Days as a Spiritual Mentor in American Comics

Now, a quite awkward situation has arisen.

Shiller and Strange deliberately refrained from taking actions, seemingly triggering a certain death ending, but neither of them died. The havoc wreaked to fulfill the death ending has made it impossible for the game to proceed smoothly.

The nurse, apparently, had never encountered wooden monsters bursting out of metal ducts, and yet failing to successfully kill the doctor. The key issue was that not only did they not kill him, but they were also lively and well, both physically and mentally, still concerned about their work.

You'd say they're strong since they inexplicably stopped playing by the rules; you'd say they're weak since they perfectly bore the consequences of not playing by the rules and even survived.

After being frozen for a while, the nurse just left a message saying, "I'll go take a look," and left.

By this time, the sky had completely darkened, and it was about time to rest. The evening bell rang, and Shiller and Strange sat in front of the fireplace again, stuffing the limbs of the wooden monster into it.

Shiller observed the environment of the operating room and found that the lighting was much dimmer than when they arrived, but the fireplace seemed unaffected, still shining with bright and warm light.

"Don't forget to pick up the item before you fall asleep," Shiller handed a jar containing fingernails to Strange, then said, "We can verify our guess and see if this thing can bear the punishment for us."

Strange nodded. Although he was a bit averse to other people's body parts, being nailed was not a pleasant experience, and he certainly did not want to go through it again.

Shiller pondered over every detail in the dream from yesterday. He remembered being secured in a metallic chair, but the chair's armrests were made of metal supports and wood, and the shackles were not particularly tight. If he could file a small piece of the wood away, perhaps there might be a chance to escape.

But that also depended on the game allowing him to control his body. If it was just an observer's point of view throughout, then there was certainly no chance.

But Shiller felt that if it was just about experiencing the child's pain as an observer, there was no need to take the form of dreaming, a random illusion would suffice. Given how immersive it was, there must be a certain degree of freedom.

The two lay on the chairs in front of the fireplace and quickly drifted into dreams one after another.

Unexpectedly, this time Shiller's perspective was not that of the child, but of a woman who kept traveling through the dark corridors, muttering "Henry... Henry..."

Her voice had a cry to it, sounding somewhat pitiful. But Shiller focused on observing the environmental details in her line of sight.

Because it was so dark, he could not make out the specific details of the structure, but through the footstep sounds of walking on the ground and the woman's fingers brushing against the wall, it could be inferred that the floor and walls here were not wooden, but more likely made of bricks.

Suddenly, some noise came from the end of the darkness, as if some massive creature was gushing forth.

The woman stopped her steps in panic, then started running back rapidly. After a while, as the noise gradually faded away, she thought she was safe.

But when she looked up, she saw a faint light appearing at the end of the corridor. A small figure stood there.

With a whoosh, flames began to spread crazily from where the figure was standing, all the way to where the woman was. She screamed and backed away, only to find that a wall had unexpectedly formed behind her.

A very classic horror movie scene, Shiller commented internally, yet he was not just there for the spectacle.

When the flames brightened up, he noticed that the little boy standing at the end of the corridor was not a ghost, but more like a charred corpse.

And the faint light at where he stood was not shining through a window. Shiller saw giant gears turning, their interlocking gaps letting through weak light, appearing to be the internal structure of the Bell Tower.

The woman was consumed by the flames, but this time Shiller did not feel any pain, as if it was just a simple transitional animation without shared sensation.

But it makes sense, being burned to death is one of the most brutal ways to die. Moreover, such magic flames without smoke wouldn't suffocate a person, but rather bake them alive, which is extraordinarily agonizing to endure.

If the player had to experience such pain, perhaps they would just quit the game outright.

And then the dream hadn't yet ended. He was back to the boy's perspective, as if everything just now was his memory.

Metal pliers again spread into Shiller's mouth. At this moment, Shiller realized that he had grabbed onto a tooth and pulled it out. Shiller did not feel any pain, and then the tooth was extracted.

Shiller squinted and looked closely, noticing that the tooth clamped in the pliers was precisely the one he had acquired in the operating room.

This thing really is used to take the place of death.

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The same was true for Strange. However, he didn't see an interstitial scene about a woman; instead, he appeared on an earlier timeline, just after the nail of his big toe had been pulled out.

Strange looked down at his bleeding foot, while those people prepared to pull out the second toenail. Strangely enough, when the second toenail was pulled out, Strange didn't feel any pain. He looked down, and the nail on his second toe was still there.

The crowd noticed this anomaly and took a few steps back. Someone in the crowd shouted, "Witch! She's a witch!"

Strange rolled his eyes—come on, you're in a world set with magic, and you're still witch hunting?

Then he became puzzled. In their world, where there are Octopus Men and Bird-Men, these people don't bother with them but instead gather together to make life difficult for a little girl who at least looks human. Is that reasonable?

Strange felt something was wrong, but his body was not under his control. Unable to manipulate the character, he could only silently observe and try to figure out what these people were up to.

On Shiller's side, the pliers meant to pull out his teeth disappeared, leaving him alone in this hellish place, and still, he could not control his body, forced to just watch helplessly.

For Shiller, this was quite a boring dream sequence. He thought there would be some sort of escape room element, but clearly it wasn't the case here. Or maybe they failed to trigger certain conditions, hence the plot could not advance.

Was it because they didn't heal enough patients?

If the number of people healed was a condition for progress, they probably could never fulfill it in this lifetime.

The flow of time in dreams is uncertain. Shiller silently counted seconds in his mind; it had been about half an hour when the door of the cell was unexpectedly pushed open.

This time, the person who came in was not pliers or the like, but a Plague Doctor wearing a black robe and a beaked mask, carrying a bloody pair of pliers, seemingly the same one that had flown away.

Shiller was totally focused, wanting to see what would happen next in the plot. However, as the Bird-Man Doctor approached, the little boy struggled in fear, crying and screaming incessantly, and suddenly Shiller woke up from the dream.

Strange woke up earlier than him and was writing something on parchment; it seemed he was recording some details he saw in the dream.

The two recounted what they saw in their respective dreams. Strange frowned and said, "Clearly, something's not right."

Shiller was also surprised to hear that Strange's side seemed to involve some witch-hunt background. The setting of their world was the coexistence of magic and Steampunk technology; magic wasn't something lofty, even some races are born with it.

Although the human race is not a race born with magic, they can learn it through training and encounter magic frequently in daily life. Magic is a routine part of their existence. Witches would not be something rare, so what witch are they hunting?

"Could it be that this isn't the real world?" Strange proposed a possibility, adding, "So far, the only environment we've been exposed to is this hospital room. The corridors are inaccessible, and the consulting rooms are connected to the wards by passageways; we can't see the specific situation. I've felt this was odd before."

"You mean we might exist in someone's consciousness world? And because he only knows about this hospital room, the consciousness world can only present this room? Everything outside is unexplored because he has never been there?"

"It's not impossible," Strange continued to speculate, saying, "Of course, it's also possible that the game system is too lazy to create maps, so they concocted the story in this direction."

When it comes to the world of consciousness, it is naturally Shiller's area of expertise. He said, "If we think in this way, what we see now is not what it appears to be on the surface."

"The owner of the consciousness world only has this hospital room in his mind. In psychological terms, there are two possibilities. Either his psyche has been severely traumatized, memories completely shattered, retaining only this one fragment—the hospital room."

"Or as you suggested, the owner of the consciousness world has always been here since the start of his memories, never leaving, and thus unaware of what the outside world is like. The consciousness world naturally presents nothing more than a hospital room."

"If it's the latter, then the person must have been brought here at a very young age, no older than when their memory formation began. Otherwise, there would at least be some impression of the consulting room and corridor. As long as there is an impression, combined with some imagination, it would not be a complete void."

"And if the person was brought here very young and has never left, then he might be suffering from a serious illness, taken to the hospital for treatment, bedridden, and the consciousness world naturally only has such a small area, with contact limited to just a few people."

"Wait, what roles are we playing?" Strange asked.

"Of course, the incompetent doctors—uh, I mean doctors—who are treating him," Shiller said, "I believe, the owner of the consciousness world cannot be a modern person. Apart from the non-modern style of the ward, today's hospitals wouldn't just leave a sick child in one ward; at the very least they'll be rushed to various examination rooms. Even if the child is young, there will be some impression."

"It's only in times of underdeveloped medical care that children with strange illnesses would be left in a ward ongoingly; seemingly under treatment, but actually waiting for death."

"I also saw the Plague Doctor with a beak mask in the dream. This suggests, if there is a real world at all, that the owner of the consciousness world living in it may be a sick child from the Middle Ages during the outbreak of the Black Death."