Chapter 2985: The Green Trees Are Dense and the Summer Days Are Long (30)

Roughly the day before Nigma was harmed, he had made a phone call to Edward. No one knew what they had talked about on the phone, but Gordon guessed that Nigma might have intentionally provoked Edward and revealed his own location, wanting to lure him over.

However, Edward had gone to find Cobblepot instead, which should have been outside of Nigma's expectations. The two of them had dug a hole for Nigma together.

Nigma lured Edward over, wanting to provoke him into harming him. Edward might have indeed broken in, but he didn't actually harm Nigma; he might have just drugged him and made the other party believe he had been harmed.

Then he had sent this refrigeration device into his stomach. Considering there were no external wound marks, it could only have been sent in through the esophagus. Considering this thing wasn't large, it was still quite possible.

Then this thing froze Nigma. The principle was the same as Victor freezing his wife; it could make a person lose all vital signs, and the body temperature would be very low.

So when Nigma was discovered in the alley, everyone thought he was dead, and even professional forensic doctors couldn't see any vital signs.

But the abnormal body temperature condition would soon be discovered by the forensic doctors. They would want to figure out what was going on, and the forensic verification process included the process of checking the condition of the internal organs; many times, they had to open the digestive tract for examination.

The forensic doctor had a high probability of cutting open the abdomen for examination, and once the refrigeration device in Nigma's stomach was discovered, they would inevitably take this thing out to see. And once it was taken out, Nigma would gradually thaw and come back to life.

The forensic doctor thought he was a corpse, so naturally, they wouldn't hold back when making the cut, inevitably causing wounds in the abdominal cavity. It would be fine if the person were dead, but if they suddenly came back to life, naturally, they had to be sent to the hospital.

And Nigma, who woke up from the emergency treatment, would only know that his stomach had been injured, which matched up with what he believed to be a knife wound from his nephew.

But half the police station knew that the wound wasn't actually stabbed by anyone at all; he hadn't suffered any injuries when he was sent to the police station. It was the forensic doctor who had cut his abdominal cavity open because they thought he was dead.

In other words, the nephew stabbing him with a knife didn't exist at all. The facts didn't match his perception, and there were only two results.

The vast majority of people would think he was lying, think he was framing his nephew, because there wasn't a single wound when he was sent in, so how could he have been stabbed by someone? All the testimony he gave against his nephew looked like he was deliberately lying to frame him.

But Gordon knew there was one very small possibility: he wasn't lying. He truly believed Edward had stabbed him, and to achieve this, there must have been someone who took action, and that was Schiller.

Gordon actually knew that hypnosis wasn't that magical, but he also knew that hypnosis was actually more magical than he thought. From a theoretical standpoint, it was impossible to let a person lie peacefully in a room and make them believe they had been stabbed by a knife.

But if someone really had broken into someone's office with a knife, made the motion of stabbing, and the other party really felt the pain and then lost consciousness, it was very easy to hypnotize him while he was half-awake and half-asleep, telling him someone had stabbed him.

Sometimes, one didn't even need hypnosis; the coma itself was the brain's self-protection mechanism, and it was very normal for memory to be disordered after waking up from a coma, just like how forcing a computer to shut down could lead to program errors.

Gordon didn't know if Schiller could do the former, but he knew he could definitely do the latter. Some behavioral and verbal misdirection, combined with hypnosis, was too simple for Schiller to distort an event that had already happened.

But this wasn't a conspiracy; it was an open plot, because if Nigma really cared for his nephew, he wouldn't have said anything, or he would have just quietly told the police in charge, trying his best not to make a big deal out of it.

Now that he was shouting about his nephew stabbing him with a knife in the name of care, he had stepped into a trap himself. Gordon saw it, but he had no way to stop it.

Could he go and tell Nigma, "You've fallen for a trick; the more you shout, the more you look like a lunatic and a fool"?

And if he were firmly upholding legal justice and couldn't tolerate a grain of sand in his eyes, it wouldn't make sense for him to destroy his own kin, because he himself knew his nephew was in a mental hospital and was not a person with full capacity, so there was no point in upholding legal justice in this matter.

If he really wanted to seek justice, he should have gone after the mental hospital, demanding they strengthen management; that would be protecting his nephew's interests.

And now that he was doing this, only one possibility remained: he was deliberately making his nephew's act of going crazy and hurting people known to everyone.

That was why Gordon guessed he had deliberately lured Edward over. This wasn't victim-blaming; it was just that he was being a bit too obvious.

Of course, if he had really come with knife wounds, then if he said this, people would only sympathize with him. But now everyone knew he was perfectly fine when he was sent to the police station, so the malice hidden in his leading words was too easy for people to detect.

Sure enough, when Gordon went back in, the two young police officers left behind had very strange expressions, occasionally glancing at the weeping Nigma. Gordon didn't doubt for a second that as soon as they returned to the police station, they would share this with the colleagues who had watched Nigma come back to life.

And they would add the complaint that this guy was unlucky because he deserved it; he hadn't had a single wound when he was sent in, yet he still wanted to frame his nephew.

Although Nigma had fallen for the trap and had no chance of a comeback, Gordon still dutifully told him the truth.

"Sorry, sir, I didn't say anything earlier because I saw you were emotionally agitated, but according to the forensic file... when you were sent to the police station, there were no wounds on your body at all."

This one sentence smashed right into Nigma's head. Gordon also witnessed what was called a dimensionality reduction strike in terms of IQ. Nigma looked like he had been beaten stupid.

"That's impossible! That's impossible!! I clearly fainted from excessive blood loss! If there were no wounds, how could I be in the hospital?! And my wound is clearly still hurting..."

The police in the room all showed awkward expressions. Gordon really didn't know how to explain it, so he had to get the attending physician over.

It just happened to be time to change the dressing, and the doctor opened the bandage wrapped around his abdomen. At that moment, Nigma froze.

As everyone knew, a stab wound and a cut wound were completely different. No matter what, a knife couldn't stab out such a perfect cross-shaped incision. This was clearly the work of someone proficient in surgical techniques.

"Impossible... Impossible!!" Nigma roared, saying, "You're all lying to me! Did someone bribe you?! You're all speaking for that little bastard!!!"

Now, Gordon felt this must be Schiller's work. His works always revealed this kind of black humor. After seeing more of them, Gordon could also distinguish them.

Actually, it was very difficult to expose a hypocrite. For anyone, it was a matter of discourse power. If a person behaved politely and reliably in front of anyone, it was very difficult to make people believe he was an abuser. Countless people suffered from this predicament and could not be liberated.

But Schiller had set up a perfect trap.

Essentially, it was still using an information gap. During the time Nigma was unconscious, he didn't know what the police had done. The things the police did happened to fit his purpose, but the truth was completely different from what he thought.

And after he woke up, he found that everything was exactly as he had imagined, so he naturally had inertial thinking and disclosed the so-called truth according to the situation he had imagined.

But this truth was far from the facts, and the so-called disclosure of the truth became a malicious frame-up.

Just regarding this matter, Nigma, who had fallen for the trap, was a victim. By logic, Gordon should have helped and protected him, but this was the brilliance of the strategy.

If Nigma had absolutely no malice, he wouldn't have fallen for the trap. Once he fell for the trap, it proved he did have malice, and it was very easy for Gordon to see that this malice was the origin of this incident. He was completely asking for it. Even if Gordon were kind, he couldn't defend him any further.

And the consequence of this was terrifying, because before Gordon arrived, Nigma might have been trying to build momentum, and the first thing he did when he woke up was to meet the reporters, using that set of rhetoric about his nephew stabbing him.

But everyone had seen him being transported into the police station and then transported out. If it were just an accidental injury case, why would the victim go to the police station?

The reporters squatting at the gate of the police station weren't stupid. If you were really stabbed by your nephew, what was with the dying and coming back to life?

These reporters were natural hyenas. They would stir up trouble even if they were in the right, and if there were no abnormalities, they would fabricate them to show off their journalistic charm. In such a situation that was clearly contradictory, they wouldn't stop until they dug to the center of the earth.

Sure enough, as soon as Gordon walked out of the hospital gate, he was surrounded by a group of reporters. The reporters pointed their microphones at him and asked.

"Chief, does Mr. Nigma insist that his nephew harmed him because he suffers from some mental illness? Or did the police department demand he say so to evade responsibility?"

"Chief Gordon, some have described this as the most serious forensic accident of the century. Does Mr. Nigma's insistence that he was stabbed by his nephew have anything to do with this? Did the police department put pressure on him?"

"Chief, I am a reporter for the Gotham Medical News. Do you think the Nigma family has hereditary mental disorders? Does Mr. Nigma's memory disorder have anything to do with this?"

"Chief, I am Mary from the City News. Do you think Mr. Nigma's mental state is fit to run for mayor? Is he more willing to retreat for treatment, or is he actively striving for it?"

Gordon waved his hand at them and got into the car without answering anything. These were problems Nigma would have to worry about.

Sitting in the car, Gordon couldn't help but think again that in every case Schiller worked on, the end of the victim revealed what they had done in the past. Although Nigma didn't die, did his current situation also echo what he had done in the past?

What was harder than exposing a hypocrite was actually self-justification. Although it was often said not to justify oneself, the internal logic of this was that self-justification could never prove innocence; no amount of evidence was ever enough.

Once one fell into the vortex of self-justification, one would only be pushed step by step until one despaired and collapsed.

Did Schiller want Nigma to fall into such a situation?

In other words, Nigma had once let others fall into such a situation. At this very moment, it was just like that moment in the past.

Gordon thought of Edward Nigma, who had been sent to the mental hospital.

Gordon always felt that sometimes, the theory that "evil people are ground by evil people," like that of an outlaw, was not entirely without merit. A policeman like him, even if he knew the truth, could never do anything to the mayoral candidate Mr. Nigma, but Schiller could.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—how could that not be another kind of justice outside of justice?

Gordon added another sentence in his heart: "It's only right that you're Batman's teacher."