the human nature of the mastermind behind the scenes has a certain hatred of the rich. It is not necessarily to vent anger for the lower class, but simply hate the rich.
Secondly, the other party may be a patient with narcissistic personality disorder, or it may be that the polluted chaos and madness magnified these characteristics in his personality, causing him to desire a perfect closed self.
To some extent, he realized this wish. With the power of the monster, he completed the perfect closed loop of himself, locked these people he hated in the restaurant, and let them cycle over and over again. He only needed them to suffer, not to judge, and he had already defeated and controlled them.
Then the question came, what was wrong with me?
Schiller felt that he was not a rich man, at least Dr. Sosip's background was not that rich. He felt that he might have broken in, but the chef said that he was the last guest, which was obviously contradictory.
He glanced at Jerome opposite him again. Obviously, this guy was also a special case. The Valeska family had no money. Even if Jerome had a high education and high IQ, he was too young and was not a person of the same class as the old money sitting here.
Jerome and I were like teenagers who accidentally entered a celebrity banquet in a nonsensical comedy, but this was not a comedy, but a horror movie.
Why there happened to be a place for me could be thought about later. The most important thing now was to crack the secret of this cold dish.
In the few tens of seconds that Schiller was thinking, more than a dozen diners finished eating the rotten heads, left their own heads, and then walked back in from the door, sat back in their original positions and repeated the previous actions.
After they ate all the meat on a head, they left their own heads. Then, according to common sense, there would be more and more heads on the table, and finally there would be no more, because they could only eat meat but not bones. If they stayed where they were, a mountain of heads would pile up on the table sooner or later.
But the fact is that when the fresh head rolled onto the plate, the original head rotted quickly, as if the time on the head was accelerated, and the bones and flesh rotted into a pool of black water and disappeared under the tablecloth.
After the fresh head was eaten, there was a new head, and the head that was eliminated and was still fresh also rotted quickly, and would disappear from the table before the new diners came in.
Schiller looked down at the head on his table and saw no signs of accelerated decay, so it was okay as long as he didn't eat it?