Chapter 1434: Research on Manipulation (Part 17)

The third day Bane came again, hearing Bruce say good morning in that low tone, he had no surprise at all. He just squatted in front of Bruce's cell door and said.

"I don't know if you are pretending to be driven crazy by the torture Amanda inflicted on you. Perhaps this is your means of teasing or retaliating against her, but I didn't come to listen to this."

"Then what do you want to listen to?"

"I just want to know about you, about Batman, about..." Bane's tone gradually sank, and after half a day, he spat out a word: "About Cat Getan."

"I don't know what you specifically mean."

"A long time ago, I asked a peer if there were any good vacation spots to recommend. He told me Cat Getan would be a good choice. I think this point of view is very interesting. Perhaps the best place for us criminals to relax is precisely a city of sin."

"So about five years ago, I went on an East Coast trip with a peer with good standards. The first stop was the bustling Metropolis, and then it was Cat Getan. The feeling was quite good, as if I had returned home."

"What is your home like?"

Bane was silent again. After a while, his voice with a low trembling sound came from outside the door: "You are smarter than I thought, Batman."

"Thank you for your compliment."

"Your heart has a deeper darkness than mine, but it appears more straightforward than mine, and you use this straightforwardness as a weapon. You have indeed surpassed my assessment of your level. Now I am even more interested in you."

"My honor."

"Then tell me, Batman, what happened to the city I saw a month ago?"

"I don't understand what you mean."

"My meaning is, why in just five years, the legendary City of Darkness is gone? Cat Getan not only has sunshine, but also hope?"

Bane tapped the door with his hand, making a "thud" sound. His tone was full of slightly pathological curiosity.

"Tell me, Batman, what did you do to this city to make it become what it is today? Tell me, how exactly did you save Cat Getan? This is the question I followed you here to ask."

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because Cat Getan is unsavable." Bane's tone finally had a fluctuation. His breathing became heavier, and his speaking speed became faster: "Because five years ago, when I saw this city, I judged that even if I replaced you, I couldn't cure this city. I believe you couldn't do it either, so I left."

"That peer once asked me why I didn't kill you, because when I saw you from afar, I thought you were too young and immature. I thought you weren't worthy of being my opponent."

"If I must take your life, it would be best to let your despair match this city. At that time I called it a miracle, and you weren't worthy yet. At that time you were still far behind."

"Thank you for your compliment."

"Batman..." Bane groaned: "A few months ago, I revisited the old place out of curiosity—I couldn't believe what I saw. You, a boy immersed in his own childish fantasies and games, used just a few years to chisel a crack in Cat Getan's eternal dark barrier."

"Now the miracle belongs to you, and I want to know, what is the true face of the miracle?"

"Why do you ask that?"

Bane was silent for a while, shorter than his previous silence. He asked: "Truth for truth, right?"

"What is your home like?"

"A prison. It sounds absurd, but my mother was captured due to war. The person who caught my mother decided that if it was a boy in her belly, then he would pay the price for his father's crimes. Then I was born."

"Sounds very bad."

"Yes, but there is worse. I was born and raised in prison. It couldn't be called a healthy upbringing. My physique was far inferior to those strong prisoners who were newly locked in. I grew up in constant beatings and abuse."

"And one day, a prisoner wanted to use me to break out of prison, pushed me down the tunnel and made me faint. It might have been the impact on my brain that changed my thinking. I couldn't bear it anymore, so I killed him."

"I don't know what you specifically mean."

"In a very cruel way, I dislocated his jaw, injected mouse bait into his stomach, and then stuffed a pile of hungry live mice into his esophagus, letting him be gnawed away from the inside out."

"The warden thought I was very cruel, so he threw me to the lowest level of the cell, a dark and narrow place where the tide would rise at any time. I lived by eating mice."

"But this exercised my will and physique. When I truly grew up, I seized the power of the prison and ran rampant here. They valued my strong willpower and chose me as a member of the biochemical experiment."

"The experience in the laboratory was very boring. As you said, the experimental project wasn't valued, and the doctor wasn't professional enough. They injected me with a toxin to make me stronger, so I killed them. Everyone escaped from the prison. Since then, I have become a free mercenary."

Bane's tone became lower and lower. After being silent for a while, he still opened his mouth and asked: "As an exchange, don't you intend to reveal some truth about Cat Getan?"

"I don't know what you specifically mean."

"What do you think Cat Getan is?"

"Cat Getan is a city located on the East Coast of the United States, bordering the Atlantic Ocean, belonging to a temperate continental humid climate, with four districts under its jurisdiction and a total population of nearly ten million..."

"It seems I can't get an answer today." Bane stood up, put one hand on the door, and said: "I took Amanda's order to lure you here, not entirely to complete the task, but also to create a sufficiently secret way for us to communicate."

"This kind of means can't be called glorious, so count it as me owing you. But I must figure this out. You will always answer me. Goodbye, Batman."

"Goodbye, Bane."

An hour later, Bruce woke up again. He blinked somewhat confusedly, trying to dispel the hallucinations in front of him. Feeling the silence in his ears, he said to himself: "... He left? The automatic reply shouldn't have any problems, right?"

Soon, he became quiet again, clearly diving into the shit-mountain code, just like every Gothamite had done before, trying to find gold in the shit with great perseverance.

The second day, the third day, the fourth day, Bane would appear outside Bruce's cell door every day and talk to him about many things, but rarely got a response.

Bane naturally noticed that Bruce's short and repetitive answers were wrong, but he thought that he helped Amanda trick Bruce here, so Bruce would feel that he and Amanda were in the same group, so it was normal for him to perform the act of being driven crazy by sensory deprivation in front of him.

Bane knew he had to break through this layer of defense to have a possibility of getting the real answer.

But what made him first surprised, then shocked, and finally speechless to the point of being speechless was that for a whole week, this Batman didn't say another word to the only object he could communicate with under the harsh punishment of sensory deprivation.

Bane was almost feeling admiration.

As everyone knew, the harshness of sensory deprivation lay in the fact that in a completely dark space, people couldn't feel the flow of time. This state of complete loneliness seemed to last until they died. This was a very deep despair, and almost no one could resist it.

In most cases, sensory deprivation couldn't be very strict, but Amanda built this prison, so naturally she would rack her brains on the final punishment. The cells used for this punishment were surrounded by maze-like soundproofing devices and were strictly shaded. Even the ventilation devices were absolutely silent.

Criminals would be very strictly restrained in chairs. Except for solving personal needs at irregular times, there was no activity space. If it weren't for the fact that long-term immobility might cause limb diseases, Amanda would have even considered directly inserting tubes to solve eating and excretion.

This was simply an excellent environment for cultivating Stockholm syndrome. Bane naturally knew this too.

In this situation, having an object to communicate with and a method to experience the passage of time, the imprisoned object would definitely look for a sense of security like crazy to reduce the ravages of that terrible loneliness and despair on the will.

Bane originally wanted to kill Batman, but after he revisited Cat Getan, he thought Batman was a miracle, so he, like all the villains in Cat Getan, didn't want to destroy Batman's body, but wanted to completely destroy his spirit, or go further, manipulate his spirit.

Bane's pathological curiosity about Batman saving Cat Getan wasn't admiration, just a kind of pathological curiosity. This was malice without reason, and Bane didn't need any reason to cross the moral bottom line. His birth and growth were twisted, and pathological was normal for him.

But now, he really felt admiration for Batman. Batman almost completely surpassed the limit of human spirit. The sensory deprivation of fourteen days in total, which might be longer and more painful than decades of imprisonment in the feeling of thinking, couldn't make this tough guy say another word.

Precisely because Bane's childhood and adolescence were spent in a completely enclosed small space, he could understand how this pain twisted people's spirits and drove people crazy.

He also knew better that if he had a partner at that time, he didn't need to do anything else, just come to accompany him to say a word every day, he would definitely be grateful, and no matter what the other party asked him to do, he would do it.

Loneliness was humanity's greatest enemy, and humans in loneliness were order's greatest enemy.

But for so many days, Bane got nothing except a few repeated answers—he was convinced.

Finally, Bane stood in the dark corridor, feeling the boundless silence he had once feared so much and the loneliness that would still well up in his heart when recalling the past for many years, and said to Bruce.

"I once thought about breaking your spine, watching you crawl helplessly on the ground, unable to do anything, abandoned in a rainy night, because this could make you experience the pain I had suffered, not the pain of the limbs, but the loneliness and despair brought by powerlessness."

"No matter how you look at it, I must defend myself. I don't like dynamic bloodshed and conflict."

"I prefer to deprive people of their power, watch them die in silence, and let them understand that in the last moment of their lives, what they fear most isn't death, but the loneliness of being abandoned."

"From the moment I was born, I was abandoned by the world like this."

"But this isn't a revenge. I couldn't defeat loneliness in loneliness. I chose to break away from loneliness, return to the crowd, and resist with violence. This proves that I lost to it."

"I searched the world and killed countless people in this way, just to prove that I was right—no one can defeat loneliness itself in loneliness."

"Until I met you, Batman."

Bane raised the hand he had placed on the door, retracted his arm, and hung it by his side, his posture solemn as if he were paying tribute to something, and his voice sounded like a soft sigh.

"You defeated loneliness, and you also defeated me."

Then he put both hands on the door, gritted his teeth, and said: "And I just want to know, what exactly supported you to defeat it? You must tell me, Batman... Answer me!"

Answering him was only deeper silence.

At the same time, his angry and puzzled voice echoed in Bruce's mental world—

"How come Schiller can do it but I can't???" ===== CHAPTER 1435 =====