Chapter 2272: Late Autumn in Jincheng (25)_1

The atmosphere in the room remained quiet.

Morbid thought Pamela's situation was beyond his field of expertise, so Pamela quickly discovered that the Professor had returned, but she didn't sit back down, instead, she stood by the window in deep thought.

Pamela, who had just experienced an emotional fluctuation, would not calm down so quickly. She had held back from disputing, fearing only Shiller's mysterious power, but she knew this professor better. She understood that most of the time, he was willing to explain things to his students.

Pamela called out to Shiller twice, but he miraculously didn't hear her. Unable to resist, she straightened up from the bed, prompting Shiller to turn his head to look at her when he noticed her movement.

"Apologies, I was deep in thought and thus a little distracted. Are you feeling better, Miss Pamela?"

"I feel much better, I just wanted to know..." Pamela hesitated, her nostrils flaring slightly, before she finally asked: "Do you think I am any different from you?"

"It seems you see more of our similarities." Shiller weighed his words, "That's perhaps why you show up in the garden of my mansion when you encounter difficulties."

"I..." Pamela's vocal cords trembled weakly. She took a deep breath and gathered the courage to say: "I saw you, as if it was another you, and how you handled the demon, I mean the elk."

"How did that make you feel?"

Shiller took a seat diagonally across the room, a fair bit further from Pamela. But this positioning gave him a big-picture perspective, making him appear more like a hunter. He clearly was observing something from the shadows.

"I felt some excitement." Pamela was very honest, she said: "Seeing you dismember human-shaped creatures, causing them painful screams and bleeding, it makes my blood pump."

Shiller's brows furrowed deeper.

He sensed something amiss, the feelings Pamela described contradicted the ones he had regarding her.

Pamela was not a natural-born lunatic.

This was the conclusion Shiller had drawn. Pamela Isley's distance from being a serial killer was equivalent to the distance between Gotham and Metropolis.

Her mental condition couldn't be considered healthy, and her mental state was unstable, but not everyone with psychological problems and poor mental states are natural-born lunatics. Lunatics and ordinary people almost seemed like two different species.

From Pamela's experiences, it was indeed so. She tasted misfortune in her youth and might have experienced killing or hurting someone. As she grew, these tendencies only intensified, to the point where she could calmly frame others after committing murder, completely fitting the bill of a cold, brutal, manipulative psychopath.

But the most unreasonable point Shiller felt, in this case, was that Pamela didn't remember the process of her murdering someone.

Shiller weighed his words before speaking.

"It seems that these natural-born serial killers have a different perspective from you regarding the harm they do to their peers."

"What's different?"

"Why do you think you forgot about the process?"

Pamela slightly furrowed her brows, trying her best to associate her answer with psychology: "I remember it being mentioned in class that when humans are subjected to major mental stimuli, they instinctively develop amnesia. This is a form of self-protection mechanism in the brain."

"That's precisely the biggest difference. Ordinary people would consider murdering two individuals as a major stimulus while the lunatics wouldn't. They barely have any empathy and do not recognize how terrifying death is. Murdering someone is like casually plucking off two leaves from a tree. How would they forget due to mental stimuli?"

Pamela was left speechless.

"I know that you have aspirations toward this." Shiller bluntly said: "The actions of my alter-ego may have allowed you to see the aesthetics hidden behind violent acts. Gothamites are good at appreciating such aesthetics, and they enjoy following it."

"But the reason these lunatics are referred to as natural-born psychopaths is due to the numerous innate defects they possess. Those who fetishize serial killers often refer to these as advantages: they are indifferent, uneducable, lacking in empathy, and moral sensibility."

"These are not personality traits that they developed after experiencing certain stimuli or situations, they were born with these traits, which are nearly impossible to mold after birth. If you are not one of them, you can never become one of them. You may resemble them, but there will definitely be differences."

"So, I am not one of them?" Pamela looked at Shiller with a hint of confusion: "But I feel that I also possess these traits."

"That's a different matter, miss," Shiller paused for a moment to collect his thoughts before explaining: "We can discuss the abnormal indifference you exhibit later. From my observations, you don't belong to that category of lunatics."

"If you still don't believe me, I'll prove it to you by asking a series of questions."

Pamela sat composed with her hands resting behind her. She seemed a little tense as she cleared her throat and said, "Go ahead."

"When you see someone walk past you in class, do you think 'I want to thrust a dagger into his heart, then use a chain saw to cut off his head and place it on a tree stump'?"

"Who did I see?"

"See, that's the difference," Shiller said, "Normal people would first focus on who the other party was, they would want to know if they have any reason to kill him. But for psychopaths, such thoughts do not need any reason, it just occurs to them spontaneously."

"Therefore, murder cases committed by psychopaths are generally hard to crack. They kill randomly, leave when they're done, bear no grudges nor social connections with the victims — there are no guidelines. No sociological relations point to them as they often evade legal sanctions multiple times."

Pamela nodded.

"And do you sometimes feel dizzy and nauseous, sensing the fragmentation and discontinuity of time and space, that something is wrong and you must correct it?"

Pamela shook her head again.

"Distorted senses are also a hallmark of born killers, who often devise whimsical ideas, completely destroying their previous cognition of certain things, and creatively shaping a new one. If reality does not coincide with their new construction, they will feel dizzy with blurred vision, suffering unbearable pain. They will resort to violent means to correct the reality they believe to be disordered."

"This is often the reason for their murders. They believe that certain people are not as they seem to others, referring not to the victims, but to hypocrites or other socially-defined two-faced individuals."

"In their crazed perspectives, it's possible that this person has sprouted four arms, thus two must be chopped off, or this person originally had no arms, so they need to attach someone else's."

"So you will often see serial killers crafting astounding pieces of art. However, these are not their creative ideas. There is no rational thought process involved. They simply see a person appear like this and transform them as such."

"Unimaginable." Pamela began to feel a chill creeping up her back.

Then she looked at Shiller, her survival instinct screaming inside her mind, pleading with her not to ask the fatal question, but an even stronger curiosity was pushing her forward.

"Are you...?"

In that instant when Shiller's eyes changed, Pamela shrank back to the corner of the bed at the highest speed, but before her eyes could fully diverge, they refocused.

Shiller said, a bit helplessly, "We're currently dealing with a rather professional issue. At this point, provoking madmen isn't wise. I believe this is the last opportunity."

Pamela swallowed hard, nodded forcefully, but still didn't change her ways, looking at Shiller with an inquisitive gaze.

"My performance in this regard isn't serious." Shiller shook his head and said, "If you insist on finding an example, go look for Batman. Of course, I'm not talking about the one acting as a tourist attraction, but the real Batman."

"His actions are actually also attempts to rectify the world. At times, even more fervent and obsessive than the madmen, which is a form of sensory distortion."

"Dressing himself as a bat?"

"Cross-dressing is another feature." Shiller's hand lightly tapped on the armrest as he continued, "Lacking empathy and being overly detached from the world, along with sensory distortion preventing them from feeling reality, they usually lack an anchor for their existence."

"When you love me, feel me, and express your love and feelings, I can understand myself through these. This is the recognition anchor a normal person should have."

"But madmen can hardly feel these. Their connections with others are too weak, but their perspectives and senses become extremely uncertain due to their frenzy, so they often lose their existence."

"For this reason, they have to find a new anchor for themselves: I am whatever I pretend to be."

"So you say you're a normal person?"

Shiller stood up.

Innumerable vines sprang out from under the bed, spreading across the bedroom floor and covering the surrounding walls in an instant. The storm created by the vines, like a giant hand, reached for Shiller, but it wasn't an attack, Pamela was merely defending herself.

Unexpectedly, Shiller didn't resist, but he also didn't use any special abilities to escape. He just opened an umbrella to block the vines and calmly stood in place, looking at Pamela.

"I have to introduce you to a new type of person." Shiller's voice lowered.

"Obsessed Deviants." Shiller turned his head away, not looking at Pamela, and continued, "Madly obsessed with mental patients, they are always attracted by the craziness of the madmen, until they themselves get pulled into the inescapable whirlpool."

"I knew you were one of them when I saw you preparing for dinner, Miss Isley."

Shiller sat back down on the sofa, turned his head to look at the vine tip poking out from the back of the chair, flicked the curling part with his finger lightly, and the part curled quickly, growing into the chair and wrapping around Shiller's wrist.

"For your sake, Miss. I am not completely free from perceptual distortion." Shiller smoothed the hem of his suit with his other hand, saying, "Consider yourself lucky that you didn't turn your back on me just now, otherwise, I'd be thinking of a new name for lighter colored meat."

The vine went back with a woosh.

Pamela shrunk into the corner of the bed, hugging her knees, staring wide-eyed at Shiller. Shiller slowly exhaled, and said, "Owing to your particular interest in me, Miss Isley, I am compelled to express my gratitude."

"So..."

"That wasn't you."

"Huh?"

"All Things Green, come forth."