Chapter 261: No Major Bat Event (Part 1)_1

Lightning flashed and thunder resounded, rain falling heavily on Gotham's perpetually dark and terrifying night. A lightning bolt streaked across the sky, illuminating Arkham Mental Hospital in the darkness. In the only lit room of the building, two people faced each other.

When Hugo came to from his dizziness, he saw a figure in a white coat sitting across from him, looking at him with considerable concern.

Hugo closed his eyes once more, straining to move his eyes, allowing the hazy halo in his vision to dissipate. He saw that the doctor opposite him had green hair, his face painted with clown makeup.

This green-haired doctor took a patient record from a nearby bookshelf, looked at Hugo and said, "Hugo Strange, severely delusional, three months in hospital, this is your second checkup this month, are you feeling any better?"

Hugo opened his mouth to say, "Jack, what are you doing here?"

Hugo looked down, noticing that he was wearing a straitjacket. He strained to twist his body, "…Stop playing your tricks! Jack, what are you planning? Let me go!"

The doctor who was called Jack showed an expression of helplessness, "It seems your condition has worsened, you're not still under the delusion that you're a psychologist, taking all doctors for patients, are you?"

"What are you talking about?" Hugo opened his eyes in surprise, "I am a psychologist, and you are the patient who calls himself the Joker. Wasn't it just recently that we cooperated...Wait!"

Hugo forcibly shook his head, fragments of memory emerging in his consciousness, "No, I should be in Shiller's consciousness space right now, how could I…"

"New symptoms?" Jack furrowed his brow, "What story have you concocted this time?"

"Listen, Mr. Hugo, I don't know where you got your high school and university experiences, or if you made them up, but no matter how detailed your lies are, you're not the world-renowned psychology master from your illusions."

"I don't want to spend another 20 minutes repeating your life's story, but if that's the only way to bring you to your senses, I'm going to have to."

"Hugo Strange, you are a truck driver, working for a mob on Elizabeth Street, you are not an outsider, but a native of Gotham…"

"And on a rainy night, you, laughing manically, attacked the heir of the Wayne family, Bruce Wayne, with a dagger. But Master Wayne is a good man, he saw that you were mentally ill, not only did he refrain from holding you responsible, but he sent you here."

"Listen, Hugo, you need to cooperate with the treatment. My time is precious, if it weren't for Wayne Family's money, I would not be treating you here..."

"What?! I am... what kind of nonsense are you talking about?!??" Hugo said incredulously, "The backstory you told is clearly your own, Jack, stop joking around, this isn't funny at all, let me go now!"

"See, you are always like this, to tell you the truth, your symptom is quite rare. Once you heard someone else's background story, you would immediately imagine it as your own, and you are also the most uncooperative patient I have ever seen."

Jack across from him sighed, pressing a button on the table. After a while, another white-coated doctor walked in. Jack waved at him and said, "Doctor Victor, I'm really getting a headache now."

Jack rose from his chair, pointed at Hugo and said to Victor, "I know his medication dose has already reached its limit, but his condition shows no signs of improvement..."

Hugo across from him was already trying to wrestle free from the straitjacket, "Victor, have you gone crazy too? Consciousness space... where are we?"

"Where are we?"

Accompanied by Victor's voice, the room Hugo was in turned into a square box, gradually shrinking. The four walls as supports unfolded and flattened, and wooden structures rose from where the walls used to be, forming a wooden stage. Two thick red curtains fell from both sides of the stage with a "whoosh".

Viewed from the stage, there were rows of audience seats below. Victor was sitting in the audience section, asking questions. Shiller, his head shaped like a globe, answered, "Here is the 'Inverted Tower'."

"Inverted Tower? What is that?"

"You can think of it as a zone within my Thought Palace, much like a theater."

"The Inverted Tower lies on the 7th, 8th, and 9th levels of my Thought Palace. Of course, like what you saw earlier, I had the elevator operator open a backdoor for Hugo, otherwise I'm afraid he wouldn't even make it up the first step."

"So why did you teleport him here? Is there anything special here?"

"This teleportation is random, I didn't specify, he's actually quite lucky."

"Lucky? What do you mean?"

"As I've said before, each area within my Thought Palace has its own unique rules."

"So what are the special rules in the Inverted Tower?"

"The Inverted Tower is where I do role reversal thinking. When treating patients, I need to put myself in their shoes, understand their psychological state to determine whether they can withstand my next question…"

"Therefore, the Inverted Tower exists. In here, the identities that you firmly believe in will be inverted. The doctor becomes the patient, and the patient becomes the doctor."

"So when you're treating a patient, you actually turn yourself into the patient here and then try to see things from their perspective?"

"Correct. That's why I said he's lucky. Normally in the realm of consciousness, 'belief creates reality.' But here, it's inverted — belief creates the opposite of reality. Hugo, who truly believes he's a psychiatrist, has here become a patient. His past patients have now become doctors."

"So how is he supposed to get out of this place?" Evans asked, confused.

"A lunatic who once climbed this tower provided a pretty good demonstration."

"And what was that?"

"If you believe you are a doctor, you become a patient. Conversely, if you believe you are a patient, you become a doctor."

"Similarly, if you believe there are stairs leading upstairs, there won't be. If you believe there will never be stairs leading up, then there will be."

"This really isn't difficult. For ordinary people, persuading themselves to believe in something completely contrary may be challenging. But for someone who has accomplished things in psychology, it's not that hard. That's why I say his luck isn't too bad."

"The only problem is how long it will take Hugo to grasp the rules here, to discern a pattern, and then to leave."

Victor turned his head back. His gaze fell back on the stage. By now Hugo, wearing a straitjacket, had returned to his hospital room, clearly deeply confused.

The first question he asked, of course, was why Shiller's consciousness space was so intricate?

This wasn't just a question of it being too realistic. Every person here, every object, every detail was identical to the real world. For a moment, Hugo really started to doubt himself.

Then came the peculiarities of this space. Usually, anything that appears in the consciousness space represents some aspect of the personality. A pink room might represent love, or considerations about gender. A pencil could represent one's education or childhood memories.

But now Hugo was lost. What does a mental hospital where roles are reversed represent?

Everything here was as it was in the real world. Yet exactly because of this, things felt strange.

Regardless, Hugo, utterly at a loss, started his life as a mental patient.

After all, he was a psychiatrist. He knew what mental patients did in hospitals. He had tried to secretly spit out his medication, to unbuckle his straitjacket, even to jump off a building. But he failed, as there were simply too many doctors watching him – aside from Jack who was wearing Joker makeup, there were Victor, Cobblepot, and Alberto.

Day after day passed like this. The rain outside the Gotham Hospital window never stopped. Hugo didn't manage to escape these doctors' surveillance. As he continued to think hard, trying to unlock the secret, he suddenly realized that this seemingly peaceful life was sliding towards an unpredictable terror.

Once when he tried to spit out his medication again, Doctor Jack in Joker makeup had the nurse bring a funnel, then poured an entire bottle of pills into Hugo's mouth. When he tried to unlock his straitjacket again, they brought huge chains to bind him up with.

Upgrade by upgrade, they started to use more dangerous treatments. Starting from the forced medication, to the chains, to tying him to a treatment chair and applying electric shocks on him…

The rain outside the window of the mental hospital became heavier, the darkness in Gotham became denser, until one night, a figure with a dagger walked into his room. The lightning outside the window illuminated his face, plastered with a mad clown's smile.

The clown with his dagger approached Hugo. Hugo screamed, attempting to back away, but the chains had bound him. He had nowhere to run.

The clown with the dagger sliced open his face, peeling off his skin. Hugo screamed in agony. Along the wall illuminated by the lightning, the dagger fell once, twice. Blood splashed, and the mad laughter echoed far and wide…

Interleaved with the sound of rain, the curtain gradually closed. In the audience seat, Victor rubbed his arm and said, "You know what, this movie will definitely be categorized as for viewers 21 and above…"

"Why did things go out of control?" Cobblepot asked.

"Like I said before, the lower the floors, the more chaotic things become, while the higher the floors, the more ordered they become. In the Thought Palace on the 330th floor, floor 7,8,9 are considered very low, so they would go out of hand fast."

"The longer you stay there, the more severe the world will lose control. After all, this is the consciousness space and dreams, where any terrifying thing could happen, just like in a nightmare."

Evans shivered and said, "It's a truly frightening nightmare, where a doctor dreams of becoming a patient, and ends up being…"

"Honestly, it's a bit disappointing to me. The last lunatic who climbed the stairs solved everything in less than a day. He even had the stairs appear right in front of him. He had time to blow a few kisses to the people on this floor…"

Speaking of which, Shiller, whose head was a globe, glanced toward Jack who was dozing next to him. But Jack seemed oblivious to his movement, and didn't respond at all.

"If this really is a nightmare, and he's woken up from fear, what happens next?"

"If he's woken up, it means he's failed, and he will return to the first floor."

"Well, let's see where the elevator will take him next."