The Kingdom of Death is different from the underworld of Hela. This is not a barren land, but more similar to the Kingdom of Dreams. There are various fantasy dreams composed of fragments of the rules of the universe. It is possible that you were in a weird black forest just a second ago.
In the next second, we arrived in a dark city like Gotham. For creatures of order, everything here is chaotic.
Human souls are not completely unconscious when entering the kingdom of death. They will fall into a bizarre dream, usually their own memories of their lifetime. In the dream fragments, they will relive those memory scenes that impressed them deeply.
Once, it is the so-called revolving lantern.
But this process is actually confirming all the codes of this soul so that the database can delete them.
For some reason, Schiller, who has died many times, experienced this loading process for the first time. He first fell from the darkness, then felt the hazy light, and continued to fall after the light, as if he was soaked in amniotic fluid.
Warmth enveloped him.
The feeling of weightlessness became weaker and weaker, and Schiller felt that he had hit bottom.
He tried hard to concentrate, and then forcefully opened his eyes. Suddenly, Schiller found himself in a familiar church.
Just like the picture taken by a lens with a special aperture, there is a hazy and dreamy halo everywhere, everything has no details, but it can bring back memories.
Schiller turned around instinctively and saw the tall cross behind him and the statue of Jesus with open arms and lowered eyebrows.
Suddenly, a burst of rapid footsteps sounded at the door of the church, and a figure rushed towards this side. The filter was instantly broken. When Schiller came back to his senses, he saw Natasha stretching out her hand in front of his eyes.
He shook his head and said: "Schiller, are you okay?"
"I'm fine." Schiller turned around and looked around. The scene was still a bit blurry. Even the outline of Natasha in front of her was not accurate. Judging from the reflection in Natasha's pupils, she seemed to be the same.
It was just a vague human figure, and if the voice hadn't been quite clear, it wouldn't even be possible to tell his identity.
"We are almost like we have entered a video game." Natasha shrugged, looked at the surrounding environment and herself, and said: "This should be hell, right? It's much better than I imagined."
"This is not hell, at least not Mephisto's hell. If the plan goes well, this should be the edge of the kingdom of death. It won't be long before we penetrate the barrier and enter the real kingdom of death, and then become a permanent wanderer there.
echo."
"So, what's going on with this church?"
"This should be a memory from my lifetime." Schiller didn't seem anxious at all. He walked to the window seat in the first row of the church and sat down. He patted the seat next to him and motioned for Natasha to sit over.
.
"Okay, this is my first time dying. Obviously I'm not as experienced as you. Now can you tell me your plan?"
Natasha sat next to Schiller, and the two of them sat in the first row of the church and stared at the huge cross in front of them. Schiller's first words were beyond Natasha's expectations.
"I'm sorry, I lied to you from the beginning. Although I am indeed not a doctor, I was entrusted by a doctor to communicate with everyone in order to improve their mental health as much as possible.
situation."
"Is it Dr. Schiller who entrusted you?"
"Yes ma'am, but first let me ask you to answer a few questions. How are you feeling right now?"
"It's hard to say." Natasha sighed, put her elbows on her legs, leaned forward, stared at the checkered floor tiles in front of her that reflected the dreamy luster, and said, "There is a feeling of exhaustion after overdraft, but it's a little hard to say.
Pure relief and relaxation.”
"Can you tell me more about it?"
"It's more like I exhausted all my energy and knew that there was nothing I could do, so I just stayed there and waited to die."
"So, let's turn our attention to earlier, how did you feel when the two of us were fighting?"
"I was drunk and didn't think too much."
Schiller turned to look at Natasha and said: "Ma'am, we are not in the SHIELD office now. This is the realm of God that mortals cannot set foot on. There are no bugs, no record books, and I am not an agent interrogating you.
, I know you have the right to say any answer, but from a personal point of view, I hope you can be honest enough, because the development of things to the current situation includes a lot of the fruits of my labor."
"You are really good at talking." Natasha pushed the hair from her forehead back with both hands. She did not mock Schiller again, but commented sincerely. She found that Schiller was indeed very good at impressing others.
"That's a bit too intense." Natasha finally replied.
"Why do you think so?"
Natasha took a deep breath, was silent for a long time, and finally shook her head and said, "There's no need to talk about this, it won't work."
"So, let's talk about my experience." Schiller was not harsh, but changed the topic. He leaned on the back of the church bench and said: "You should have heard about my story from Professor Charles.
My experience is that when I was young, I was taken to the laboratory of a mysterious organization and received long-term training there."
Natasha's blinking frequency became slightly faster, but she still controlled herself not to turn her head and stayed where she was silently.
"Their purpose is to train me into a killing machine capable of causing chaos, so even if I am extremely talented, I must undergo some professional agent training."
Schiller's voice began to become more and more distant, like a distant voice echoing on the horizon.
"One of the exercises interested me very much, and it was during that exercise that I discovered that my perception of pain was different from ordinary people."
As if Natasha knew what he was going to say, her Adam's apple moved up and down subtly, and the muscles in her neck also twitched.
"The pain reflex is a person's most basic reflex, which comes from our body's self-protection mechanism. Pain is a reminder of danger, not only of external dangers, but also of internal dangers."
"If a person's arm is bitten by a wild beast, he will follow his instinct to pull his arm back and run away. If a person has a stomachache and diarrhea, he will know that he may have eaten something bad and adjust his diet in time to avoid poisoning.
To a certain extent, in the process of human evolution, the more sensitive the response to pain is, the easier it is to survive."
"But if what you need is a killing machine rather than a person, the pain reflex is unnecessary and needs to be manually screened and eliminated."
Schiller sighed lightly, lowered his head and said: "My pain reflex is naturally weak. It's not physiological, it's more like a mental disorder that blocks part of the influence of pain."
"I can see it." Natasha said in a depressed voice, "I made a cut on your arm, but your first reaction was to think instead of retracting your hand because of the pain."
"Although I considered this before taking action, I didn't expect you to be so exaggerated. You are not a professional agent." Natasha complained a little.
"So as a professional agent, are you more exaggerated? Ma'am?"
"Okay, you just want to pry my mouth open." Natasha shook her head irritably and said, "Yes, it may be more exaggerated than you think. I have no pain reflex at all."
The two fell silent. Schiller was shocked by this fact and didn't speak. Natasha waited for him to speak, but it didn't come, so she didn't want to waste time and spoke directly.
"As you said, years of rigorous training have eliminated this part of the instinct. Even if I only have one breath left, I can still aim and shoot more stably than ordinary people, and my marksmanship is still very accurate."
"Three holes in my chest signify my approval, ma'am."
But Natasha shook her head and said: "No, there shouldn't be three holes. If it were normal, you would be shot to death."
"Even if you are infinitely close to death?"
"Even if I'm dead." Natasha turned to look at Schiller and said, "The muscle reflex of my finger will pull the trigger at the last moment."
Schiller was silent for a while, and then said: "When people feel pain, they usually pray, hoping that gods will eliminate the pain for them, but the human emotional structure is far more sophisticated than they imagine. If there is no pain,
There would be no happiness."
"People's souls are like a big tree. The part growing above the ground represents all kinds of beautiful feelings, while the part buried deep underground represents the pain or illness that they don't want to mention."
"If you blindly remove the underground roots, or simply completely separate the upper and lower parts, the result will be that the happiness and other positive emotions in the upper part will gradually wither, and the whole tree will become a rotten tree."
"It is often said that some people die at thirty, only to be buried at seventy. This is not uncommon. They make peace with the intense emotions they desperately wanted, not because they got it, but just never did it again.
The passion keeps them wanting."
"Some people call this state of breaking through the world, stability and calm, but again, I prefer to call it 'numbness'."
Natasha listened quietly without saying anything. Then she turned to look at Schiller and saw his increasingly blurred profile in the dim light of the church's stained-glass window, like the undulating mountain shadow in the morning light.
.
"You have got all the answers you want." Schiller turned to look at Natasha and said: "Nick, Eric, Odin, Hela, you are all the same. You are not mentally ill. You are better than anyone else."
People need to be more stable. You have found all the ways out for your entanglements and difficulties, but the passion is no longer in the ordinary and stable days."
"It's just that, madam, your problem is more serious than them. The trauma of those painful elimination trainings has not disappeared. It still affects you all the time. Your numbness is still growing, until one day,
It will suck all the nutrients out of the trees on the ground and turn you into a walking zombie."
Natasha was expressionless and silent for a while, then asked: "How did you know?"
"I feel the same." Schiller leaned back further and took a deep breath and said: "Throughout my life, I have been trying to balance pathology and normality. In the past, I did not contain the pathology, which led to me falling into madness. Then
A doctor sealed my illness and plunged me into a numb state of inability to be happy. My tower and abyss are gradually being perfected in the process of this self-struggle."
Natasha swallowed her saliva. She didn't expect that Schiller would analyze herself so deeply in front of her, and the female agent never thought that there would be one thing in the world that she would need to muster up all her courage to do.
This is not even a difficult thing, but it is harder than anything in this world, which is to open up and truly describe how you feel.
"When you...when you cut me open like a fish, I felt an unprecedented intense emotion exploding in my mind. I think it was fear, but at the time I thought it was impossible.
I thought I had evolved this emotion long ago."
Natasha smiled and said half-jokingly: "Then I was shocked, because I actually felt pain. I haven't felt this way for many years. The training I received made me completely immune to the pain reflex."
"It's not that I can't feel pain, it's just that after the pain is transmitted to the brain, the reflex nerves can't work. I can use my reason to control the movement of all my muscles without any abnormality."
"This is the secret of my mission's success rate being so high. All the targets who wanted to exchange injuries with me got here earlier than me. They were waiting for me in hell."