Chapter 2226: Late Autumn in the Golden City (Part 25)

The atmosphere inside the room remained very quiet.

Shiler believed Pamela's condition did not fall within his professional scope, so Pamela soon discovered that the professor had returned, but he did not sit back in his original spot, instead standing before the window in quiet contemplation.

Pamela, who had just experienced emotional fluctuations, would not calm down so quickly. She had refrained from retorting earlier only out of fear of the mysterious Shiler's imposing manner, and she understood this professor better, knowing that in most situations, he was very willing to explain things to his students.

Pamela called out to Shiler twice, but Shiler didn't hear her. She couldn't help but sit upright on the bed, and only when Shiler noticed her movement did he turn to look at her.

"Apologies, I was thinking, so I was a bit distracted. Are you feeling better, Miss Pamela?"

"I'm much better, I just want to know..." Pamela paused. Her nostrils flared slightly, and after hesitating for a moment, she said, "Do you think I am different from you?"

"It seems you have seen more of the commonalities between us." Shiler weighed his words before saying, "That is also the reason why you appeared in my manor's garden when you encountered difficulties."

"I..." Pamela's Adam's apple trembled faintly. She took a deep breath, gathered her courage, and said, "I saw you—or rather, another you. I saw how you dealt with the demon, I mean, the moose."

"And how did that make you feel?"

Shiler sat at the opposite corner of the room, further away from Pamela, but this posture of surveying the whole situation made him look more like a hunter; he was clearly hiding in the shadows, observing something.

"I felt a bit excited." Pamela appeared very honest. She said, "Watching you cut up humanoid creatures, making them howl and bleed in pain, made my blood boil."

Shiler's brow furrowed deeper.

He sensed a hint of something wrong; the feelings Pamela described and Shiler's own perception of her were in conflict.

Pamela was not a born lunatic.

This was the conclusion Shiler reached; the distance between Pamela Isley and a serial killer was about as far as Cat Getan was from Metropolis.

Her psychology could not be called healthy, and her mental state was not stable, but not everyone with psychological problems or a poor mental state was a born lunatic. Lunatics and ordinary people were almost like two different species.

Judging from Pamela's experiences, that was correct: she had encountered misfortune in childhood, possibly had experiences of killing or harming others, and as she grew up, it intensified, even to the point where she could calmly frame others after killing. This completely fit the profile of a cold, cruel, and manipulative deviant.

But the most unreasonable point Shiler could sense in all this was that Pamela actually did not remember the process of her killing.

Shiler spoke after careful consideration.

"I'm afraid these born serial killers have a different view of harming their own kind than you do."

"What is different?"

"Why do you think you forgot the process?"

Pamela frowned slightly. She associated as much as possible with psychology and replied, "I remember it being mentioned in class that when people suffer major mental trauma, they instinctively produce amnesia; this is the brain's self-protection mechanism."

"That is the biggest difference. Ordinary people would view a double homicide as a major trauma, but lunatics would not. They have almost no empathy and do not realize that death is a terrifying thing. Killing is like plucking two leaves; how could they forget it due to mental trauma?"

Pamela was speechless.

"I know you have a longing for this." Shiler said bluntly, "Certain behaviors of the other me might have allowed you to see the aesthetic hidden behind violent acts. Gothamites have always been good at appreciating this kind of beauty and are very willing to follow it."

"But the reason these lunatics are called born psychopaths is that they possess many innate defects. Serial killer enthusiasts call these advantages: coldness, unteachability, lack of empathy, and lack of moral sense."

"These are not personality traits they acquired because they suffered some trauma or experienced certain things; all of this came with their birth. It is almost impossible to shape them later. If you are not one, you will never be one. You might be very similar, but there must be a difference."

"So I am not one?" Pamela stared at Shiler with some confusion and said, "But I think I have these traits too."

"Those are two different things, Miss." Shiler paused to think for a moment before explaining, "We will talk later about what is going on with your abnormal, cold demeanor. From my perception, you are not this type of lunatic."

"If you still don't believe it, I will prove it to you by asking you a series of questions."

Pamela sat composed, hands behind her back, appearing a bit nervous. She coughed twice and said, "Ask away."

"When you see someone walking by in class, do you think, 'I want to stab a dagger into his heart, then use a chainsaw to cut off his head and place it on a tree stump'?"

"Who did I see?"

"See, this is the difference." Shiler said, "Normal people would first focus on who the other person is; they want to know if they have a reason to kill him. But for a psychopath, this kind of thought doesn't need any reason; it's just that they suddenly want to do it."

"Therefore, homicides committed by psychopaths are often difficult to solve. They kill randomly, leave after doing it, have no grudges or social connections with the target, and don't even have any guidelines. No sociological links will point to them, and they are often able to escape legal sanctions multiple times."

Pamela nodded.

"And do you often feel dizzy, nauseous, feel the fragmentation and inconsistency of time and space, feel that something has gone wrong, and that you must correct it?"

Pamela shook her head again.

"Distorted senses are also a hallmark of born serial killers. They will have sudden whims, completely destroying their previous cognition of certain things, and shape a new one through fantasy. If reality does not conform to their new shaping, they will feel dizzy, unbearable pain, and will not hesitate to use violent means to correct the reality they believe is disordered."

"This is also often the reason they kill. They believe certain people are not what others see. Here, it doesn't refer to the victims, but hypocrites or others who are inconsistent in a sociological sense."

"It could just be that in the lunatics' vision, this person has grown four arms, so two must be cut off, or this person has no arms and needs to take someone else's to attach to him."

"So you will often see this type of serial killer create amazing works of art, but that is not their creative concept; there is no process of rational thinking involved. They just see this person appearing there like that, so they turned him into that."

"Hard to imagine." Pamela began to feel a chill down her back.

Then she sized up Shiler. Her survival instinct roared in her brain, demanding she not ask that question out of ignorance of death, but an even more intense curiosity pushed her forward.

"Are you one too?"

At the instant Shiler's expression changed, Pamela retreated to the corner of the bed at the fastest speed, but before her eyes could completely lose focus, they refocused again.

Shiler said with some helplessness, "Now we are facing a quite professional problem. At this time, provoking a lunatic is unwise. I think this is the last chance."

Pamela swallowed hard and nodded vigorously, but still, unrepentant, looked at Shiler with curious eyes.

"My performance in this regard is not heavy." Shiler shook his head and said, "If you must find a typical example, go find Batman. Of course, I don't mean the one acting as a tourist attraction, but the real Batman."

"His actions are actually also correcting the world, sometimes more intense and paranoid than lunatics. This is one of the alienated manifestations of sensory distortion."

"Dressing up as a bat?"

"Cross-dressing is another feature." Shiler tapped his fingers on the armrest and said, "Because of the lack of empathy, they are too alienated from this world, and because of sensory distortion, they cannot feel reality. They usually have nothing to anchor their existence."

"When you love me, feel me, and express your love and feelings, I can know myself through these. This is an cognitive anchor that a normal person should have."

"But lunatics can barely feel these. Their connection with others is too weak, but their vision and senses have become extremely uncertain due to madness, so they often lose their existence."

"For this reason, they have to find a new anchor for themselves: I dress as what I am."

"So you say you are an ordinary person?"

Shiler stood up.

Countless vines spread out from under the bed, instantly covering the bedroom floor and surrounding walls. The storm formed by the vines grabbed toward Shiler like a giant hand, but this was not an attack; Pamela was just trying to protect herself.

Unexpectedly, Shiler did not resist, but he did not use special abilities to escape either; he just opened an umbrella to block the vines and stood quietly in place, looking at Pamela.

"I have to introduce a new type of person to you." Shiler's voice lowered.

"Deviant fetishists." Shiler turned his head, but still wasn't looking at Pamela. He said, "Madly obsessed with mental illness patients, they are always attracted by the crazy traits of lunatics, until they get themselves involved in a vortex from which they cannot escape."

"When you saw me preparing the food, I knew you were this type of person, Miss Isley."

Shiler sat back on the sofa. He looked back at the fine tips of the vines emerging from the back of the chair and flicked the curled part with his finger. As a result, that part grew forward, inching forward, and directly wrapped around Shiler's wrist.

"I am reminding you out of kindness, Miss. It is not that I have absolutely no process of sensory distortion." Shiler smoothed the hem of his suit with his other hand and said, "You should be glad you didn't have your back to me just now, otherwise I would have to think of a new name for the lighter-colored meat."

The vines retracted with a 'whoosh'.

Pamela huddled in the corner of the bed, hugging her knees, staring wide-eyed at Shiler. Shiler slowly exhaled and said, "Compelled by your extra attention to me, Miss Isley, I have to express my honor in person."

"So..."

"That was not you."

"Ah?"

"Green of All, come out."