Chapter 1164 Professor (Thirty-six) (Patreon)

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The sound of high-heeled footsteps echoing through the empty corridor is often accompanied by a light, resonant echo, somewhat like the vibration of the piano keys being played inside the piano.

With a creak, the door opened, and Mrs. Miller, holding a cup of tea, said with some surprise, "Professor Schiller, why are you standing so close to the fireplace?"

She then shifted her gaze to Schiller's hand, where he was holding a piece of firewood. Mrs. Miller sighed helplessly and said, "Sir, the wood in the fireplace has been specially treated. The new wood you've brought in from outside won't burn."

"Is that so?" Schiller, standing by the fireplace, casually tossed the piece of wood into the fire, closed the metal grate door on the outside of the fireplace, and walked over to the armchair next to the coffee table. He looked at Mrs. Miller and said, "Excuse me, ma'am, who are you again?"

"Professor Schiller, in the four hours since you returned from the hospital, you've asked me this question six times, and I've only been here six times in those four hours."

Mrs. Miller placed the teapot and teacups on the coffee table and looked at Schiller, saying, "I hope you're just joking with me, because if you really have prosopagnosia, I may be troubled by this question for the rest of my life."

After saying this, she turned and headed for the door, but just as she reached for the doorknob, she nearly got hit by the door being pushed open.

Mrs. Miller raised her eyebrows slightly in annoyance, just about to scold the person, when she realized it was Bruce. Her expression immediately softened, and she nodded towards the room, saying, "Mr. Wayne, you've arrived just in time. The tea has just been brewed."

Bruce nodded at Mrs. Miller and stepped aside, allowing her to exit the room. After Mrs. Miller left, Bruce gently closed the door behind him.

Schiller glanced up at him, gestured with his finger towards the sofa across from him, and then continued pouring water into his teacup. Once Bruce had sat down, he unusually took the initiative to speak, "Hello, uh, a new Professor, how should I address you?"

"I am Schiller," Schiller replied, finishing pouring his own tea and then pouring a cup for Bruce, placing it in front of him. "You don't need to distinguish between us. We are all Schiller."

"Okay, but I hope to better understand the differences between you and the Professor Schiller I'm most familiar with," Bruce said, looking directly into Schiller's eyes.

"Are you hoping for me to evaluate him from my perspective?" Schiller gently blew on his tea and said, "He's quite a meddlesome little fellow, and like the other Majority versions of me, he's talkative, melodramatic, and a bit noisy."

Bruce's eyes widened slightly as he repeated Schiller's words, "...little fellow?"

"Oh, he didn't tell you?" Schiller seemed a bit surprised. His right eyebrow twitched, and then he leaned back on the armrest of the armchair, supporting his chin with his elbow, his index finger and thumb pinching his chin as he tilted his head slightly. "The emergence of personality traits follows a certain order. Generally, the earlier ones are the stronger ones."

"The Professor Schiller you're most familiar with is one of the earliest emerging core personalities, serving as the foundation that supports the Schiller persona. He is the pillar of the Thought Tower."

"The Schiller you know is Pride, and perhaps you also know Greed and Sloth. Each personality trait has a name, and I'm no exception - I'm called Pathology."

"He should have told you that he is a psychiatric patient. It's not just a metaphor; he has a genuine mental illness."

"Scholar-type autism?" Bruce asked.

Schiller nodded. "You should know that Schiller's Thought Tower didn't exist from the beginning, but rather originated from an accident."

Bruce recalled the memories he had seen in Schiller's mindscape, where Schiller's personality had suddenly shattered, and those fragments had formed the current Thought Tower.

"When the high tower had not yet shattered, traits like Pride, Greed, Sloth, and so on were not independent existences, just like you couldn't currently have a conversation with the Pride or Greed within your own personality, as the personality is a whole. Traits don't exist independently."

Bruce seemed to understand some of it. He looked at Schiller and said, "So you existed separately at that time?"

"This brings up the duality of psychiatric patients. Perhaps you know that many mental illness patients share a common characteristic - their state is completely different when they are symptomatic versus asymptomatic."

"It's not just those with Dissociative Identity Disorder or schizophrenia who feel like there's another self living their life. Nearly all mental illness patients with duality have this sense."

"A psychiatric patient's life is divided into two parts - the normal part and the part when the mental illness is active. The Majority patients are unable to control themselves when the mental illness is active, so what is controlling them then?"

"The mental illness," Bruce answered instinctively, then looked up at Schiller and said, "Pathology... so that's what it means."

"Correct, pathology is the counterpart to normalcy," Schiller nodded. "Before the personality shattered, Schiller, like any other psychiatric patient, had two states - the normal state and the pathological state. That's when I existed."

Bruce thought for a moment, then came up with a new question, but before he could ask, Schiller directly provided the answer. "Of course, it's the normal state that collapsed, which is why Schiller became unable to take care of himself. If it had been the pathological state that collapsed, wouldn't he have just recovered?"

Bruce made a helpless expression. Schiller shook his head and said, "To be precise, I can't be considered a personality trait, because personality traits are actually part of the consciousness, while I am a product of a brain disorder, a physical part."

"No matter how Schiller's personality shatters, the structure of his brain doesn't change, so no matter what the normal state becomes, the pathological state remains the same."

Hearing this, Bruce had a new question. He said, "If you're not a personality trait, how can you control the body?"

"This is where the doctor who treats me comes in."

Schiller took a sip of the tea at the perfect temperature and said, "Do you think a person suffering from a mental illness is more tormented than someone with a complete personality breakdown, to the point of being unable to think?"

Bruce pursed his lips, pondering the question seriously, but felt he couldn't compare the two, as he had never experienced a personality breakdown himself, nor did he know what it felt like to be unable to care for oneself or think.

"That doctor believes it's better to be a mental patient than a raving monster for the rest of one's life," Schiller concluded, and Bruce couldn't refute it.

"After a normal personality breakdown, external help is needed to help Schiller re-establish the order of his personality, but even the most skilled psychologist is still another person, unable to directly enter his consciousness. Perhaps a different approach is better."

"You mean..."

"That doctor will use certain methods to stimulate me, causing my mental illness to recur in a state of personality breakdown, and then guide me to reorganize my chaotic thoughts without a normal, persistent condition, and rebuild an orderly personality."

Bruce slowly widened his eyes and said in disbelief, "Can this really be done?"

"I know it sounds a bit unrealistic, but you must understand that Schiller is extremely special. It is precisely because of his uniqueness that he has encountered these problems, but it is also because of his uniqueness that he can receive this treatment."

After saying this, Schiller slowly put down his teacup, leaned back in the chair, and said, "In other words, I actually helped Schiller build the entire Thought Tower, organized all his fragmented personalities, witnessed their birth, gave them names, and taught them how to regain control of this body - I am their teacher and father, I am the true Professor."

Bruce slowly lowered his head and exhaled, saying, "So the psychologist's treatment of Schiller was actually completely ineffective... No, what I mean is, the psychologist only treated Schiller's fragmented normal state, but didn't treat his pathological condition at all?"

"That's not an accurate statement," Schiller shook his head and looked at Bruce. "Have you really read your books to the end? Which psychologist in this world dares to say they can cure autism? That's an incurable disease."

"The autistic patients you see who are indistinguishable from ordinary people are mostly acting, or have been taught how to perform like normal people. That's the standard treatment for autism."

"But just because they can act like normal people doesn't mean they are normal. The pathological condition can be hidden by normal performance, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

"You must be very disappointed, but I still have to tell you that so far, the cause of autism is still unknown, and it's not just a simple psychological problem, it may be a brain disorder."

Schiller stood up from the sofa, walked over to the cabinet behind the glass partition, and said as he organized some newspapers, "Don't say you can cure Schiller. If you could completely cure any autistic patient in this world, you'd be showered with the top medical awards, and you'd be the one writing the next edition of psychology, psychiatry, and behavioral science textbooks."

"But..." Bruce felt like he was holding his breath. He stood up and turned to look at Schiller, saying, "But even if you represent autism, that doesn't mean autistic patients should... I mean, they shouldn't..."

Bruce never mentioned the word, because just bringing it up would have crossed his moral line a bit.

But Schiller seemed to understand his meaning. He took a newspaper and walked back to the sofa, sitting down and shaking the newspaper open. Looking at Bruce over the top of the paper, he said, "You're worried. Will I be like Professor Pigface?"

Although Bruce didn't answer, his expression clearly showed affirmation. Schiller looked at him, and Bruce saw a negative answer in Schiller's eye contact. Bruce was just about to breathe a sigh of relief when Schiller's next words sent a chill down his spine.

"Don't worry, I don't like pork."

In that instant, Bruce felt like he was being doused from head to toe with a bucket of ice water, every pore on his body breaking out in cold sweat, a feeling he hadn't had since the gunshot in the alley all those years ago.

But then he thought of an even more serious problem - if Schiller's pathological condition made him eat human flesh, but he didn't see ordinary people as his own kind, but rather as pigs, then what he was eating was...

Bruce no longer felt like he was just being doused with cold water, he felt frozen in a block of ice, both cold and unable to move.

And when he looked up at Schiller again, he could clearly see a desire in Schiller's eyes fixed on him, the most primal human instinct - the desire to eat.

Bruce hadn't leapt up from a chair that fast in years. He quickly backed up a few steps to the side of the sofa.

He hadn't expected the truth to be more terrifying and horrifying than he had imagined - Schiller didn't see ordinary people as human, the food he liked was those like him, Born Psychopaths.

Schiller was the hunter of hunters, the butcher of butchers.

And then Bruce thought of an even more terrible fact - the seemingly illogical but bold actions of the serial killers who had targeted Schiller, their mysterious and intuitive gathering, who had organized them?

Seeing Schiller's unfocused eye contact at the party and his now intense gaze, Bruce didn't even need to dwell on this question in his mind for a second, the answer was already very obvious.

"Sorry, Professor, I have something to take care of, I'll be leaving now," Bruce turned and headed for the door.

It wasn't that he was worried Schiller had any intentions towards him, it was mainly that he needed to go crack down on the criminals, make those serial killers immediately go back to where they came from, they deserved to be in jail, but not in the pot.

A whooshing sound came from behind him, and Bruce instinctively sidestepped, rolling on the ground. Just as he was about to stand up, his shoulder was viciously kicked, and he ended up lying on the floor.

As he rolled over, he saw Schiller approaching, holding a gleaming bone-cutting knife.

"Considering you're my student, and Pride would be heartbroken if you died, leave 1000 milliliters of blood and you can go."

Seeing Schiller's menacing approach with the knife, Bruce finally remembered why Pride had conjured up so many serial killers in his dream, making him play an escape game for months.

With a "shing" sound, the boning knife cut Bruce's arm, spraying fresh blood that stained the left half of Schiller's shirt red. The batarang closely followed the blood, leaving a wound on Schiller's left shoulder as well. Their blood mingled together, dyeing the shirt a deep crimson.

But in the moment the batarang was thrown, Bruce remembered the first time he saw Schiller's madness, when the deranged Schiller had inserted his finger into the deep, bone-exposing wound.

If Bruce remembered correctly, the expression on Schiller's face at that time was one of enjoyment.

He was a masochistic lunatic.

Bruce rolled and retreated, covering his arm, but he had been pushed back to the door.

Bruce quickly grabbed a chair by the door, blocking the downward strike of the boning knife. Schiller's arm muscles strained as he used the back of the knife to push the chair leg, sending the chair flying.

With a "whoosh" sound, the knife embedded itself in the wall, less than three centimeters from Bruce's right ear.

Bruce's azure eyes, reflected in the knife's surface, were like the moon falling onto Gotham's sea, or a lighthouse on a foggy night - bright, clear, and trembling with fear.

There was no escape route in the room, so Bruce immediately yanked open the door, intending to run into the hallway.

Even if that meant risking another wound on his back, his experience fighting against many homicidal maniacs had taught him that sometimes, he had to buy space with blood.

But as soon as he opened the door, he collided with a small figure - Harley, who glared at Bruce with her hand over her nose, saying, "What are you doing here again? Get out of the way, I have something to do..."

"No! You have nothing to do!"

As soon as Bruce spoke, he watched helplessly as Schiller's gaze shifted to Harley's face.

Bruce yanked Harley behind him, but just as Schiller was about to turn his gaze back to Bruce, a hulking figure appeared at the end of the hallway.

Turning his head, Bruce saw Professor Pigface's horrifying pig-like face.

Bruce cursed the Gotham Police Department's efficiency in his heart, but when he looked back at Schiller, the blood-stained knife had mysteriously disappeared.

Schiller had resumed his polite demeanor, straightening his tie and gesturing for Professor Pigface to enter, saying, "Please, come in."

Bruce was certain that Professor Pigface hadn't seen the previous scene, as he simply walked in.

And Bruce was more certain that in the second before Schiller turned to enter the room, his gaze was saying to Bruce, "Don't ruin my plans."

"Wait." Bruce took a quick step and forcibly held the door Schiller was trying to close, squeezing himself inside.

Bruce saw that the leading Professor Pigface looked back at him with a gaze full of deep loathing, clearly another person who knew Bruce's vigilante identity. But Bruce spoke rapidly:

"Professor, I don't think you should be with this dangerous killer. It could be dangerous!"

Professor Pigface's gaze held a hint of confusion, as Bruce had been staring directly at him when he said this.

"What happened to your arm?" Schiller's concerned gaze fell on Bruce's arm. Bruce used his uninjured arm to firmly block the struggling Harley, gritting his teeth as he said:

"Nothing, I did it myself."

"Then you should go back and tend to your wound," Schiller said, taking a step closer.

"But I'm fine! Professor! ...Thank you."

[Read at www.patreon.com/shanefreak, and thanks for the invaluable support!]

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