Chapter 4231

"Have you seen Schiller too?" Peter asked.

Bruce nodded and said: "Yes, but he is elusive, and I don't know what he is doing. He was the first of us to come, but he seems to not want to be noticed by the evil spirit, so he has been hiding from him."

Peter's understanding of Schiller is more than Bruce's, because Shadow Spider-Man has been traveling to the Marvel Universe for many years, and Nick often hires him at a high price to do dirty work; just the high-level officials of the three major empires who died in his hands are not less than three digits. He has a deep understanding of major Marvel heroes, of course, he doesn't know the inside story, and like other heroes, he thinks Schiller is a counterpart from a different universe.

"Schiller is a professional. Under normal circumstances, it is impossible for him to hide passively, unless being noticed by the evil spirit is a more terrible thing."

"Does it mean you will die if you are discovered?" Bruce speculated.

Peter shook his head and said: "It shouldn't be. Schiller told me that I have been discovered, but I didn't die; there might be some more troublesome consequences. But these are not important; we have to figure out what is going on in this world."

"Did you collect any intelligence over there?" Bruce asked.

"This town was controlled by the Mormon sect a long time ago, and we found their scriptures in the church. In addition, Kate and I suspect that it might be some force hostile to the Mormon sect that wiped out the people in the small town."

Peter briefly told Bruce the intelligence and speculation he knew, and Bruce also said: "The clown actor who resurrected that we encountered before was a member of the circus, and this circus should be engaged in the evil business of human trafficking..."

The two exchanged intelligence and immediately connected it. Bruce thought for a while and said: "The circus period might be the period when the Mormon sect in the town started and developed. I estimated it, it should be decades ago, based on the age of Linda, the youngest in the town, it is her grandfather's generation."

"This town might have developed like this." Peter said. "The geographical location of Big Creek Valley Town is not good, and there are no decent big cities around, but from various clues, this town was popular for a while before. And to support tourism and the service industry, enough population is needed. The original population of the small town was too small, and the birth rate of incestuous marriage would be very low; only by trafficking people through the circus and forcing them to give birth could the town's population grow explosively."

"This is indeed the most likely speculation. However, as far as I know, not everyone agrees with this, especially those missionaries who have been to other places. For example, Linda's father, he might not fully agree with the doctrine, and even wanted to escape."

"What about Aunt Kane?" Peter said. "Since Linda's father didn't agree, and her mother was an outsider, how could an outsider agree with such doctrine more than a local, and even accompany him back to this kind of place?"

But suddenly, Peter seemed to think of something, and he said: "That might not be Aunt Kane."

"What do you mean?"

"I know this might be a bit shocking, but I must say, Kate and I once saw Aunt Kane's corpse in the bathroom."

"What?!"

Peter recalled and said: "At that time, we knew Aunt Kane might have died, but at that time we thought she was the evil spirit, just resurrected from the dead. But what if someone else is controlling her body?"

"The clown we encountered in the circus warehouse also suddenly became active from a corpse state; now it seems it might also be done by the evil spirit. The evil spirit controlling these corpses might be the same one."

"But there are also places that don't make sense," Peter continued. "If Aunt Kane was originally a good person, just controlled by the evil spirit after death, how could she let her own daughter give birth so early before?"

"Maybe she was already controlled before that." Bruce proposed a shocking possibility, and he said: "For a rich girl like Aunt Kane, once she is uncontrolled or escapes, the consequences could be catastrophic. If you were the cult leader, would you leave her alive? Looking at it this way, maybe from the moment she stepped into the town, she was already dead and possessed; only in this way can it be guaranteed that she can never escape, and it is impossible to expose what happened here."

"But I don't understand, if this evil spirit is a person in the small town, how can he learn to be Aunt Kane so well? Even Kate didn't see any problems."

Peter here actually implies that Kate is Batwoman and also a professionally trained police officer, and her observation ability for details is also very strong, not to mention that Batman himself has seen Aunt Kane and didn't see any problems. You know, controlling a completely strange person is not that simple; if this evil spirit is a poor person, then when he controls a rich person, he won't have those habitual small movements, and Batman and the others would definitely be able to see the flaws at a glance.

"This proves that the evil spirit might be able to peek into people's memories, so that he can imitate them vividly." Bruce said. "Or, this might be his specialty; if he didn't have this ability, how could he trick so many people into this memory world?"

Bruce briefly told Peter about his speculation about this spiritual world, that is, the people here might not just be townspeople, but also tourists who have come to Big Creek Valley Town for sightseeing for many years.

"It seems that's exactly it." Peter touched his chin and said, "Now the history of this town is probably clear: from the end of the last century to the beginning of this century, the Big Creek Valley Town circus toured the United States, causing a craze and attracting many tourists. However, the so-called circus was just a tool for human trafficking, and the religious forces entrenched in this closed small town used this wave of tourism to kill or imprison tourists to further develop the population. But one day, some accidents occurred, leading to a large-scale decline in the town's population, and the small town almost couldn't develop. And today, this has become a dead town, and the few living people are likely puppets controlled by the evil spirit."

Bruce nodded, affirmed this speculation, and then he said: "We cannot directly assume that the evil spirit must be a member of the Mormon sect; after all, as you said, the destruction of the small town has no benefit to the Mormon sect, but rather looks more like their enemy did it. As for him continuing to pull people into the water after taking revenge, it is also possible because he has lost his humanity and sanity. And this spiritual world might have appeared because of this, as a means of self-rescue for those Mormon believers, because they can no longer survive in the real world, so they created such a spiritual world and set it to the appearance that Mormon believers like most: there is no tea and coffee here, no music and art, no external information, and even no hospitals; when you get sick, you only need to pray, and all you can do is religious-friendly activities—isn't this exactly what those high-level Mormon sect members want to see most?"

"Indeed, they even pulled in the foreign tourists who had been persecuted by them before, just to expand the population. Their desire to reproduce is really perverted."

Bruce paused and then continued: "Then it looks like the evil spirit controls the real world, and the Mormon sect controls the spiritual world. But from the situation where they are incompatible, they cannot be reconciled; they must want to completely eliminate each other and occupy the other's territory. We will come here, which is a kind of proof."

"Under what circumstances did you come over?" Peter asked.

"I went to the waterfall, found some clues, but was also drenched, and caught a fever on the way back, my eyes went dark, and I came here."

"Me too, car accident before, the wound on my head hadn't been treated, and I lost a lot of blood; I might have had symptoms of excessive blood loss, and when I went to the cemetery to find clues, I lost consciousness."

"This is not an accident." Bruce said. "It seems that we can only enter the spiritual world when our bodies are very weak. If our bodies are not weak enough, the owner of the spiritual world might try to interfere with the real world, using all kinds of accidents to cause us to be injured, forcing us to enter here. Many tourists might have come in this way."

He paused and asked: "How exactly did the car accident that caused your head injury happen?"

"To be honest, I don't know." Peter said. "I only remember that I seemed to have seen something, and when I came back to my senses, the car had already overturned."

"You don't have the memory of that period of time?"

Peter nodded and said: "My state has not been good recently, and I had a quarrel with Kate, so it was like this."

"Something is wrong." Bruce said. "This might be someone playing tricks, and I am the same. Actually, my state is not bad, but after entering the town, I started to have nightmares frequently, and I caught a cold after staying in that abandoned house for one night; if it weren't for this, I wouldn't have had a fever."

"What you suspect is indeed very reasonable." Peter said. "If the real world and the spiritual world are hostile, then they must both want to win over the people in each other's world. It is possible that the owner of the spiritual world played tricks, making us injured and weak, so that they could pull us in."

"No, it might not be actively pulled in." Bruce said. "Schiller told me that he hasn't been discovered by the evil spirit, and also told me to be careful, which proves that this might be a passive program. Once someone becomes very weak within the town, their spirit will be sucked into this small town. And if you lose yourself here, you might never be able to get out."

"Wait." Peter said. "Schiller said he has already discovered me; I thought he meant he saw me when I entered the spiritual world. But could there be a possibility that he has been staring at me since I entered the town?"

Bruce also immediately reacted and said: "That car accident, I'm afraid he wanted to pull you in directly through the car accident, but the car accident didn't cause enough damage, and your willpower was strong enough, so he didn't succeed."

"But what is special about me?" Peter said.

Bruce thought of the gun he saw at Peter's waist when helping the people who overturned the car; it was a police-issued pistol, so he said: "Because you are a police officer, and a police officer from Westview City."

"Do you mean that because I am a police officer, if I go missing here, many people will definitely come to look for me, so he can trick people from the city over, and then he will find a way to pull these people into the spiritual world?"

"I'm afraid it's worse than that." Bruce was obviously more pessimistic and said, "You said you had no memory at the moment of the car accident; is it possible that you were already possessed by the evil spirit at that time?"

Peter suddenly broke out in a cold sweat, because he suddenly thought of why Schiller reminded him like that. He said: "If my spiritual body is here, then who is controlling my body outside?"