IWOL Chapter 219: Lunatic Asylum

A man and a woman were sitting around the fire, having a conversation:

Man: Madam, if I am not mistaken, I seem to have seen you somewhere.

Woman: Me too, Sir, I seem to have seen you somewhere.

Man: Madam, did I happen to see you in Manchester?

Woman: This is very possible. I am from Manchester! I don’t remember very clearly, Sir. I dare not say if I saw you there.

Man: Oh my god! This is weird! I am from Manchester too, Madam!

Woman: This is too strange!

Man: This is too strange! However, me, Madam, I have been away from Manchester for almost five weeks.

Woman: This is too strange! What a coincidence! Me too, Sir, I have been away from Manchester for almost five weeks.

Man: Madam, I took the train at 8:30 in the morning and arrived in London at about five.

Woman: This is too strange! What a strange coincidence! I took this train too! Sir!

Cui Zuojing listened from the side for a while, his head full of “Sir and Madam, this is too strange. This is too strange. How can there be such a coincidence…?” As he listened, the veins in his temple throbbed. It appeared that both parties had no intention of stopping. They talked about the train they took and where they lived after they arrived in London.

This was exactly the dialogue that mental patients would have. Even though Cui Zuojing had been listening to them for a while, no one in the lounge paid attention to him, as if they couldn’t see him at all. Cui Zuojing walked over to the man talking to the radio and reached out to take it away.

The man’s eyes followed the radio and finally saw the young man who’d picked it up. He said “Oh,” then his voice paused and he added, “Do you know that in three months, the sun will explode at noontime?”

“….” Having determined that the reason no one looked at him wasn’t because he was a ghost, Cui Zuojing put the radio back to its original place and said, “It has nothing to do with me.”

Cui Zuojing turned and left the lounge. The conversation between the man and the woman continued, and it was unclear what conclusion they would draw in the end.

As he walked down the hallway, he met a blonde nurse. She saw Cui Zuojing, stopped, and said, “It’s almost time. Go to the dining hall.”

Cui Zuojing didn’t have time to find out where the dining hall was before the nurse continued on into the lounge to call the other patients.

Soon, the boy who was painting took the lead to come out. He passed by Cui Zuojing, and this time Cui Zuojing saw his face clearly. His eyes were as blank as a walking dead, and his forehead had a flat suture scar, as if a knife had cut a straight line into it.

Cui Zuojing followed him, turned left, then turned right, and reached the dining hall smoothly.

There were already many people in the dining hall. Men and women in hospital gowns were sitting at the long table in various poses, reaching out for food of clear, watery soup.

Everyone’s spoons were made of wood and was clearly meant to prevent the mentally ill patients from turning it into a murder weapon. Judging from the decorations on the walls in the room, this was a lunatic asylum in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.

According to Cui Zuojing’s interpretation, the European lunatic asylum was originally used to detain the poor, the homeless and the mentally ill. The harsh living environment and the unlimited claustrophobia gave many people who were originally sane endless despair and morphed them into insanity. With the development of the times and the gradual deepening of human understanding of mental diseases, lunatic asylums gradually became a hospital.

Of course, despite breaking away from such a deformed system, lunatic asylums were still terrifying until corresponding regulations were enacted.

Cui Zuojing also disguised himself as a patient and sat down in a random place. He pretended to drink the rice porridge with floating green cabbage leaves, which looked dull and tasteless.

He had no intention of actually eating, but a nurse noticed him and seemed to have discovered that something was wrong. She frowned, stared at Cui Zuojing’s face for a long time, and went into the kitchen.

Cui Zuojing didn’t pay attention to her and instead focused on the various noises and actions around him. The person next to him was holding a spoon and trying to pour soup into the nostrils of the patient on the opposite side. Another person had torn her bread into the shape of a male sexual organ and was using it to hit the face of the woman sitting next to her. The woman screamed and pushed her down, and the two people grappled into a ball.

Cui Zuojing watched with interest as the two women tore at each other’s clothes and hair.
Three nurses rushed over to pull them apart and poke needles into the patients’ arms. Soon, they calmed down.

It was tranquilizer.

At this time, Cui Zuojing felt his shoulder being tapped.

He turned his head and saw that there was a man in a white coat behind him. The man wore gold-rimmed glasses, and every pore on his body exuded the message “I am the doctor here.”

Cui Zuojing: “?”

The young man asked politely with his eyes.

The doctor said, “Mr. Lane, please come with me. I need to do some tests.”

“Okay.” It happened that Cui Zuojing didn’t want to stay in the dining hall. It was too loud and noisy. Hiding the spoon in his cuff, he got up and followed the doctor.

When they left the dining hall, a female nurse and another male nurse followed behind them. The male nurse was a full nine meters tall and looked very strong. Cui Zuojing didn’t doubt that he handled the matters here with his fists, using brute strengths to send patients flying.

The male nurse was watching Cui Zuojing, but he didn’t mind. The small spoon in his sleeves emboldened him. If there were some fantastical development, the spoon would surely help him when contending with these three people.

The hospital was quite big. Outside the dining hall was an activity room and a restroom. Within the timeframe allowed by regulations, if a patient’s performance was stable and appeared to be of no threats to others, they could move about under the watchful eyes of a nurse. The men’s and women’s restrooms seemed to be closed at this time for cleaning.

Although he’d only seen one doctor so far, judging from the number of nurses and patients, this should be a very famous lunatic asylum; otherwise it wouldn’t be this large.

Cui Zuojing was taken to the second floor. He thought the doctor would take him into his office for an examination, but he didn’t expect the doctor to pass by the door of the office and continue walking.

Cui Zuojing didn’t say a word; he wanted to know what these people were up to.

He was taken to the door of a closed room. The doctor stopped and took out the key but didn’t immediately open the lock. He turned around, his eyes behind the lens were extremely calm, and he asked Cui Zuojing, “How have you been feeling about the situation recently?”

“It’s okay,” Cui Zuojing replied. The fact that he woke up in a confinement room and was tied up with a restraint belt indicated that he was very violent. But he was a mentally ill patient. Even if he said something wrong, it didn’t matter.

The doctor nodded. He smiled at Cui Zuojing, then his eyes moved up and made brief contact with the male nurse behind the young man. He said, “Do you remember Merl?”

“Who?” Of course Cui Zuojing didn’t remember.

“You severely injured her and she died of infection after her operation.” The flash of surprise on Cui Zuojing’s face didn’t escape the doctor’s notice. “Joshua, Emery, Ada, do you remember these people? Do you?”

Cui Zuojing shook his head. The doctor turned back, inserted the key into the keyhole, and opened the door with a soft click.

This was an operating room.

At the moment when Cui Zuojing’s retina showed the furnishings in the room, the male nurse suddenly hugged him from behind, nearly strangling him. Cui Zuojing could almost hear the sound of his ribs being squeezed. The terrifying force instantly made him unable to do even the simplest action of breathing.

If it was an ordinary person, he would have lost the strength to resist. But this was Cui Zuojing. He sensed the nurse’s intentions the moment before he acted, but he didn’t avoid it. If they wanted to imprison him, then he would allow himself to be imprisoned.

He wanted to see what these people were going to do.

Cui Zuojing’s body was not intuitively strong. He pretended to struggle hard as the male nurse dragged him into the operating room. The female nurse followed quickly and closed the door behind her.

“You used a spoon to dig out Joshua’s eyes. You tricked Emery into jumping off the third floor, and he ended up breaking one of his legs. And you instigated Ada into committing suicide.”

The doctor picked up the syringe he’d already prepared from the table. Cui Zuojing had visited the operating room with Lin Hangzhi and Victor. The moment he saw all the equipment, he understood that they were going to perform the operation immediately. Whatever was in the needle was likely anesthetic.

What surgery would be performed? The answer was simple.

In just a hundred years, modern medicine had already developed by leaps and bounds. But in the past, doctors were truly at a loss when faced with many diseases, such as syphilis, tuberculosis, and the black death. The same held true for mental disorders.

However, some people conduct experiments and discovered a surgical method for the treatment of mental illness—

Prefrontal lobe resection.

The prefrontal lobe controls complex cognitive behaviors, personality expressions, and decision-makings. When it was removed, people would lose their physical personality and physical functions. The operation turned them into something almost like a walking dead but also made them an extremely well-behaved patient. Of course, it was only natural that doctors preferred the latter sort of patients so they were perfectly happy with treating patients in this way.

Even Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of former U.S. President Kennedy and someone suffering from epilepsy and emotional disorders, was once sent to the operating table by her father to undergo prefrontal lobe resection.

After that, she spent the rest of her life as a fool with low intelligence and the inability to speak.

As for Cui Zuojing, as an extremely dangerous child with a serious tendency to violence who’d directly or indirectly harmed four people, the doctor most desperately wanted to turn him honest.

But how could this be possible?

The male nurse’s strength was indeed very strong. If it was purely relying on brute force, Cui Zuojing would have a hard time breaking free since he had little strength. But the person who ruled was―

When the doctor was about to stab the needle into Cui Zuojing’s arm, the spoon that he’d hidden in his sleeve slipped into his hand. Cui Zuojing gently moved his fingers, added a bit of his strength, and the spoon instantly pierced the male nurse’s waist, puncturing a bloodied hole.

“Ahhh!” the male nurse screamed. He subconsciously wanted to look down at the wound and ended up relaxing the strength in his arms. Cui Zuojing slammed his feet into his shoes, took advantage of his momentary lapse in strength, and broke free from his arms.

Everything happened in the blink of an eye. The doctor’s hand in mid-air still hadn’t completely fallen. The female nurse’s eyes widened and she opened her mouth to scream. But before she could scream, Cui Zuojing grabbed the doctor’s wrist, and within a second, forced the needle into the male nurse’s arm.

Everyone was caught unprepared. Cui Zuojing raised his leg and kicked the doctor with great force. Then he pushed the screaming nurse away into the path of the male nurse who was rushing toward him. He tore the door open and rushed out in the blink of an eye.