Chapter 1767: Summer in Fool's Village (16)

A typical English manor is usually divided into a front hall and a back hall. Entering from the symmetrical main entrance, you can see the front hall used for meeting guests and reception. The symmetrical stairs either line both sides of the front hall or extend to both sides in the center behind the front hall. Rodriguez Manor is the latter.

The door on the left under the stairs leads to the dining room, which is also where the garden floor-to-ceiling windows are located. The structure on the right is symmetrical to the left, but after opening the door, it is a corridor. On the right side of the corridor is the middle partition area of the back courtyard, with the butler's room, tea room, laundry room, kitchen, etc.

The room on the left side of the corridor is a reception room with a small fireplace, sofa, piano, and mirror cabinet. If you go straight forward, you can come to an office that also has floor-to-ceiling windows. This is the entire structure of the manor hall.

The structural design of the manor building pays great attention to separating the guest area from the private area. In Rodriguez Manor, the active area is the first floor, while the quiet area is the second and third floors.

Although there are offices and studies on the second floor of the manor, they are private areas and usually do not receive any guests. Shiler usually engages in reading activities in his spare time there, while the office in the back hall on the first floor is more suitable for academic discussions with colleagues and friends.

The movement line of guests arriving at Rodriguez Manor is roughly as follows: after being introduced into the manor gate by the butler, they cross the square in the front yard, walk into the main building, and wait in the front hall.

If the manor owner is on the second floor at this time, the butler will choose to call. After obtaining the manor owner's permission, the butler will take the guests to the reception room in the back hall.

When the manor owner comes down from the second floor, he will go to the reception room to greet the guests and lead the guests to the office in the back hall with the butler, or go to the dining room through the corridor in the middle of the middle partition area.

Of course, not every guest will walk through the front door. Batman's movement line is to first land on the roof of the manor, walk towards the back hall, jump down and land directly in the back garden, and then walk forward from the back door of the back garden.

However, because Merkel's butler room is in the middle partition area of the back hall, even if he is occasionally lucky enough not to be caught by tree branches, he will be discovered by Merkel on the way to the front hall.

Talia chose this route too, so when she jumped down from the roof of the back courtyard, she was facing the floor-to-ceiling window of the office on the right. Shiler was standing in front of the bookshelf behind the floor-to-ceiling window, checking his wine cabinet that was missing a bottle of wine.

There is also a huge wine cabinet in the front hall of the manor. When Constantine first broke into Rodriguez Manor, he was drugged by crazy wine there. But since more and more children have been coming in and out of the manor, Shiler moved all dangerous goods to the wine cabinet in the back hall and asked Merkel to strictly supervise it, not to let children enter this room easily.

The scope of children doesn't include Batman. In order to deal with Talia, Bruce took a bottle of crazy wine directly from the office in the back hall, and Shiler was standing in front of the wine rack thinking about which bottle of wine to take from the underground wine cellar to fill the gap.

And when Talia saw the figure standing in front of the wine cabinet, the intuition from the killer made her hair stand on end almost in an instant, and the hair follicles that opened on her back became a blower of cold air.

That reminded her of the gorgeous and dangerous Feathered Serpent God drawn by the Maya that she had seen in her father's collection.

When that man turned his head, his unfocused gray eyes focused slightly. At that moment, Talia felt like prey injected with venom.

Very, very, very wrong!

Talia gripped her fist tightly. The alarm of intuition made her almost unable to think rationally. The most terrible thing happened: she encountered a man whose weakness she couldn't see at a glance.

It is not without reason that this powerful female killer ignores all men. She has an extremely powerful killing instinct against men. Even if someone as powerful and perfect as Batman, Talia could still find his weakness the first time she faced him.

This made Talia the most beautiful and deadly scorpion in the world. She believed that no man could escape her poisonous tail needle.

Until today, until this very moment, Talia found that she had fallen into the territory of another dangerous creature. There were no weaknesses in sight, only perfect human skin woven with gorgeous silk threads, and the colors were dazzling and fascinating.

Don't listen, don't look, don't be attracted! Just when Talia was warning herself in her heart, she saw that figure had walked to the window at some point.

When they were looking at each other at close range with only a layer of glass between them, Talia couldn't make herself not look at the gray eyes hidden behind the frosted glass, as if that were some kind of antidote to the poison spread by Shiler.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Talia roared in her heart like crazy.

With a creak, the door opened. Shiler only poked half of his body out of the door. Talia heard him say: "Please come in."

Killer-style infiltration is a stupid decision, Talia thought, taking a deep breath in her heart. This made her not know where the garden door was even if she wanted to turn around and run away. Returning the same way was more like a joke. She felt her legs go soft.

Shiler seemed to have guessed what she was thinking. He turned his head slightly to look at the big tree in the center of the garden, smiled to himself and said: "You are lucky. You wouldn't want to know how many people have been hung on that tree."

He was telling the truth! Talia roared in her heart again, because she couldn't hear a hint of a lie. At the same time, she thought mockingly in her heart, only on the tree? She dared to bet that there were at least twenty corpses buried under the land of this garden.

This is the consequence of being flushed with anger. Talia cursed Bruce ten thousand times in her heart again, but she also knew that things had come to this, so she could only take one step at a time.

If she first rushed in without permission, and then turned around and left regardless of the manor owner's invitation, then even if Shiler was an ordinary Gothamite, the possibility of her being hung on a tree in a few minutes was not zero. And the current Shiler is not only not an ordinary Gothamite, but might not even be Shiler.

Talia thought in the chaotic flow of anger and panic while walking towards the door. He is not Shiler. The psychology professor who appeared in the FBI to accept the investigation into dereliction of duty is not like this. He is not so... perfect.

Talia could only use such a word to describe the current Shiler, but this is not a commendatory term, but more like a terrifying symbol. The person in front of her looks like a human, but he is not—he is too perfect.

His appearance, clothing, demeanor, expressions, words, and deeds are all emphasizing that he is a perfect person. The point is that he is a human, but humans don't emphasize that they are humans. Only monsters will carefully weave a human skin for themselves.

Talia's toe still touched the threshold of the manor. A slight "tap" seemed to scare her quite a bit. Talia shrank back without a trace.

Shiler stood against the door that opened outwards. The door gap space left was just enough for Talia to pass through. But now Talia was facing a problem—if she walked in with her head held high, her shoulders would inevitably brush against Shiler's chest. And if she didn't want to have physical contact with this man, she had to retract her arms, pull her shoulders inward, and drill through the door gap in a shrinking posture.

Talia had never felt troubled by physical contact with any man. No, that's not trouble, it's more like fear, similar to touching corrosive liquid with her hands. Every cell in Talia's body was screaming in refusal.

Retracting her arms and holding them in front of her chest, slightly shrinking her chest to pass through the door gap, this posture is not elegant, but Talia just vaguely felt that Shiler seemed to be forcing her to do so. He only gave her this one choice.

What is the point of this? Talia hadn't figured it out yet.

Talia, immersed in thought, didn't notice that she had been standing stupidly in place for a long time.

Her right foot had landed, her toe against the threshold, and her left heel had just lifted. The whole person was in a state of shifting the center of gravity. So it was very unsurprising that Shiler reached out to support her left arm and applied slight force to take her across the last step, and the two stood into the office together.

When Talia came back to her senses, the door had been closed. She felt that her only remaining oxygen disappeared with the closed door. Her body entered the prison, and her soul stayed outside the door.

The temperature in the room was lower than Talia imagined. She keenly felt the air exchange in a certain place. The air conditioner was on in this room. The water vapor that had just been stained in the humid garden turned into comfortable dryness after a while.

Talia caught her breath. She saw Shiler turn his back to her and walk towards the sofa by the floor-to-ceiling window, then came to a single sofa on one side, pulled the sofa open, and looked at Talia.

This is an obvious social hint. Talia knew she had no possibility of not understanding it. She didn't hold any hope that Shiler would imagine her as the kind of silly girl who didn't understand any etiquette. And intuition was telling her that the only consequence of playing dumb rudely was to become a living sacrifice on the Feathered Serpent God's dining table.

Talia walked over, came to the gap between the sofa and the coffee table, reached out to gather the long skirt of her lower body, and sat on the sofa.

And she didn't realize that when she hugged her arms and held her chest to drill in through the narrow door gap, this posture had been fixed on her body. Even now that she was sitting on the soft and comfortable sofa, her shoulders had never opened, and her entire chest was retracted inward.

This posture is not elegant. At banquets of various celebrities, everyone will stretch their chests and stretch their necks, like swans swimming on the lake. Besides showing their faces and neck ornaments better, they are also conveying the social signal of "I am confident and have enough confidence" to others.

In contrast, when people are tired, they are more inclined to relax the muscles of their shoulders and neck to let the whole person collapse. This is a relaxed posture presented by the body based on self-protection. And when people are not confident or want to escape, body language will instinctively imitate this posture, lowering their heads and holding their chests, with their hands held in front of them.

Psychological activities will shape body posture, and conversely, changing body posture may also affect psychology and emotions. When people stretch their limbs to their heart's content, their emotions will also relax, but if they maintain a curled posture for a long time, irritable, nervous, anxious, and other emotions will follow.

This is a way of applying psychology, that is, shaping posture through the environment, and then influencing psychology through posture.

The usual way of using it is to create a relaxed and comfortable environment, making people let go of their defenses to accept psychotherapy.

But if it is reversed, it can also force people to curl their limbs by creating an uncomfortable narrow space, creating anxiety for them without their awareness, and making them feel irritable, nervous, and avoidant by restricting their limbs.

More importantly, when the other party doesn't realize where this kind of anxiety comes from, they will gradually lose confidence in their ability to manage their emotions, and then produce confusion in conscious perception, becoming more susceptible to guidance and control. ===== CHAPTER 1768 =====