mtl008 Chapter 4515 The Darkest Night (43)
Chapter 4515 The Darkest Night (43)
Chapter 4515 The Darkest Night (Forty-Three)
“You mean, you want to go into her memories?” Jonathan Klein sat behind the table, tapping his fingers lightly on the surface, and said, “You should know very well how dangerous this is, Schiller. This isn’t the kind of treatment you get from some obese, middle-aged arms dealer who’s booked a Saturday afternoon to recount his unrequited love story.”
Victor frowned. What kind of cases do these psychiatrists usually handle?
“I don’t need you to remind me, Professor Klein.” Schiller sat opposite him, his hands resting on the armrests. “Since I proposed this plan, I naturally have every reason to be confident.”
“I’d love to hear what makes you so confident,” Jonathan scoffed. “Even God wouldn’t dare say he’s absolutely certain of success in something like this.”
“God has never been able to stop me, not before, and not this time either.” Schiller’s tone was icy.
“Alright, since you’ve made up your mind, there’s no need for me to try to dissuade you. Let’s talk about Novi.” Jonathan became excited. “The mastermind behind their resurrection must have tampered with their mental realm. But how they did it, nobody knows. Even to figure that out, we need to find another test subject.”
“No,” Schiller shook his head and said, “I will go directly into Novi’s mental world.”
“Oh my god, I never knew you were such a radical person. Your treatment plan wouldn’t be approved at any hospital,” Jonathan said. He then looked at Brand, who had remained silent.
“Don’t look at me, I specialize in neuroscience and pathology,” Brand said. “I’m skeptical about the existence of the so-called mental realm.”
"What do you think?" Schiller insisted on asking him.
Brand pulled out a stack of documents and said, "The brain imaging data doesn't show anything wrong. No regular lesions were found in the brains of these zombies."
"What about brainwave activity?" Jonathan also looked at the pile of documents.
“No obvious abnormalities were found.” Brand projected the images onto the screen and said, “I considered pituitary gland lesions. Because you told me that zombies have the ability to actively induce and gain tremendous power. This could be due to the pituitary gland secreting some kind of special hormone. But the test results didn’t reveal anything.”
“However, I still think Novi’s situation is very special.” Brand changed the subject and said, “I think this may be the key to Hugo being able to break through the control of the mastermind behind the scenes and carry out special brainwashing on her.”
"What is it?"
“She is very weak.” Brand took out a physical examination report and said, “Although no autopsy has been performed, after examining her physical condition, the doctors all believe that her cardiopulmonary function has reached a critical point. To put it bluntly, given her physical condition, she should have already lost her normal mobility due to insufficient blood supply to the heart. But the fact that she can move freely now is abnormal in itself.”
“Let’s assume that the mastermind distributes the same amount of power to everyone, and doesn’t give more to someone just because they’re particularly weak. In that case, it’s very likely that this power won’t be enough to wake Novi up.”
Schiller frowned. He could roughly understand what Brand meant. Although he wasn't entirely clear on the specific principles behind the power of death resurrecting others, no matter how gruesome their death, they were always alive and kicking afterward.
For example, Cyborg Victor's mother was in a serious car accident and couldn't even be buried properly; the mortician couldn't find a good solution. But when she returned, she was still a whole person.
This means that the power of death certainly didn't reset them to the moment before they died. Otherwise, everyone would be injured, and some might not even be recognizable as human.
He must have moved the timeline forward, restoring the resurrected individuals to a period when they were in better physical condition. And since the resurrected people appear to be close to their age at death, it's possible that they chose a time around their death when they were in peak physical condition for their resurrection.
However, Novi had a problem. Her health had never been good since birth; both at the time of her death and before, her body was in a semi-dead state. She was probably even very weak at birth.
In this situation, if the mastermind doesn't provide enough death power, the resurrection might fail. Novi is like a damp piece of firewood; you can't light it with a match, you'd need at least a flamethrower.
However, Novi still woke up. This was abnormal in itself. Brand was analyzing this point, saying, "I suspect that during the resurrection process, the body actively allocates the power of death, choosing the option most likely to result in waking up, to revive the corpse."
“That’s absurd,” Victor said. “A corpse actively harnessing the power of death?”
“It’s not surprising,” Brand said. “You may have heard the argument that after a person is beheaded, they will still be conscious for a period of time, and they will have eye movements and make expressions.”
"Isn't that a muscle reflex?" Victor frowned.
“Not entirely,” Brand said. “The brain doesn’t shut down the instant the power supply is cut off. The process is usually delayed. And the standard for that delay depends on when the brain realizes it is dead.”
"That sounds a bit idealistic." Victor clearly didn't understand this aspect.
"That's true. Human consciousness has a much stronger control over the human body than people imagine. Even the brain is like that. So I think that when it was discovered that the power of death was not enough to revive the corpse, that is, when Novi was in a state of being half alive and half dead, her brain actively allocated the power of death to power itself, and then, with extremely strong willpower, she woke up."
Schiller listened attentively, and after thinking carefully for a moment, said, "You mean that the power of death is likely concentrated in her brain?"
"Yes. This means that entering her mental realm will be more dangerous than previously thought. Most importantly, you cannot dispel the power of death during the process of breaking her hypnosis, otherwise, she may revert to a corpse."
“This is troublesome.” Jonathan said with a hint of schadenfreude. “If only her brain is alive right now, you can’t even give her anesthesia. Because once her brain stops working, it may never be able to be restarted.”
"Even chemical methods are useless?" Schiller asked, looking at him.
Jonathan paused, seemingly surprised by the question. He turned and grabbed a piece of paper, starting to scribble and draw. Victor leaned over to look, only to be glared at by Jonathan.
"What are you doing? I'm not going to steal your recipe."
"Tch, as if you could have stolen it," Jonathan scoffed. "I just don't want you pointing fingers at my brilliant design with your ice-cold brain. Get lost!"
Victor immediately reached for his gun, but after thinking about it, he refrained from doing so. Jonathan scribbled and drew for a long time, then slammed his hand on the table, paused for a long moment before finally saying, "I have an idea, but it might not work. But if it does, it will be a huge success..."
"Just tell me already," Victor rolled his eyes.
“Don’t panic, you can’t escape either,” Jonathan said. “First, to prevent her body from dying, we need to freeze her. That means using your cold, hard brain to freeze your wife…”
Victor's eyes widened as he asked, "Freeze it?"
"That's right. Wasn't your wife also very ill back then?"
“Who told you that?” Victor said. “Nora only had a rare degenerative disease at that time. If left untreated, it could be life-threatening. But she wasn’t at the point of near death yet. I wouldn’t wait until then to take action.”
"But you do have that technology, right?"
“I’m just saying that their situations are different and can’t be generalized. Besides, after being frozen, the brain also operates at a low temperature, and brainwave activity is reduced to a minimum. How can you be sure that her mental domain won’t be shut down as a result?”
“This is my domain,” Jonathan said. “Before she’s frozen, I use my fear gas to bring her brain to a state of extreme arousal, and then I use freezing to cool her down. This will keep her brainwaves within a relatively flat and controllable range.”
“But what’s the point?” Victor said. “The difficulty now is that Schiller’s activities in her brain could lead to a mental breakdown and brain death. And brain death means physical death. Because her body is already too weak to survive. And this situation won’t change under hypothermia.”
“No, no, no,” Jonathan said. “It’s still possible for things to change. What’s the principle behind your cryogenic technology for preserving the human body?”
"When the human body is in a low-temperature state, its energy consumption is reduced to a minimum, entering a near-death dormant state. This can almost indefinitely prolong the body's deterioration process..."
“That’s right.” Jonathan tapped the table and said, “With power consumption reduced to a minimum, her weak cardiopulmonary function won’t be a problem. At this point, the brain can potentially release the death energy concentrated in the brain area to other areas of the body. Because it detects that there is enough energy. The corpse can truly be resurrected without the need for willpower to control it.”
Everyone looked at Brand. Brand thought for a long time before saying, "That is indeed possible. But we can't be sure whether it's brain control or the power of death controlling it."
"How to say?"
"Although I believe that accumulating the power of death is a voluntary action of the brain, I cannot rule out the possibility that the power of death, after discovering that reviving the body is useless, actively enters the brain and focuses on strengthening the will."
“What’s the difference between the two?” Victor asked.
"The difference lies in this. If the power of death truly has the function of automatically optimizing resurrection plans, it means that it is not just a form of energy, but a kind of will. In this case, Schiller cannot enter Novi's mental domain. Otherwise, he might face the mastermind behind it all."
“I think that’s impossible,” Schiller said. “If the power of death had its own will, it wouldn’t have lost so badly in other universes. And if facing the power of death is the same as facing the Black Death Emperor, how did Hugo manage to hypnotize Novi?”
“That’s the problem,” Brand said, leaning back in his chair. “How do you know this isn’t a trap he set for you, designed to lure you into Novi’s mental realm and then make you confront that guy?”
“He’s afraid to face me,” Schiller said coldly. “Otherwise, there would be no need for the living dead to walk around me.”