Chapter 110

Chapter 110

After meeting with Xu Jian, Bai Yi once again came to the eastern suburbs of the city.

Unlike other areas that were becoming increasingly prosperous, this suburb seemed to have hardly changed in the past fifty years. In this rapidly evolving metropolis, it was like an outdated component that didn’t fit in.

Large patches of sand-mixed soil spread across the open wilderness, still bearing traces of past wars. Occasionally, one could find rusted shell casings and metal fragments when turning over the soil.

Large areas of trees grew wildly in this neglected wilderness. Beyond the layers of tree shadows, with the grayish-blue sky as a backdrop, one could vaguely see the gray-white walls of the Seventh Hospital.

Next to it was the Xingfu Orphanage, which was being rebuilt.

The roads in the suburbs were not easy to navigate. Bai Yi got out of the taxi near the road by the forest. He walked on the forest path he had traversed countless times before. The surrounding trees cast shadows that blocked out all sunlight, creating a particularly deep and chilly atmosphere. At the end of the path, the gray-white walls of the Seventh Hospital, which hadn’t been renovated for many years, appeared in his line of sight.

He looked up, and the tree shadows fell on his eyelashes.

From his earliest memories, Bai Yi never thought he was particularly special. His birth mother’s identity, his birth at the Seventh Hospital, constantly hovering between dreams and wakefulness since childhood, constantly receiving mental noise from others... All of this, in Bai Yi’s view, was perhaps how every child came into the world.

For him, the “Seventh Hospital” was a microcosm of this world, with all kinds of strange patients, doctors and nurses in snow-white uniforms – they were the normal components of this world.

Therefore, it wasn’t until he was four or five years old and sent to kindergarten that Bai Yi discovered that the world wasn’t actually like this – in the eyes of the public, the place where he had grown up was actually an abnormal deviation from the norm. He had always been different from other children.

For adults, even if they had never been to a “mental hospital,” just mentioning it would evoke chaotic, disorderly, and various negative evaluations.

But babies come into this world with a blank slate. Good and evil, black and white, normal and chaotic are indistinguishable in their eyes. They are probably the ones who can view all things most equally.

If you tell a baby from the beginning that fish fly in the sky, they wouldn’t be surprised and would naturally accept this as common knowledge. Although the director and the medical staff tried to isolate Bai Yi from the patients, his innate gift of sensing the rhythms of all things instinctively allowed him to acquire too much “common knowledge” from the patients.

When Bai Yi first left the Seventh Hospital, his “home,” and entered the new environment of the outside world, using what he believed to be “common knowledge” to communicate with other children, the discrepancies between their understanding of the world and “common knowledge” quickly made him “abnormal” in others’ eyes to a certain extent.

It was then that the old hospital director realized that Bai Yi, whom they thought had been isolated in a safe zone, had still been unconsciously influenced by the patients. The Seventh Hospital, as a growing environment, had greatly hindered the child’s ability to establish correct perceptions consistent with the outside world.

Under the old director’s forceful correction, Bai Yi finally understood what was incorrect “common knowledge” and what was correct “common knowledge,” what behaviors were appropriate for a normal child and which were not. He imitated the normal children in kindergarten and quickly integrated into this “normal” world.

But the influence brought by his gift troubled him constantly. When he was in the noisy kindergarten, he “saw” the simple yet intense emotions from the surrounding children, like splashes of colorful paint all around. On the way home, he passively sensed the thoughts of passersby, bright or gloomy, passionate or turbid. In the familiar Seventh Hospital, he habitually listened to the ever-changing, chaotic mental fluctuations from the entire hospital... All of this reminded Bai Yi that he was still “abnormal.”

He not only didn’t fit into the normal world outside, but even in the Seventh Hospital, a world considered abnormal by outsiders, he was still the “abnormal” one that didn’t fit in.

So, he had to pretend to be even more “normal.”

This was simple.

Excellent grades and appearance, along with a well-behaved personality, made Bai Yi a good student in the eyes of teachers from an early age. Although some complications caused by long-term insomnia made this good student seem not well-adapted to the noisy school environment, preferring quiet solitude, and long-term exposure to noisy environments would negatively affect his mental state... For every teacher who received similar diagnoses from psychologists or medical institutions, whether in elementary school, middle school, or high school, it was only natural to feel pity and care for this obedient and well-behaved student, constantly reducing pressure on him and often indulging his requests for leave.

Growing up in the Seventh Hospital and experiencing a wide variety of patients gave Bai Yi a clear understanding of what kind of behavior would lead psychologists to make the diagnoses he wanted.

He used this method to carve out an alternative “quiet place” for himself in this “normal” world filled with chaos, noise, and pollution. When he needed to, he could temporarily distance himself from all of this and find solitude in a place where no one could find him.

The only connection to this world that he couldn’t sever was his mother, Bai Xin, who had been a long-term resident in the depths of the Seventh Hospital.

Undoubtedly, Bai Xin, with her delusional symptoms, must have firmly believed in the things he had told her. Perhaps she even saw him as a protagonist with superpowers like in novels, which would explain why her way of looking at the world and at him was so special.

This was what Bai Yi had always thought.

It wasn’t until the Nightmare Game system descended that too many overlooked details emerged, and he suddenly realized that perhaps he had missed something, that there were still secrets about Bai Xin that he hadn’t uncovered.

As for whether or not to uncover the truth, Bai Yi was indifferent at heart. But since the system’s arrival, the hints it had given at certain moments were undoubtedly guiding him towards uncovering the truth.

So, what harm was there in going along with it once?

He had already determined that he was the creator of this game system. And in this world, there was no one more trustworthy than himself.

Casting aside his many doubts, Bai Yi met with the old hospital director as pre-arranged and obtained from him all of Bai Xin’s medical records from nearly thirty years ago, after her admission to the hospital.

Rustle, rustle.

Amidst the sound of flipping through medical records, the old director rambled on. “This child seemed to like reading from a young age. When she was at the orphanage, she liked to carry fairy tale books around every day, often believing the stories to be real. Later, she began telling her own fairy tales to the children at the orphanage. They say her stories were particularly vivid, and the children loved listening to them. The teachers at the orphanage even thought she had a talent for storytelling... But later, everyone realized something was wrong.”

“...She started believing her own stories were real.”

“...She treated the characters in those stories as her good friends. No, I should say, she treated the entire world in the stories as her friend. She began to become neurotic, constantly saying that her friends were dying, that something bad was happening, that the world in the stories was about to be destroyed. She begged every child, every teacher, every volunteer at the orphanage for help, asking them to save her friends, to save those worlds that were about to be destroyed.”

“It wasn’t until then that the orphanage realized something was wrong and sent her here for diagnosis, but it was already too late.”

Bai Yi silently flipped through the medical records, listening to the old director’s narrative with split attention. The director’s summary basically matched what was written in the records, only the records were more detailed and specific.

The familiar font of the system began to appear in midair.

[Obtained 1 important clue for the special reality task.]

[Special reality task has been triggered.]

Bai Yi blinked gently, lost in thought.

He recalled that deep sea like thick ink, the star fragments densely filling the deep sea, and that lone suspended star...

“Perhaps, everything she said was true. She was really... begging for help for her friends?”

A fleeting image of his mother’s pale face on the childhood sickbed flashed by, followed by those eyes that shone brightly with hope when looking at him. He seemed to understand his mother’s expectations of him for the first time.

An emotion he had never felt before slowly emerged in his heart, and for the first time, Bai Yi had a thought of wanting to achieve a certain goal.

“...Am I the savior she’s been waiting for?”

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