Chapter 266: No Batman Event (Part 1)

Lightning flashed and thunder rolled, the rain poured down; Cat Getan's night was always this pitch-black and terrifying. A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating Arkham Asylum in the dark of night. In the only room with its lights on, two people were facing each other.

When Hugo woke from his dizziness, he saw a figure in a white lab coat sitting opposite him, looking at him with a rather concerned expression.

Hugo closed his eyes again, struggling to move his eyeballs to let the hazy halo in his vision dissipate. He saw that the doctor sitting opposite him had green hair and clown makeup on his face.

This green-haired doctor took a medical record from the bookshelf beside him, looked up at Hugo, and said, "Hugo Strange, suffering from severe delusions, hospitalized for three months. This is your second follow-up visit this month. Is your condition any better?"

Hugo opened his mouth and said, "Jack, why are you here?"

Hugo looked down and saw he was wearing a psychiatric restraint suit. He twisted his body hard and said, "... Stop your prank! Jack, what are you doing? Let me go!"

The doctor opposite, called Jack, showed a helpless expression and said, "It seems your condition has worsened again. You wouldn't still be deluding yourself into thinking you're a psychiatrist and treating all doctors as patients, would you?"

"What are you talking about?" Hugo opened his eyes wide in surprise and said, "I am a psychiatrist, and you are that mental patient who likes to call himself the Joker. Didn't we cooperate before... wait!"

Hugo shook his head hard, fragments of memory emerging from his consciousness. He said, "No, I should be in Shiler's consciousness world right now. How could I..."

"New symptoms appearing again?" Jack frowned at Hugo. "What story have you made up this time?"

"Listen, Mr. Hugo, I don't know where you heard those high school and college experiences, or if you made them up, but no matter how detailed you make them, you are not that world-renowned master of psychology you imagine yourself to be."

"I really don't want to spend another 20 minutes repeating your life story, but if that's the only way to make you sober up, then I have no choice."

"Hugo Strange, you are a truck driver working for a gang on Elizabeth Street. You are not an outsider, but a Cat Getan local..."

"On a rainy night, you laughed and attacked the heir of the Wei En family, Bruce Wei En, with a dagger. But Young Master Wei En is a good person; he saw you had a mental illness and not only didn't hold you accountable but also sent you here."

"Listen, Hugo, you have to cooperate with the treatment. My time is very precious. If it weren't for the Wei En family paying, I wouldn't be here treating you..."

"What?! I am... what crazy talk are you spouting???" Hugo said in disbelief. "The background you mentioned is clearly your own, Jack. Stop joking, this isn't funny at all. Let me go!"

"See, you're just like this. To be honest, this symptom of yours is quite rare. Once you hear someone else's background, you imagine it as your own, and you are the most uncooperative patient I have ever seen."

Jack opposite sighed and pressed a button on the table. After a while, another doctor in a white lab coat walked in. He pushed up the glasses on his face. Jack waved at him and said, "Dr. Victor, I really have a bit of a headache now."

Jack stood up from the chair and pointed at Hugo, saying to Victor, "I know his medication dosage has reached the limit, but his condition shows no signs of improvement..."

Hugo opposite had already started swaying left and right, trying to break free from the restraint suit. He looked at Victor and said, "Victor, have you gone crazy too? Consciousness space... where is this?"

"Where is this?"

Accompanied by Victor's voice, the room Hugo was in turned into a square box, gradually shrinking. The four walls supporting the box unfolded and flattened. Sections of wood rose from where the walls had been, building a wooden stage, and two heavy red curtains "swished" down from both sides of the stage.

Looking from the stage, below were rows of seats. Victor was sitting in the audience asking questions, and Shiler, with a globe for a head, replied, "This is the 'Inverted Tower'."

"'Inverted Tower'? What is that?"

"You can understand it as an area in my Palace of Mind, just like a theater."

"The Inverted Tower is located on the 7th, 8th, and 9th floors of my Palace of Mind. Of course, as you saw before, I had the elevator operator open a back door for Hugo, otherwise, he probably wouldn't even be able to climb the first step."

"Then why did you teleport him here? Is there anything special about this place?"

"This kind of teleportation is random; I didn't designate it. His luck is actually quite good."

"Good luck? What does that refer to?"

"I said before that every area in my Palace of Mind has special rules."

"So what are the special rules of the Inverted Tower?"

"The Inverted Tower is a place I use for perspective-taking. When I treat patients, I need to stand in the patient's shoes to experience what their current mental state is like, to judge whether their stress threshold can withstand my next question..."

"Hence the Inverted Tower. Here, everything you firmly believe in will be inverted: the doctor becomes the patient, and the patient becomes the doctor."

"So when you are treating a patient, you turn yourself into a patient here and then take their perspective?"

"Exactly. That's why I said his luck is good. The rule in the consciousness space is 'what is believed to be true is true,' but here it is inverted so that the opposite of what is believed is true. Hugo, who firmly believes he is a psychiatrist, becomes a patient here, and the patients in his memory become doctors."

"Then how is he supposed to leave here?" Yin Wensi asked, somewhat confused.

"A madman who was climbing the stairs once passed through here too, and he gave a quite correct demonstration."

"What was that?"

"When you believe you are a doctor, you become a patient; conversely, as long as you believe you are a patient, you become a doctor."

"By the same token, if you believe there are stairs leading to the upper floor here, then there aren't; if you believe there will never be stairs leading to the upper floor here, then there are."

"Actually, this is not difficult. Perhaps for ordinary people, convincing themselves to believe something completely opposite is somewhat difficult, but for someone with achievements in psychology, this is not too hard. That is why I said his luck is not bad."

"The only problem is, how long will it take for Hugo to figure out the rules here, find the pattern, and leave."

Victor turned his head back, his gaze falling on the stage again. At this moment, Hugo, wearing the restraint suit, had returned to the ward, clearly immersed in great shock and confusion.

The first question he was puzzled by was, of course, why is Shiler's consciousness space so flashy?

This was no longer just a question of being realistically manifested; every person, every item, and every detail here was exactly the same as the real world. For a moment, Hugo was truly shaken.

Then, immediately following, was the eeriness of this space. Generally speaking, something appearing in the consciousness space represents an aspect of personality. For example, a pink room might represent love, or it might represent thinking about gender; a pencil might represent a school career, or it might represent childhood memories.

But now Hugo was a bit lost. What does a psychiatric hospital with inverted identities represent?

The things appearing here were no different from the real world, but precisely because of that, it seemed strange.

But regardless, Hugo began his psychiatric life in bewilderment.

After all, he was a psychiatrist; he knew what mental patients would do in a psychiatric hospital. He tried secretly spitting out his medicine, finding ways to get out of the restraint suit, and even jumping off a building, but none succeeded because there were too many doctors watching him. Besides Jack, who wore clown makeup, there were Victor, Kebote, and Alberto.

Day after day, the rain outside Cat Getan's window never stopped, and Hugo never successfully escaped the surveillance of these doctors. Just as he was trying hard to think and crack the secret, he suddenly discovered that this peaceful life was sliding into an unpredictable terror.

When he tried to spit out his medicine again, Dr. Jack, wearing clown makeup, had a nurse bring a funnel and poured a whole bottle of pills into Hugo's mouth. When he tried to get out of the restraint suit again, they brought huge iron chains and bound him up circle by circle.

Their treatment methods began to become increasingly dangerous, from Hugo being forcibly fed medicine initially, to being bound tightly with iron chains, and then to being strapped into a treatment chair and subjected to electric shocks...

The rain outside the psychiatric hospital window grew heavier, and Cat Getan's night grew darker, until one night, a figure holding a dagger walked into his ward door. Lightning struck outside the window, the bright light illuminating his face; it was a clown with a crazy smile.

He approached Hugo with the dagger. Hugo screamed and tried to retreat, but the iron chains bound his hands, and he had nowhere to run.

The clown used the dagger to cut his face and peel off his skin. Hugo screamed in pain. In the shadow cast on the wall by the lightning, the dagger fell again and again, blood splattered, and the crazy laughter spread further and further...

Amidst the intertwining of laughter and rain, the curtains slowly closed. Victor in the audience rubbed his arm and said, "You know, this film will definitely be rated for 21 and older..."

"Things are out of control. Why?" Kebote asked.

"I said before, the lower the floor, the more chaotic it is, and the higher the floor, the more orderly it is. In the 330-floor Palace of Mind, the 7th, 8th, and 9th floors are already considered very low, so the speed of losing control will be very fast."

"The longer you stay there, the more the world will lose control. After all, this is a consciousness space and a dream; anything terrible can happen, just like when people have nightmares."

Yin Wensi shivered and said, "This is truly a terrible nightmare, a doctor dreaming that he has become a patient and being... by his former patient."

"Seriously, he disappointed me a bit. The madman who climbed the stairs last time solved everything in less than a day. He even made the stairs appear directly in front of him and still had time to blow a few kisses to the people on that floor..."

As he spoke, Shiler, with a globe for a head, turned his head toward Jack, who was dozing off beside him, but Jack acted as if he hadn't noticed his movement and gave no response at all.

"If this is really a nightmare, he should have been scared awake by now. What happens next?"

"If he's scared awake, it means he failed the level and will return to the first floor."

"Then let's see, next. Where will the elevator send him?" ===== CHAPTER 267 =====