Chapter 946: Three Detectives (Part 1)

"This is indeed a question worth thinking about." Constantine touched the area under his nose and said: "According to the diary you found, he has been trying to imitate normal people, but always failed. So he changed a method, which was to design a tower, which is the mind palace we saw in his soul earlier."

"The diary didn't explicitly write whether this method was successful, but judging from our interaction with Schiller, compared to his teenage years when he was almost unable to live a normal life, at least now, he has been able to live in the society of ordinary people. This proves that this method is very likely to have succeeded."

Batman nodded and said: "And from the information we know, young Schiller suffered from autistic disorder, and it is possible that it was high-functioning autism. This kind of disease might bring people super memory and special talents in a certain aspect."

"If he really solved his mental problems, then it is not strange to become a top psychologist through learning. I think things are probably like this."

"Young Schiller suffered from autistic disorder. Because he was gifted and unable to communicate with others, he began to build a building block tower in his inner world."

"However, people from that mysterious organization broke into the orphanage one day and killed everyone there. This kind of stimulation caused the building block tower Schiller built to collapse. His spirit was also stimulated to a certain extent, manifested as aphasia, loss of thinking ability, and only instinctive reactions."

"People from the mysterious organization took him away, perhaps to Germany, perhaps to other places, and conducted experiments on him. We might as well define this experiment as using mental stimulation to enable ordinary people to lift the brain's restriction on muscles, thereby obtaining powerful strength and becoming a powerful killer with special abilities."

"Schiller spent his teenage years in the mysterious organization and, as the mysterious organization expected, became an extremely powerful and cold killer. So, they planned to use Schiller to do things we can all think of in a certain country."

"However, when they sent Schiller back to this country, Schiller suddenly broke free from their control and killed all these people."

"The commotion he caused was discovered by certain official organizations in this country. So, they subdued and took Schiller into custody, brought him to the so-called Ninth Management Office, and wanted to restore his spirit to normal."

"Precisely because the building block tower collapsed and he didn't receive treatment during the golden treatment period, Schiller couldn't return to the life of ordinary people by simply imitating behaviors. So, he had to change his method, sticking the already collapsed building block fragments back together to become a mind tower."

"After possessing the mind palace, Schiller's spirit gradually returned to normal. And because he possessed excessive talents and had suffered psychological trauma, he chose the path of psychology, achieved not bad results, and finally came to Gotham University to become a professor."

Constantine also relatively agreed with this conclusion. He nodded and said: "Looking at it this way, Schiller's growth process is still very inspirational."

But Batman said in a low voice: "What makes me care most is the mysterious organization that once took Schiller away, British spies..."

Seeing Batman cast his gaze on himself, Constantine sized him up and said: "Why look at me? Not every British person is a spy."

But having said this, Constantine seemed to have remembered something and said: "However, I saw that the tower drawn on the second notebook you took out has many patterns. But Schiller's current mind tower is very smooth, without any traces. What is going on?"

Batman took out the notebook again, and the three of them gathered together to look at a picture on it. Batman said: "This might just be a design drawing. These patterns are to show where each fragment is pieced..."

Constantine shook his head slightly and said: "Even if it can be pieced together, will it really not leave any traces? The mind tower we see now is simply perfect, without any traces of splicing."

"Perhaps you don't know, Batman, the human soul is a very fragile thing. You can see one scar after another on the soul of a mental patient, even if they have recovered through treatment and drugs, these traces will not disappear."

"I prefer to see the process of Schiller's mind tower collapsing as the collapse of the soul. The state where he couldn't speak and couldn't act autonomously is like an empty shell without soul control."

"And if he used some method to piece his soul back together, it is absolutely impossible not to leave any traces." Constantine said very firmly. Zatanna also echoed: "That's right, although I haven't seen people whose souls have completely collapsed, quite a few people's souls have collapsed a small piece."

"The collapsed part might be able to be recombined later, and some people can even glue all the fragments together and restore them to their original shape, but this doesn't mean the gluing has no traces. If you look from the spirit realm, their souls are riddled with holes."

Zatanna cast her gaze toward Constantine. Constantine hesitated, waved his hand, and said: "Alright, alright, I was using a sleight of hand. After all, no one wants to walk around with scars all over their body, right?"

After saying this, his body emitted a faint micro-light. Batman squinted. He saw that one crack after another suddenly appeared on Constantine's body, and some places even looked like they had been scorched.

These scars didn't look like they were caused by one kind of thing, with deep and shallow, large and small ones. But looking from a distance, there was no good place on the whole body.

"This is the price of using magic." Constantine shrugged indifferently and said: "I have cut my soul more than once to use as bait. It is not completely impossible to completely eliminate these scars, but the power required is really too much."

"Even if my reputation were much better than it is now, no existence would be willing to lend me so much power at once, because this is very likely to cause world instability and cause very serious consequences."

After saying this, the scars on Constantine's body gradually disappeared. He looked down at himself and then said: "Anyway, it can be disguised, this is not bad, right?"

"If the memory we saw in Schiller's memory space is true, his soul once collapsed, then it is absolutely impossible not to leave scars." After Constantine said this, Batman's eyebrows knotted together again, and he began to doubt what he had seen.

"I say, have you already forgotten why we came here?" Zatanna said: "We are not here to explore the past of this professor. Our goal is the curse medium."

After saying this, she looked down at the building block in her hand, her expression revealed a trace of hesitation, but soon, she said as if talking to herself: "This is also for his own good. No matter who it is, even a powerful magician, mastering such a powerful curse medium means that he will inevitably be doomed."

"The more powerful, the more price to pay." Zatanna shook her head and said: "That group of greedy black magicians will never understand this truth. It is not them using the curse, but the curse controlling them."

Then, she firmed her expression, looked at Batman and Constantine, and said: "A weakness item can become a support for a scene, and three items are three scenes. I think this is completely enough. When I used this move before, one was enough. After all, fabricated memories are extremely deceptive, which has nothing to do with willpower."

Zatanna looked at Batman and asked: "Will you doubt your own memory? Will you doubt whether a certain thing you remember was fabricated by others?"

Batman remained silent, but Zatanna said: "Most people will feel that their memory is reliable, and mind magicians use this point to weave dreams and fabricate memories to achieve their goals."

Looking at Batman's increasingly deep expression, Constantine coughed twice and said: "However, now we are trapped in this memory space, we must find the way out."

"If there is a common path for these three memory spaces that have been separated, then there must be other paths leading to a more peaceful memory space." Zatanna said while thinking: "Generally speaking, the way out will be in the place the other party is most unwilling to face..."

"If the Follow-up Visit Room is not the correct answer, then where is it?" Batman asked: "From the clues we have now, we can only infer that he has encountered several failures in the Follow-up Visit Room, so he is unwilling to face it."

Zatanna shook her head and said: "No, the logic of the real world may not be used in the memory space. And, encountering failure doesn't mean being unwilling to face it. Don't forget, at this time, he is still a mental patient, and what he likes and hates may not necessarily have logic."

Batman's fingers touching his wrist paused, feeling that Zatanna's words also made sense. He had studied psychology, so he knew that mental patients' cognition of the world was different from ordinary people. Adults encountering setbacks would be frustrated, and achieving success would be happy, but mental patients might not be like this.

In the eyes of ordinary people, the plans formulated encountering failure again and again might leave psychological shadows, and they wouldn't want to go to the place where they encountered failure again. But in the eyes of mental patients, this might be a game.

After all, Schiller's diary only mechanically recorded the process of some things happening and didn't express emotions, so it was indeed impossible to determine that the Follow-up Visit Room was the place he was most unwilling to go.

"Besides the Follow-up Visit Room, where else is more likely?" Constantine also started to think, but Zatanna said directly: "The clues in our hands now are certainly not enough to infer the specific answer, but there is another way."

"Another way?" Batman looked at her and asked: "What is it?"

Zatanna beckoned to him, then walked to the door, opened the door, found that Schiller was not here, so she walked out of the door with peace of mind and said: "Follow me."

Constantine and Batman didn't figure out what the method she said was, but they also followed her out of the door. Zatanna walked to the door of the room next to the utility room, pushed the door open, looked into it, shook her head, and closed the door.

Then, she walked to the opposite room, also opened the door and looked into it, shook her head, and closed the door.

Then she walked forward again, to the room in the middle of the corridor, opened the door, closed the door. Just when she was about to continue walking forward, she turned her head and found that Constantine and Batman had both stopped in place.

Zatanna stood a few meters away looking at them and asked somewhat puzzled: "What are you doing? Why haven't you come over yet?"

Batman also stared at her, and after a few seconds, he slowly opened his mouth:

"The method you said, shouldn't it be the brute-force method?"