Chapter 2785

Schiller saw that the man who had returned and sat next to him was completely indistinguishable from the previous one. He also didn't seem to notice that only the head on his own plate was fresh, but instead picked up the knife and fork again and began to enjoy it on his own.

But this time, when he used a fork to scrape the meat off his face, the meat on his own face didn't fall off, as if it were really just a plate of food, rather than his own head.

At other tables, people had already eaten that rotted head one after another. Their heads, like this man's, rolled onto the table, were put back into the plate, and then another "them" walked in and continued to enjoy their own heads.

The person who returned might no longer be them.

Schiller looked at the menu next to him. There were seven dishes on the menu. Following the serving order of a French feast, they were served one by one, eating one dish before the next. They were: aperitif, cold dish, soup, main course, cheese, dessert, and digestif.

Schiller had come in relatively late, and the aperitif had already been served. It was placed on Schiller's left hand, an orange-yellow aperitif. However, this was obviously unusual, because when Schiller tilted the glass slightly, he found that the wine was viscous, looking like some kind of syrup, and it was mixed with bubbles.

Then the head served on the table should be the cold dish. Its name on the menu was "Nourishment."

Schiller recalled the ballad the head had sung earlier. The ballad was roughly divided into two parts: the first few lines said that he ate them and obtained nourishment, but they were getting fewer and fewer, so in the end, they could only eat themselves, and finally grew into a towering tree.

The "they" referred to in the first few lines used a personal pronoun, which proved it did not refer to animals or vegetables, but to people, though it shouldn't be people in the biological sense.

Schiller looked around and found it wasn't hard to see that most of the diners sitting at the tables were dressed in glamorous attire. To be precise, no one who could stay at the Wei En Hotel was a simple person; people of Peter's class couldn't afford such a hotel.

The restaurant of the Wei En Hotel was also very high-end, receiving only a limited number of guests at a time. The head chef was world-renowned and attracted many gourmets. Various celebrities often held banquets and small gatherings here, and it had hosted countless weddings for the wealthy.

So the first part might refer to them drawing nourishment from people at the bottom, but Schiller didn't think the monsters here would have any intention of pleading for the people. Monsters in the Cthulhu mythos system didn't seek revenge for grievances; the madness they triggered was chaotic and illogical.

These monsters wouldn't distinguish whether people had money or not, and certainly wouldn't deliberately punish them just because some people were rich. Everything worldly was unimportant to them, and human society was nothing more than an anthill in their eyes. Do ants distinguish between rich and poor?

And if Schiller wasn't mistaken, the people in the restaurant now were the wealthiest among the guests of the Wei En Hotel. This monster wasn't an HR department that could conduct a background check before they entered the restaurant, not letting those without money in?

Schiller had a guess, but he couldn't be sure yet.

Back to this dish, since "they" in the nursery rhyme were getting fewer and fewer, then perhaps it had reached the stage of eating oneself.

Schiller searched his mind for stories related to the Cthulhu mythos system, but didn't find any that fit perfectly. On the contrary, the story of the Ouroboros was more suitable for the current scene.

The Ouroboros is actually a snake biting its own tail, forever in a state of self-consumption. Jung believed that the Ouroboros reflected the human psychological state; Schiller thought Jung was talking nonsense.

This pattern was also endowed with the meaning of "infinite cycle," just like what was happening in the restaurant: a man ate a rotted head, his own head became the dish on the plate, another "him" walked in and continued to eat his own head, just like an endless cycle of devouring. This was almost exactly the same as the story of the Ouroboros.

Because it was related to psychology, Schiller had also analyzed this story. His view was similar to the mainstream view, but not exactly the same. Many experts believed that a monster capable of infinite self-consumption represented the human wish to be completely self-sufficient.

In mythological descriptions, this snake had neither eyes nor ears, but it didn't need to see or hear, and it had no hands or feet; its own self-consumption was a way of moving.

There was no doubt that compared to the omniscient and omnipotent gods in other mythological stories, it appeared too strange, even incomplete. Its birth was not for the purpose of creating or destroying anything; it seemed to exist just to exist.

But Schiller believed that all of this was related to the self. The Ouroboros represented more of an independent self, or a whole reference frame centered on the self.

As everyone knows, humans are shaped within an environment. There are too many reference points people can have, such as the words and judgments of others, the reflection of social status, the feedback brought by wealth, and even the requirements of morality and law.

Schiller believed that the Ouroboros represented an extreme self, highlighting its own internal circulation, expressing a concept of "I am society," equivalent to an active closed strategy adopted after the human self is magnified to infinity.

It was similar to saying that everything except me cannot judge me. I myself am a macroscopic state of motion—advancing, devouring, growing—everything is completed by me, without needing any other thing as a reference frame to judge myself.

This could further extend to the study of narcissistic personality disorder. The "infinite self" of the Ouroboros was clearly the ideal state for patients with narcissistic personality disorder, because the typical manifestation of narcissistic personality disorder is the infinite exaggeration of self-worth.

This type of personality disorder usually always feels a sense of worthlessness, so they need to gain a sense of security by exaggerating their self-worth, which is why they always live in an interweaving of inferiority and arrogance.

Psychoanalysis believes this is a projection disorder; their psychological energy cannot be projected onto anything in the outside world, so it remains stagnant inside and becomes narcissism. But this view is no longer accepted by the industry because it cannot explain the state of interweaving inferiority and arrogance.

Modern behavioral science and object relations theory believe that patients with this type of personality disorder mainly have the manifestation of "inability to distinguish self from others." Because they did not receive enough love from others during childhood, they believe they cannot gain a sense of security from other people; only by loving themselves and affirming their own value can they bring enough sense of security.

Therefore, they need higher self-identity, but the self-identity of the vast majority of people can only come from social identity, that is, the recognition and praise of relatives and friends, career progress, and the acquisition of wealth.

However, general social identity cannot satisfy their high demand for self-identity, which will keep them in a state of low identity, thus generating feelings of inferiority. And in order to gain a sense of security, they begin to excessively exaggerate their self-worth, resulting in manifestations of arrogance.

The state of the Ouroboros, which can completely rely on itself to satisfy all self-needs, is precisely the state that patients with narcissistic personality disorder dream of—that is, the self is a society, and one can satisfy all one's own identity needs.

As mentioned before, the monsters in the Cthulhu mythos system don't have such complex thoughts, so after Schiller analyzed all this, he was even more convinced that the anomaly in the restaurant was someone playing tricks behind the scenes.

This was actually not surprising. In the vast majority of Cthulhu mythos systems, these Old Ones and Outer Gods are indeed to blame, but to put it bluntly, most of it is still human disaster.

To be precise, it was some people who dared to do anything for forbidden knowledge, and after obtaining forbidden knowledge, this knowledge they could not control caused them to have mental disorders.

No one is perfect, and no one's psychology is completely healthy. Some people who go to seek forbidden knowledge are not healthy to begin with, and after being impacted by this knowledge, they become even crazier, and of course, they will harm their fellow human beings.

It can be said that if the vast majority of movies, TV shows, or novels under the Cthulhu mythos system excluded the factor of human disaster, it really wouldn't cause much harm.

Many of the masterminds in such literary works are basically humans who have been polluted. Just looking at Schiller's experience on the 19th floor, without Jerome causing trouble there and without the confused Gordon laying traps, Schiller wouldn't have been delayed there for so long.

So this restaurant must also be a product of the combination of natural disaster and human disaster.

And from the cold dish, one can see that, first, the human part of the mastermind has a certain trait of hating the rich; it's not necessarily to vent for the people at the bottom, but simply hating the rich.

Secondly, the other party might be a patient with narcissistic personality disorder, or it might be that the pollution of chaos and madness magnified these traits in his personality, leading him to crave a perfect closed self.

To some extent, he realized this wish. Through the monster's ability, he completed the perfect closed loop of the self, locking these people he hated in the restaurant, letting them cycle over and over again. He only needed them to be in pain, and didn't need them to judge him; he had already surpassed and controlled them.

Then the question arises, what about himself?

Schiller felt that he was not a rich person, at least Dr. Sothoth's background wasn't that rich. He felt that he might have broken in, but this head chef said he was the last guest, which was obviously contradictory.

He glanced at Jeremiah opposite him again. Obviously, this guy was also a special case. The Valeska family had even less money. Even if Jeremiah had high education and high IQ, he was too young and was not in the same class as the bunch of "old money" sitting here.

He and Jeremiah were like those teenagers in slapstick comedies who accidentally entered a celebrity banquet, except this wasn't a comedy, but a horror movie.

Why there happened to be a seat for him was something he could think about later. Now the most important thing was to crack the secret of this cold dish.

In the dozens of seconds Schiller was thinking, more than a dozen diners had finished eating the rotted heads, left their own heads behind, and then walked in from outside the door again, sitting back in their original positions to repeat the previous actions.

They ate all the meat on one head and left their own heads. Then, according to common sense, there would be more and more heads on the table, and finally, it would be completely unable to hold them, because they could only eat meat but couldn't gnaw on bones. If they stayed in place, a mountain would sooner or later pile up on the table.

But the fact was that when the fresh head rolled onto the plate, the original head rotted rapidly, as if the time on the head had been accelerated. The bones and flesh all rotted into a pool of black water and disappeared under the tablecloth.

After the fresh head was eaten, there were new heads, and the discarded heads that were still relatively fresh also rotted very quickly, disappearing from the table before the new diners came in.

Schiller looked down at the head on his table and didn't see any signs of accelerated rotting, so as long as he didn't eat it, would it be fine?