Published at 8th of October 2024 3:10 am

Chapter 1351: Banging Heads Against the Sky

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When Deng Yilan was in elementary school, the teacher described a girl in her class as ‘naturally rebellious.’

That girl was quite pretty, with big eyes and always unkempt hair. Whenever the class lined up according to head size to go to the cafeteria, she always found an excuse to disappear, claiming she needed to use the restroom. During class, she would lower her head and doodle in her textbooks, criticizing the school education as force-feeding; if she had to participate in group activities, she seemed tortured. Deng Yilan observed her throughout elementary school and heard her repeat countless times: “Why? I don’t want to. Are my thoughts not important?”

“Just you wait and watch.”

When Deng Yilan, as a group leader, went to the office to submit assignments, a middle-aged female teacher said to other teachers, “She’s still young, with such a strong sense of self, so free-spirited. She’ll suffer for it in the future!”

The tone sounded like she couldn’t wait to see the girl regretting her actions.

Was having a strong sense of self a bad thing?

Deng Yilan always felt that she and that girl were completely different people. She must be good if having a strong sense of self was terrible. She would cry at the slightest criticism from teachers, never tardy to class, and obediently followed her parents’ instructions as a cashier—until one day, she suddenly heard herself yelling loudly, “But I don’t want to!”

In an instant, it was as if she had been thrown back over twenty years, back to that stuffy afternoon in the classroom. That girl, whose hair was always messy, was being sent outside to stand as punishment while crying.

She didn’t have time to overthink. The first sentence resounded in the room, followed by a flood of words like a tide: “Even if I’m sick, even if I think there are two suns in the sky, I don’t want to be locked up. What right do you have to restrict my personal freedom?”

The male doctor held his clipboard and looked at her. He didn’t say the words ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to,’ but they echoed loudly in the room.

“If you say I have a tendency to harm others, a tendency to commit suicide, and need protection, fine, you can assess me. But I don’t have these tendencies. Any proper psychiatrist would come to the same conclusion. I don’t harm others or myself, so why are you locking me up? Why? Just because someone casually says someone is mentally ill, and regardless of whether they agree or not, they’re sent to the hospital, and they’ll never see the light of day again. Isn’t this like something out of a horror movie?”

The male doctor lowered his head, scribbling a few lines on the paper.

Deng Yilan stretched her neck, squinting to read words like ‘manic-depressive,’ ‘impulsive,’ and ‘lack of self-control.’ She almost laughed.

But this was how the world worked. No matter who you were or what skin you wore, if they told you to go, you had to go, and if they told you not to, then you didn’t. Whether it was school teachers, hospital doctors, mall security guards, or neighborhood committee meetings… Deng Yilan’s anger, seen by others, only confirmed to them that she was indeed mentally ill—skipping work, the company paying for her treatment, what a great deal she had found, yet only a mentally ill person would be so resentful and hateful.

She secretly spat out all the medication they gave her. After her parents came to see her and advised her to reflect on her mistakes and get treatment, she decided to let go. Since she couldn’t escape the surveillance of the male nurses, and no one was willing to release her from the hospital, she might as well say whatever she wanted without worrying about the consequences. After all, she was a mental patient.

When faced with doctors assessing her condition, Deng Yilan would say, “You know I’m not sick, so why assess me? Why don’t you assess your own professional ethics?”

When encountering rude nurses, Deng Yilan would say, “Am I not an adult? Am I not capable of making decisions? Do I need you to make decisions for me?”

A month ago, she might have been frightened by her own actions, but now she felt liberated. Seeing the unpleasant expressions on their faces, she felt incredibly relieved.

However, a nurse quickly shattered her spirits with just one sentence the next day.

“You’re happy, aren’t you?” The tone of the nurse was similar to that of the elementary school teacher, staring at her and smiling, “Your deceased husband has been found to be involved in the museum theft. He didn’t succeed in stealing anything, so he ended up being killed by his own kind. They haven’t caught the culprit yet.”

That day, Deng Yilan couldn’t eat anything, but she vomited twice at night.

In less than a week of being admitted, she began to feel like she might actually be going crazy. There was a patient who kept saying, “They can hear me talking,” “Their eyes are everywhere”; they said he had persecutory delusions— but Deng Yilan felt he made sense.

By the fifth day, getting discharged had become a distant hope. When she thought about it, the outside world had devolved into a dream, feeling incredibly distant. In just a few days, the thirty-plus years she had lived outside became blurred, like a pile of ashes blown away by the wind.

She became much quieter, always staring blankly at one place. It seemed like she wasn’t thinking about anything, yet constantly feeling exhausted.

One day, during lunch, she sat in the cafeteria like the other patients with milder conditions. She stared blankly at her tray when someone walked over and sat opposite her.

It was the silent uncle.

They said he had been in this hospital for a long time, never speaking, and with no violent tendencies. He would take his medication, eat, and sleep on schedule. Over time, everyone in the hospital treated him as if he were part of the furniture, like a table or chair, blending into the background of the hospital.

“Zhang… Uncle Zhang?” She wasn’t entirely sure if she remembered correctly.

“I’m not surnamed Zhang.” This was the first time Deng Yilan heard him speak with a strange accent she couldn’t quite place.

“Oh, sorry—”

“They call me Uncle Zhang because one syllable in my real name sounds similar to Zhang.” He lowered his head and scooped some porridge but didn’t eat it.

“What’s your real name, then?”

After a moment, Uncle Zhang uttered a long string of syllables, strange and unfamiliar, not resembling any language Deng Yilan had heard before. This was indeed a mental hospital with too many paranoid delusions.

“I heard you talking to that nurse yesterday.”

Deng Yilan said, “Oh.” She could not contact the outside world, so she could only talk to the nurses. She repeated her story about the bloodstains in the cabinet corner repeatedly, asking them to follow up for her, but it seemed like no one cared much. If a mental patient mistook paint for blood, was there anything worth making a fuss over?

“So what?”

“You asked a lot of questions, why no one was investigating the bloodstains, and also—”

Uncle Zhang pushed the bowl away, clasped his hands together, and looked up. His eyelids were drooping, covering half of his eyes, yet at that moment, a glint of light suddenly gathered in his eyes, surprising Deng Yilan. “And also, why is no one investigating what the Twelve Worlds is?”

‘Twelve Worlds.’ The words made her heart pound. In that instant, memories of her past life with Han Jun resurfaced like ghosts; something sparkled like a flame about to ignite from that pile of ashes that had not yet been blown away by the wind.

“I know you’re not a posthuman,” Uncle Zhang said. “Where did you hear about the Twelve Worlds from?”

Something flashed in Deng Yilan’s mind, and she leaned forward. “Posthuman? What posthuman?”

“If you answer my question first.”

Deng Yilan stared at him blankly, her whole body covered in goosebumps.

“Are you… are you one of these posthumans?” The question she truly wanted to ask was stuck in her throat—Was Han Jun also a so-called ‘posthuman’?

Uncle Zhang nodded without hesitation.

He looked like a normal person, but that didn’t mean anything. Many mental patients, when not experiencing symptoms, seemed completely normal.

Seeing her hesitation, Uncle Zhang suddenly smiled, “Do you think you’re the first normal person to be locked up here?”

Deng Yilan opened her mouth, but her defenses were shattered by his following words. “They’re trying to pin a mental illness label on you forcefully. Are you going to do the same to me?”

Of course, she wasn’t.

Han Jun’s hastily spoken words about his advertisement with someone named Lin Sanjiu were soon finished. Uncle Zhang’s face suddenly had color and vitality upon hearing that someone was recruiting companions to return to the Twelve Worlds, like a terminally ill person hearing about a medical breakthrough. Yet his inquiries about other matters nearly caused Deng Yilan to lose control several times. If going mad could make her forget the injustice that happened to Han Jun and forget the injustice that happened to herself, then what’s the harm in going mad?

“He’s naive.”

After she finished speaking, Uncle Zhang made a soft hum. “He feels the restriction of being watched but hasn’t realized the risk of escaping… no wonder he ended up like this.”

“If you keep talking like this, I won’t talk to you anymore,” Deng Yilan said.

Uncle Zhang laughed, and passing doctors and nurses, all ignored them. “You’re quite something, pretty girl. Despite being a normal person, you have some spirit.”

“What exactly is a posthuman? Han Jun is one, right?”

She didn’t expect Uncle Zhang’s answer to bring her a shock that far exceeded reality.

Uncle Zhang’s words were too bizarre, too unscientific. She couldn’t say they didn’t seem like something a delusional patient would hallucinate after seeing the phrase ‘Twelve Worlds.’ Her mind was filled with doomsday thoughts, and she couldn’t even hear Uncle Zhang’s last sentence clearly: “If I could find them… perhaps they would be willing to let me follow them.”

It wasn’t until the middle of the night that day when she couldn’t sleep and was tossing and turning, that she suddenly thought of this sentence and sat up in shock.

Deep down, she still didn’t quite believe in things like doomsday, as it was a common delusion among mental patients. Regardless of what Uncle Zhang was, he made his intentions very clear: he wanted to leave this place.

Deng Yilan didn’t want to go to Twelve Worlds with him, just like she wouldn’t want to step on a rainbow bridge to see what was at the rainbow’s end. After all, she wasn’t really crazy. But she did want to escape from this mental hospital. What she would do after getting out, she didn’t know. However, she felt like every direction was blocked by invisible boulders, and forces from all directions prevented her from moving forward. She wanted to find a way to give Han Jun some justice.

Even if Han Jun was involved in the museum theft, did that mean he deserved to die? Did his death mean nothing?

She had heard someone say a sentence before, “The sky looks high, but if you jump a little, you’ll bump your head.” But she was stubborn. Before she was beaten to the point of bleeding, she wanted to keep jumping, keep banging her head against the sky, and see just how hard it really was.

Because, in the end, justice had to be served.

The next day, Deng Yilan stopped Uncle Zhang in the courtyard.

“Let’s escape together,” she whispered.

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