Chapter 1961

As soon as Jack finished speaking, the image on the screen slowly faded to black, and a few large characters appeared: "Game Over."

"Huh?!"

Everyone was dumbfounded, including Owen. He had been too busy trying to stop the people who were fighting like dogs to pay attention to what was playing on the screen.

As for the others, they had been too busy fighting or breaking up fights to notice how far the game had progressed. How could it have ended already?

Fortunately, the winner's avatar was displayed at the end of every round. As the black in the center of the screen slowly dissipated, the person who appeared was none other than Shiler.

Jack let out a long sigh and said, "Stunned, aren't you?"

Batman looked over with a gaze that felt almost tangible. Jack looked at them in return and said, "I discovered it a bit earlier than you did, but not by much."

"Then why didn't you say anything?" Red Robin asked, frowning.

"Discover what? What didn't I say?" Nightwing and Red Hood were both completely confused; they hadn't realized what was going on at all.

Red Robin squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed his forehead with his hand, scratched his hair, and sighed, "I felt something was wrong just now. It felt like I couldn't catch my breath, but it wasn't that serious, so I didn't pay it any mind."

"Huh?" Nightwing made another sound of confusion.

Batman paused in the middle of retracting his grappling hook, as if he had realized something.

"Shiler's greatest specialty is hypnosis," Jack said.

"In a way, this can be considered giving them a taste of their own medicine." Jack looked at Owen and said, "Our situation right now is the same as theirs."

"When the conditions for victory are unclear or violence brings no direct benefit, no one chooses to act. But from another perspective, in this situation, as long as one person chooses to use violence, everyone will fall into a chaotic brawl."

"What do you mean? Are you saying that the fighting both inside and outside the screen was caused by Shiler's hypnosis? Stop joking, how could that be possible?" Nightwing said, his face full of disbelief.

"I heard Batman say that Professor Rodriguez is a very capable psychology professor, but I've also heard him say that hypnosis isn't that easy. It requires a calm environment and the patient's cooperation. How could he just hypnotize people so casually?"

"It's not hypnosis, just psychological suggestion." Jack shook his head, grabbed a piece of debris from the spectator stand to sit on, sniffed, and said, "How did you feel when you first saw the magic circle Shiler drew?"

Everyone frowned. Peter tightened his brow and said, "How did I feel? I just thought the thing looked ugly."

"It made you uncomfortable, right?"

Peter said with a troubled expression, "I'm not trying to belittle Dr. Shiler's drawing skills on purpose, but the outer frame of that magic circle was clearly a perfect circle, yet the text and patterns inside were completely misaligned. Even within the same ring, the text had varying heights, and some were even embedded into each other."

Peter shook his head, shivered, and said, "It was so dense and crowded; just looking at it made me feel sick."

Owen pulled up the two magic circles Shiler had drawn first and second, and projected them onto the screen.

Among the people here, only Spider-Man had the enhanced vision brought by his spider mutation, so only he had seen the details clearly at the time. But this time, with Owen's partial magnification, the others also realized that this magic circle couldn't be called conventional—it was more like, if an Outer God saw it, they'd have to personally crown you Pope.

Just as Peter said, the outer frames of the two circles were perfect, and if you didn't look closely, the text inside seemed to form a circle too. But upon closer inspection, there were major problems.

The characters were written clearly enough, and the patterns were visible, but for some reason, the starting point of every stroke was unexpected. Things that should have been high weren't, things that should have been low weren't, strokes that should have been connected weren't, and strokes that shouldn't have been connected were blindly linked.

A stroke from a preceding character would be embedded into a part of the following character, and the following character would squeeze the preceding one out of shape. It felt like every character was a deformity that couldn't stand or sit properly.

This was an unfamiliar script, so the group couldn't read it and therefore couldn't spot obvious errors. But looking closely, it didn't look like something written by someone who had been writing human script for years.

After all, human writing emphasizes alignment, but the text on the magic circle did the exact opposite, which felt very awkward to everyone accustomed to English writing.

Furthermore, looking closely at the order in which the ink dried on the first magic circle, Shiler had started out writing the text somewhat properly, but it became increasingly distorted, as if he were exploring how to make the writing as uncomfortable as possible for people to look at.

By the second magic circle and the subsequent ones they suspected were fake evidence planted by Shiler, this crooked, uncomfortable style had been perfected. At first glance, it was ugly; looking again, it was awkward; staring at it for a while made you feel dizzy.

"Is this some kind of magic?" Robin said, frowning. "But even if it were magic, it couldn't affect us through a screen."

"These characters have no meaning," Jack shook his head and said. "Even written like this, they have no substantive effect. The only function is to make people feel more and more uncomfortable the longer they look."

"Think about it, how long have we been staring at these so-called ancient relics forged by Shiler?"

"It hasn't been that... wait, a single fake relic wouldn't take long to look at, but how many did he actually forge?"

The group joined Owen in reviewing the previous footage. With this distorted font as an identifier, finding the fake relics became much simpler, and they discovered that the number of fake relics exceeded their imagination.

It had been mentioned that there were two paths to the headquarters of the Guided Technology Group. People on both paths had found some ancient relics, but more often, they found documents describing these relics and the textual information left on them.

The printed content in these documents was basically real, but the fragments and excerpts in the notes supposedly left by old-era scientists were almost entirely forged by Shiler.

And he didn't write them from scratch; he deliberately added a few sentences next to notes that were already well-written, making them look like annotations left by the scholars themselves. He also did this next to printed documents and tampered with the rune forms in places that were easy to erase and rewrite.

The quantity wasn't too high, but the frequency of appearance was incredibly high. As they followed both groups of people looking for clues, these crooked, awkward-looking runes constantly appeared in their field of vision.

"I said before, how could these aliens let such ugly writing circulate for so many years?" Peter said, covering his forehead. "And I felt that certain characters placed in these notes were very uncomfortable, but I thought it was just because the notes weren't rigorous."

"He is provoking our emotions," Batman said.

Jack snapped his fingers and pointed at Batman, meaning he had said it well. Then he continued: "Arriving in an unfamiliar environment to play an unfamiliar game, where you could be eliminated at any moment—although none of you here are cowards, implicit mental pressure is impossible to shake off."

"An excessive desire to achieve something, or being in an unsafe environment for a long time, can lead to implicit anxiety."

"Short-term implicit anxiety won't cause much harm, but if you are in a state of implicit anxiety for a long time, it will turn into real anxiety. And there is another situation: the accumulated implicit mental pressure and anxiety suddenly erupt, causing an emotional breakdown."

"Just like when we suddenly see a passerby who was expressionless start to cry and make a scene—it's not necessarily because they encountered something they couldn't accept at that moment; it's highly likely to be the straw that broke the camel's back."

Jack turned back to look at the screen and said, "This is the final straw."

Peter turned his head away and said, "So Dr. Shiler used certain uncomfortable patterns to directly detonate the implicit anxiety within us."

"No, these types of patterns serve to blur perception. When you see something uncomfortable, you instinctively associate it with more uncomfortable things. And when you carry this mindset while doing certain things, the influence follows you like a shadow."

Jack turned his body to look at Red Hood and said, "For a person with a healthy and normal mental state and willpower, psychological suggestion isn't that easy. But for someone whose spirit is already unstable and whose mindset is already abnormal, lighting the bomb becomes much simpler."

Everyone knew he was talking about Red Hood, but Batman thought that he actually had a better way to stop Red Hood and Jack from fighting, yet in that instant, he had made a choice that leaned more toward violence.

Was this his own choice? Or had he been unintentionally guided all along? How many things in this world, like the magic circles Shiler drew, were invisibly guiding him toward violence? Were they artificial or natural?

There was a moment of silence in the screening hall. Clearly, many people were thinking about this question: Are the choices we make really our own? Or are we just a collection of the past and present? Is it actually the things we've experienced and the environment we're in that make the choices?

Peter snapped out of it with a jolt and said, "No, no, no! Don't think about this! Stop it!"

Although the others didn't understand what he was talking about, they were startled awake by his sudden loud shout. Peter immediately held up both hands to explain, "Don't ever think too deeply about this, because this is Dr. Shiler's method for soliciting clients!"

"He will first come up with a huge plan, drag a bunch of people into it, constantly guide them to make the choices he wants, and then let these people start reflecting after the plan is over."

"Thinking about why they were led by the nose, whether the choices they made were really their own, what position they occupy in the whole environment, where they came from, where they are going, and what the meaning of life is."

"But these questions aren't things you can figure out by thinking, so the more you think, the more confused you'll get. The final result is to go see a psychiatrist, and Dr. Shiler charges a very high fee—two million dollars an hour!"

"Hiss!"

The sound of people gasping in shock rose one after another.

Red Hood suddenly remembered the bill Shiler had previously given Batman for his treatment.

Then he said, in a state of near panic, "Stop thinking about it! Let's go see a psychiatrist together; even the Wayne Group would go bankrupt!"

Batman's gaze, however, fell on Peter. It was the same old story: Batman would never let go of any child who was both smart and capable.

"Alright, let's first take a look at how Shiler won." Owen clapped his hands, pulling everyone's attention back.