Chapter 1919: U: Beyond the Great Event (45)

"Perhaps this hospital is exceptionally large?" Seeing Natasha recalled and said, "There were quite a few wards on the way here, so maybe such long corridors are needed?"

"But the area of the wards is not large." Batman looked around the ward and said, "What's very strange is that the vast majority of wards here are double or single rooms, without large public wards. It's not like all the patients are dangerous individuals with strong aggression, right?"

"If that's the case, for the hospital operators, building more large wards and appropriately adding single or double rooms would be the best choice, as it both reduces construction costs and accommodates more patients."

"And have you noticed?" Batman walked to the wall on the side of the room, hammered the wall, and said, "The walls between rooms are very thick, but the corridor and the exterior walls of the building are normal."

Seeing Natasha was also confused by what he said, so she asked, "What exactly have you thought of?"

Batman paced in front of the door, reasoning from the beginning.

"This scene was created by the murderer. He would create a complex hospital, possessing corridors, ward lobbies, and various rooms, rather than simply creating a space to lock us in. There must be a reason."

"When inferring the modus operandi, I tend to equate effort with reward. Only with better rewards would the perpetrator use more complex methods."

"Since the murderer's goal is to kill us, there's no need to consider any laws here, so he wouldn't adopt more complex methods like an ordinary person just to confuse the police and escape guilt. In other words, the benefits he can reap from this method are direct."

"And in this game, there is only one direct benefit, which is to kill us and win."

"This means that his creation of a complex scene is for the purpose of killing us."

"Then, performing reverse inference, does this mean that he couldn't kill us without creating this complex scene?"

"The previous game process is also a piece of evidence." Batman lightly rubbed his fingers and said, "The murderers in these games seem very powerful and have various abilities, but they don't directly use these abilities to kill us, but rather insist on taking a roundabout way. This shows that their abilities must also have their drawbacks."

"For example, the first mimic murderer—not to mention he had no way of knowing Dick's habits—he only turned into one person from beginning to end, instead of borrowing the opportunity of us splitting up to turn into others to confuse us. This isn't that he didn't want to do it, but that he couldn't; he didn't have that ability."

"The second arsonist murderer goes without saying. If he could really control fire from a distance, why not ignite our skin directly instead of creating grand-scale flames in the space around us? It's very likely he couldn't do it."

"The third gem murderer is the same. His body size is so large that he could clearly crush us with one move, but he insisted on playing games with us. All that talk about curiosity about human nature is nonsense. I observed before that his act of not daring to throw the cage aside shows that he couldn't control his strength well. Although his force was great, it was very slow."

"And although many gems have amazing hardness, it also means they lose toughness and become very brittle. It's a bit troublesome to break a gem person of such a large size, but it's not difficult for us to cooperate."

Batman paused his steps and then said, "And this is very reasonable. We are not like players in a game who can die and resurrect infinitely."

"We only have one life in this game. If he created ten invincible monsters that were immensely strong, fast, and could transform, teleport, and enter dreams, then this wouldn't be a game, but a one-sided slaughter. The organizer obviously wouldn't do that."

"So he must impose many restrictions on the murderer's side, such as not being able to act within a certain time, and the murderer's own abilities also have flaws."

"Then we must think about where the flaws of this dream murderer are. He didn't kill directly—whether it's because the safety time hasn't passed or he can't kill directly—remains to be seen."

"But there is no doubt that he created such a complex hospital as a dream scene, which must be to compensate for his flaws and better achieve the goal of killing us."

"Then this hospital is his modus operandi, and by connecting the various oddities in the hospital, one can profile his personality, and thus find his flaws."

"First, the most unreasonable thing about this hospital is the architectural structure. No hospital operator would deliberately make the walls very thick, the wards very small, and the corridors very long. This is an anti-human design in any hospital."

"Then this is the key to the profiling." Batman touched his chin and said, "The question is whether the key point is the thick walls, the small wards, or the long corridors."

"I think it's the last point. The first two points serve the last point."

"First, if the key point is that the walls are thick, and this murderer wants to build a fortress that is difficult to destroy, then he should also thicken the exterior walls, rather than just thickening the walls adjacent to the rooms, which provides no protection."

"The rooms being small is the same. Since the ultimate goal of this hospital is to kill us, the murderer's focus of action cannot be the hundreds of other wards we almost never go to."

"On the contrary, we almost inevitably pass through the corridors, whether exploring the hospital or for daily activities. The hospital's corridors have the greatest impact on us."

"There is another piece of evidence: the doctors and nurses in the hospital are constantly hinting that we are sick, but they let us easily perceive their attitude, wanting to arouse our rebellious psychology, either to prove it to them or to escape."

"And if you want to prove it, you naturally have to repeatedly go to the doctor's office, inevitably repeatedly shuttling through the corridors. Escaping is even more so."

"In other words, these corridors, which are longer than any other hospital, are the key to killing us."

Batman looked up and examined the ward again, saying, "And dividing them into small wards and thickening the walls are all to cover up the abnormality of the corridors."

"We have been to hospitals before and have a certain understanding of how many doors there are in a hospital corridor."

"So he must create many small wards to simulate the door spacing of ordinary hospitals, and because the corridors are too long and the number of doors is limited, the wards might be stretched too long, making us feel weird as soon as we walk in, so he chose to thicken the walls to return the wards to normal size."

When saying this, Seeing Natasha looked at the ward she was in and indeed discovered the abnormality.

This ward was a rectangle with two windows, each with a bed under it, but she could see that there was a large cabinet on each of the two short sides of the rectangle, while on one long side there was a bed, and on the other side, there was nothing.

Seeing Natasha remembered that there was also this large cabinet in her own room, and it wasn't filled with medical supplies, but some decorative items like sculptures.

She hadn't thought much about it at the time, but now it seemed very strange. Why put so many decorations in a psychiatric patient's ward? Was it because they were afraid they wouldn't have things to self-harm with?

"This is to further improve the spatial structure of the long, narrow room." Batman reached out and knocked on one of the cabinets and said, "Thicken the walls, then block them with two cabinets, and the length-to-width ratio of the room becomes basically normal."

And he walked over and knocked on the guardrail at the end of the bed and said, "This bed is less than two meters, it should be at most 1.8 meters. This is also to increase the visual horizontal space."

"But our... oh, right, if our beds were also shortened, you would definitely have noticed immediately, so our beds are normal."

Batman nodded. He really liked teammates who trusted his abilities and understood things instantly.

"But what does a long corridor have to do with killing us?" Seeing Natasha raised another question and said, "Is it to make us more tired? But turning in an ordinary corridor isn't exactly effortless. Is it worth going to such great lengths just to extend this straight distance?"

"Unless the straight line is very important." Batman began to think in silence.

In his mind, he kept replaying the long corridor he had just passed through—a deep, straight corridor leading to the end, with one door after another on both sides.

Suddenly, two completely different but similar scenes overlapped in Batman's heart.

"The bus." He said in a deep voice.

"What?" Seeing Natasha asked, puzzled.

"The structure of the long corridor and the wards is like the structure of the bus and the seats on both sides." Batman said with wide eyes.

He walked to the cabinet on one side, squatted down, and dug out a pile of paper from underneath. Without a pen, he used some dust from the windowsill to draw simple patterns.

"This is the hospital's long corridor." Batman drew a straight vertical line.

"These are the wards symmetrical on both sides of the corridor." Batman drew many horizontal lines on this vertical line.

"This is the bus aisle." Batman drew another vertical line below.

"These are the bus seats or the gaps between seats." Batman drew many horizontal lines on the vertical line.

"These are two almost identical patterns, both a vertical line with many short horizontal lines on it."

"But this is still too abstract." Seeing Natasha couldn't think of the connection. She tilted her head and looked at the pattern on the paper and said, "Then why would the perpetrator want the hospital's structure to imitate the bus's structure? What's the meaning of this?"

Batman felt he had touched the answer, but he was just a little bit off. The truth was on the tip of his tongue.

"Bang!" The door was bumped. Fortunately, Batman had locked the door, so it didn't open.

Seeing Natasha turned her head and finally clearly saw the face of the red-clothed female ghost. It was a face with no skin, charred muscle veins, a mouth split to the ears, and blood-red eyeballs, staring terrifyingly through the observation window of the door.

"Bang! Crash!"

Batman withdrew his hand from the shattered observation window. He rubbed his wrist and said, "Sorry, I had a reflex reaction when I saw that smiling face."

"Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap!"

A series of bloody handprints flew across the window. Seeing Natasha's gaze followed the handprints all the way to the very top of the room's window.

Black hair fell abruptly, and the ghost face slammed onto the glass with a "Bang."

This time, it really startled Seeing Natasha into taking a step back, because this was a very typical jump scare.

But the next second, the IV pole smashed the glass with a "Bang," and even bent the protective railing with a "Clang."

Seeing Natasha, under the window, grabbed the IV pole with both hands and thrust it upward. After a teeth-grinding sound of metal deformation, the IV pole that had originally extended the stand had now become a bare long spear.

Seeing Natasha let out a breath, holding the long spear, and walked toward the door.

Batman turned to unlock it for her but was pushed aside by Seeing Natasha.

BOOM!!!

In the pitch-black long corridor, a door panel flew onto the opposite wall. Seeing Natasha retracted her foot, holding the long spear, walking with dragon-like steps, glancing left and glaring right.

Finally, she turned back to look at Batman and said.

"Sorry, reflex reaction." ===== CHAPTER 1920 =====