Lightning and thunder, the sound of rain, the night in Gotham is always so dark and terrifying, a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, illuminating the Arkham Psychiatric Hospital in the dark night. In the only room with lights on, two people
Are facing each other.
When Hugo woke up from his dizziness, he saw a figure in a white coat sitting opposite him, looking at him with a concerned expression.
Hugo closed his eyes again. He moved his eyes hard to let the hazy halo in his field of vision dissipate. He saw the doctor sitting opposite with green hair and clown makeup on his face.
The green-haired doctor took out a medical record from the bookshelf next to him, looked up at Hugo and said: "Hugo Strange, suffering from severe delusional disorder, has been hospitalized for three months. This is your
At the second follow-up visit this month, is your condition better?"
Hugo opened his mouth and said, "Jack, why are you here?"
Hugo lowered his head and saw that he was wearing a mental patient's restraint suit. He twisted his body vigorously and said: "...Stop your prank! Jack, what are you going to do? Let me go!"
The doctor named Jack opposite showed a helpless expression and said: "It seems that your condition has worsened again. You don't still think that you are a psychiatrist and treat all doctors as patients?"
"What are you talking about?" Hugo opened his eyes in surprise and said, "I am a psychiatrist, and you are the mental patient who likes to call himself a clown. Didn't we cooperate before...wait a minute!"
Hugo shook his head hard, and some memory fragments emerged from his consciousness. He said: "No, I should be in Schiller's conscious world now. How could I..."
"Are there new symptoms?" Jack frowned and asked Hugo: "What story did you make up this time?"
"Listen, Mr. Hugo, I don't know where you heard about those high school and college experiences, or if you made them up, but no matter how detailed you make them up, you are not the world-famous person you imagined.
Master of Psychology.”
"I really don't want to spend another 20 minutes repeating your life, but if this is the only way to make you sober, then that's all I can do."
"Hugo Strange, you are a truck driver, serving a gang on Elizabeth Street. You are not an outsider, but a native of Gotham..."
"On a rainy night, you laughed and attacked the heir of the Wayne family, Bruce Wayne, with a dagger. However, Master Wayne is a good man. He saw that you were mentally ill. Not only did he not hold you accountable, he also
Sent you here."
"Listen, Hugo, you have to cooperate with the treatment. My time is precious. If it weren't for the money from the Wayne family, I wouldn't treat you here..."
"What?! I am...what crazy talk are you talking about???" Hugo said in disbelief: "The background you mentioned is obviously your own, Jack, stop joking, this is not funny at all, put it away
Drive me!"
"Look, you are like this. To be honest, your symptoms are quite rare. Once you hear other people's background, you will imagine it as your own. And you are also the most uncooperative I have ever seen.
of patients.”
Jack across from him sighed and pressed the button on the table. After a while, another doctor in a white coat walked in. He pushed up the glasses on his face. Jack waved to him and said hello: "Wei."
Doctor Kedo, I really have a headache now."
Jack stood up from the chair, pointed at Hugo and said to Victor: "I know that his medication dosage has reached the limit, but his condition has not improved at all..."
Hugo on the opposite side had already begun to sway left and right trying to break free from the straitjacket. He looked at Victor and said: "Victor, are you crazy too? The space of consciousness...where is this place?"
"Where is this?"
Following Victor's voice, the room where Hugo was located turned into a square box, gradually shrinking. The four walls supporting the box were spread out and paved, and sections of wood rose up from where the walls were originally.
It was set up as a wooden stage, and two thick red curtains "brushed" down from both sides of the stage.
Looking from the stage, there are rows of auditoriums below. Victor is sitting in the auditorium asking questions. Schiller with the head of the globe answered: "This is the 'Upside Down Tower'."
"The Upside Down Tower? What is that?"
"You can understand it as an area in the palace of my mind, just like a theater."
"The Upside Down Tower is located on the 7th, 8th and 9th floors of my palace of thought. Of course, as you saw before, I asked the elevator manager to open a back door for Hugo, otherwise he might not even be able to get to the first place.
I can’t even climb the stairs.”
"Then why did you teleport him here? What's so special about this place?"
"This kind of transmission is random. I didn't specify it. His luck is quite good."
"Good luck? What does this mean?"
"I have said before that every area in my palace of thinking has special rules."
"So what are the special rules for the Upside Down Tower?"
"The Upside Down Tower is a place I use to put myself in someone else's shoes. When I treat a patient, I need to stand in the patient's perspective to understand what his current mental state is like, and to judge whether his stress threshold can be tolerated.
Okay, my next question…”
"So there is the Inversion Tower. Here, all the identities you believe in will be reversed. The doctor will become the patient, and the patient will become the doctor."
"So when you treat a patient, you turn yourself into the patient and then put yourself in their shoes?"
"Yes, that's why I said he has good luck. The rule in the consciousness space is 'whatever you believe is true is true', but here it was reversed to mean that the opposite of what you believe is true. He firmly believes that he is a psychiatrist.
Guo became a patient here, and the patients in his memory became doctors."
"Then how on earth is he going to leave here?" Yin Wensi asked in confusion.
"There was a madman who passed here before while climbing the stairs, and he gave a pretty correct demonstration."
"what is that?"
"When you believe you are a doctor, you will become a patient. On the contrary, as long as you believe you are a patient, you will become a doctor."
"In the same way, if you believe there is a staircase leading to the upper floor here, then there is no one. If you believe there will never be a staircase leading to the upper floor, then there is."
"In fact, this is not difficult. Perhaps, for ordinary people, it is a little difficult to convince themselves to believe a completely opposite thing, but for people who have made achievements in psychology, it is not too difficult. This is
The reason why I said he is quite lucky."
"The only question is how long it will take Hugo to figure out the rules here, find the rules, and leave here."
Victor turned his head back and his eyes fell on the stage again. At this time, Hugo, who was wearing a straitjacket, had returned to the ward. It was obvious that he was immersed in great shock and confusion.
His first doubtful question was, of course, why is Schiller's consciousness space so fancy?
This is no longer just a very real problem. Every person, every object, and every detail here is completely consistent with the real world. For a moment, Hugo was really shaken.
Then, there is the weirdness of this space. Generally speaking, something that appears in the consciousness space represents a certain aspect of personality. For example, a pink room may represent love, or it may represent thinking about gender.
, a pencil may represent a career in school, or it may represent childhood memories.
But now Hugo is a little confused. What does a mental hospital with reversed identities represent?
What appears here is no different from the real world, but that's why it seems strange.
But no matter what, Hugo began his career as a mental patient in confusion.
After all, he was a psychiatrist, and he knew what mental patients would do in a mental hospital. He tried secretly spitting out the medicine, trying to get rid of the straitjacket, and even jumping off the building, but all failed because he was staring at
He has too many doctors, besides Jack in clown makeup, there are also Victor, Cobot, and Alberto.
Just like this day after day, the rain outside Gotham's window never stopped, and Hugo failed to escape the surveillance of these doctors. When he was thinking hard and trying to decipher the secret, he suddenly discovered that this peaceful life
Slipping into an unpredictable terror.
When he tried to spit out the medicine again, Dr. Jack, who was wearing clown makeup, asked the nurse to bring a funnel, and then poured a whole bottle of pills into Hugo's mouth. When he tried to break free of the restraints again,
When he was getting dressed, they tied him up with huge iron chains.
Their treatment methods began to become more and more dangerous, from Hugo being forcibly fed with medicine, to being tied up with chains, to being tied to a treatment chair, and then using electric shocks on him...
The rain outside the window of the mental hospital was getting heavier and heavier, and the nights in Gotham were getting darker and darker. Until one night, a figure holding a dagger walked into the door of his ward. Lightning fell outside the window, and bright light illuminated his face.
It was a clown with a crazy smile.
He approached Hugo with a dagger. Hugo screamed and wanted to retreat, but the iron chains tied his hands and he had nowhere to escape.
The clown cut his face open with a dagger and peeled off his skin. Hugo screamed in pain. In the shadow of the lightning on the wall, the dagger fell down, blood spattered, and crazy laughter.
Spreading farther and farther...
Amid the sounds of laughter and rain, the curtain slowly closed. Victor in the audience rubbed his arm and said, "Did you know, this film will definitely be classified into a level that can only be watched by people over 21 years old..."
"Things are getting out of hand, why?" Cobot asked.
"I have said before that the lower the number of floors, the more chaotic it is, while the higher the number of floors, the more orderly it is. Among the 330 floors of the palace of thought, the 7th, 8th and 9th floors are already considered very low floors.
So it can get out of control very quickly."
"The longer you stay there, the more out-of-control the world will become. After all, this is the space of consciousness and dreams, and all kinds of terrible things can happen, just like people having nightmares."
Yin Wensi shuddered and said: "This is really a terrible nightmare. A doctor dreamed that he became a patient and was tortured by the original patient..."
"To be honest, he made me a little disappointed. The madman who climbed the stairs last time solved everything in less than a day. He even made the stairs appear directly in front of him, and he still had time for people on this floor.
He left a few blowing kisses..."
As he spoke, Schiller, who had a globe head, tilted his head towards Jack who was napping next to him, but Jack didn't seem to notice his movement and didn't respond at all.
"If this is really a nightmare, he should have been frightened and woke up by now. What will happen next?"
"If he is frightened and wakes up, it means that he failed to break through the level and will return to the first level again."
"Then let's see, where will the elevator take him next?"
