Chapter 1451: Research on Manipulation (17)_1

On the third day, Bane returned. By the time he heard Bruce greet him in that low tone, he was no longer surprised. He simply squatted down in front of Bruce's cell door and spoke.

"I don't know if you're pretending to be driven mad by the torture Amanda inflicted on you, or this is your way of fooling or avenging her, but I'm not here to hear that."

"Then what do you want to hear?"

"I only want to know about you, about Batman, about…" Bane's voice gradually slowed, and after a while, he spat out one word: "About Gotham."

"I don't know what you mean specifically."

"A long time ago, I asked a colleague for recommendations for a good holiday spot. He told me Gotham would be a good choice. I found this interesting; perhaps the best place for us criminals to relax is indeed a city of sin."

"So, about five years ago, I embarked on an East Coast trip with a competent colleague. Our first stop was the bustling Metropolis and then Gotham. The feeling was quite nice; it felt like coming home."

"What's your home like?"

Bane fell silent once more, and after a moment, his deep, trembling voice came from outside the door: "You're smarter than I expected, Batman."

"Thank you for the compliment."

"You have a darkness deeper than I in your heart, yet you seem more straightforward than me, and you use that straightforwardness as a weapon. Indeed, you have exceeded my evaluation of you. Now, I'm more interested in you."

"My privilege."

"So tell me, Batman, what happened to the city I saw a month ago?"

"I don't understand your point."

"What I mean is, why did the legendary City of Darkness disappear in just five years? Gotham now not only has sunlight but also hope?"

Bane rapped on the door with a 'thunk'. His tone was saturated with a morbidly intense desire to know.

"Tell me, Batman, what did you do to this city to make it what it is today? Tell me, how did you save Gotham? This is the question I wanted to ask you when I followed you here."

"Why do you ask?"

"Because Gotham is unsavable." Bane's voice finally wavered. His breath grew heavier, and he spoke faster: "Because five years ago, when I saw this city, I decided, even if I were to replace you, I wouldn't be able to cure this city. I was sure that you couldn't either. So, I left."

"That colleague once asked me why I didn't kill you. By the time I saw you from afar, I thought you were too young and immature. I didn't think you were a worthy adversary."

"If I was to take your life, your despair should at least be commensurate with that of the city's. At that time, I called it a miracle, but you weren't worthy. You were still a long way off."

"Thank you for the compliment."

"Batman…" Bane murmured. "A few months ago, I revisited the place out of curiosity– I couldn't believe what I saw. You, a boy lost in his childish fantasies and games, managed to carve a opening in the perpetual darkness of Gotham in just a few years."

"Now the miracle is yours, and I want to know, what is the true face of this miracle?"

"Why do you ask?"

Bane was silent for a while, shorter than before, and asked: "An exchange of truths, right?"

"What's your home like?"

"A prison, which sounds absurd, but my mother was captured as a war prisoner. The captors decided that if her child was a boy, he would pay for his father's crimes. And then I was born."

"Sounds terrible."

"Yes, but it gets worse. I was born and raised in prison, didn't grow up healthily, far smaller in stature compared to the formidable newly-imprisoned convicts. I grew up amidst constant beatings and torture."

"And one day, a prisoner tried to use me to escape, pushing me down a shaft until I was unconscious. Maybe the brain damage changed my thoughts; I couldn't take it anymore. So, I killed him."

"I don't know what you mean specifically."

"In a very cruel way, I removed his jawbone, filled his stomach with rat bait, and then stuffed a hoard of hungry live rats into his esophagus, and let them gnaw at him from the inside."

"The Warden thought I was very cruel; so, he threw me to the bottom of the prison, a dark and narrow place where the tide would rise at any time. I survived by eating rats."

"But this honed my will and physique. When I truly grew up, I seized control of the prison, ran amok unchecked. They saw my strong willpower and selected me as a member of a bio-experiment."

"The experience in the lab was boring and tedious, as you said, the experiment was not taken seriously, and the doctors were unprofessional. They injected me with a toxin that made me stronger. So, I killed them. Everyone escaped from prison, and from then on, I became a freelance mercenary."

Bane's tone grew quieter, he paused, before asking: "As a trade-off, aren't you going to reveal some truth about Gotham?"

"I don't know what you mean specifically."

"What do you think Gotham is?"

"Gotham is a city located on the East Coast of the United States, facing the Atlantic, with a temperate continental humid climate, divided into four districts, with a total population of nearly ten million people..."

"Seems like I won't get an answer today." Bane stood up, with one hand on the door and said, "I took Amanda's task and lured you here, not just to complete the mission, but also to create a sufficiently secretive communication channel for us."

"That's not very honorable, so consider it as my debt to you, but I must understand this matter. You will eventually answer me. Goodbye, Batman."

"Goodbye, Bane."

An hour later, Bruce woke up again, blinking somewhat dazedly, striving to dispel the illusion before his eyes, and feeling the silence at his ears, he muttered to himself: "...he's gone? I hope the automated response not malfunctioned?"

Soon, he quieted down again, obviously diving headfirst into the mountain of codes, just as every Gothamite has ever done, trying over and over again to find gold in the filth with great determination.

On the second day, the third day, the fourth day, Bane would appear outside Bruce's cell every day, talk about many things, but rarely get a response.

Bane certainly noticed that Bruce's short and repetitive responses were off, but he thought, since he helped Amanda lure Bruce here, Bruce would think he's with Amanda, so it's normal for him to act like he's going insane from sensory deprivation in front of him.

Bane knew he had to break through this defense to get the real answers.

But what first surprised him, then shocked him, and finally left him speechless and helpless, was that for an entire week, Batman, under the harsh punishment of sensory deprivation, didn't say more than a few words to him, the only one he could communicate with.

Bane almost admired him.

As everyone knows, the cruelest part of sensory deprivation lies in the fact that, in a completely dark space, people can't feel the passage of time. This state of complete isolation seems to last until they die. It's a deep despair that almost no one can resist.

Most of the time, sensory deprivation is not very strict, but when Amanda built this prison, she must have put a lot of thought into the final punishment. The cell for this punishment is surrounded by a labyrinth-like soundproofing device, and it is completely blacked out, even the air exchange device is absolutely silent.

The convicts will be very strictly restrained on the chair, with no room for activity except for irregular personal needs. If it wasn't for the possibility of causing limb disease due to long-term inactivity, Amanda would even consider directly using a tube to solve feeding and excretion issues.

This is a perfect environment for developing Stockholm Syndrome, and Bane naturally understands this.

Under such circumstances, with someone to communicate with, having a way to perceive the passage of time, the prisoner would be crazed in their search for a sense of security in order to alleviate the terrible loneliness and despair that destroys the will.

Bane originally wanted to kill Batman, but after looking at Gotham's situation again, he concluded that Batman is a miracle. So, like all the villains in Gotham, he doesn't want to destroy Batman's body, but to shatter his spirit completely, or even better, to manipulate his spirit.

Bane isn't admiring the fact that Batman saved Gotham, just an unhealthy curiosity. He doesn't need any reason to cross the moral bottom line due to his twisted birth and upbringing. Being morbid is normal for him.

But now, he really admires Batman. Batman has almost completely exceeded the limits of human spirit. Fourteen days of sensory deprivation, adding up to a possible longer and more painful torment in the mind than decades of imprisonment, hasn't let this tough man say an extra word.

Because Bane's childhood and teenage years were spent in a completely enclosed narrow space, he understands how this kind of pain can twist the human mind and drive people mad.

He also knew if he had had a partner at that time, who didn't have to do anything, just come to talk to him every day, he would have been eternally grateful, ready to do whatever the partner asked him to do.

Loneliness is man's greatest enemy; a lonely human is the greatest enemy of order.

But all these days, Bane has got nothing but a few repetitive responses—he's submitted.

Finally, Bane stood in the dark corridor, feeling the boundless silence he had feared so much before, and the solitude that still sprang up when he remembered the past after many years. He said to Bruce,

"I once thought about breaking your spine, watching you crawl helplessly on the ground, being discarded in the rainy night, because that could let you experience the pain I had, not physical pain, but the loneliness and despair brought by powerlessness."

"No matter how you see it, I have to defend myself; I don't like dynamic bloodshed and conflict."

"What I prefer is to strip people of their power, watch them die in silence, and let them understand that at the last moment of their lives, what they fear most is not death, but the loneliness of being abandoned."

"From the moment of my birth, I have been abandoned by this world."

"But it's not revenge. I couldn't overcome the loneliness in the loneliness and chose to leave loneliness and return to society to retaliate violently. This shows that I failed."

"I've searched the world, killed countless people in this way, just to prove that I'm right—no one can overcome the loneliness itself."

"Until, I met you, Batman."

Bane lifted his hand from the door and took it back to his side, like a salute in a solemn posture, sighed softly when spoke.

"You've defeated loneliness, and you've defeated me."

Then he placed both hands on the door again, gritted his teeth and said, "And I just want to know, what it is that sustains you to conquer it. You must tell me, Batman... answer me!"

What responded to him was only a deeper silence.

At the same time, in Bruce's psychic battlefield, Bane's frustrated and puzzled voice echoed—

"Why can Shiller do it, but I can't???"