Split Zone No.13

322 Exclusive Experiment

The mixed race man leaned back in his chair as he crossed his slender legs, his blue eyes looking at me with interest.

"You really can't recall who I am?"

This stunned me.

Who… is he?

He had a handsome face, but I didn't recognize it. It was unfamiliar. I only remembered the part where he was my doctor before I ended up in the Split Zone.

Those eyes…

His eyes did look familiar…

He smiled at me. "Look at my eyes, Li Shen. Think carefully, who am I?" His voice had an enchanting quality to it, and it sounded mesmerizing.

I stared at his face as I listened to his voice. My vision was clear at first, then it blurred before it returned again with a clear view.

My vision was extremely clear now, and I could see that face with extreme clarity.

My throat felt as if it was being held down by a hand.

My lips quivered as I tried to speak in a hoarse voice. His lips seemed to move a little.

"You are…" The words seemed stuck in my throat.

"You are…" I wanted to cry. "Mr Blond…?!" Yes, that's right, he's Mr Blond!

I couldn't fully comprehend this. At the beginning, he was definitely the doctor who was treating me, and only his hair was identical to Mr Blond's, while everything else was different!

But when I made eye contact with him just now, my impression of Mr Blond seemed to turn to dust! There was nothing there!

I couldn't remember and I couldn't recall how Mr Blond looked like at all!

I remembered it eventually, and Mr Blond… he looked exactly like this mixed race doctor! Their faces were an exact copy in the deep recesses of my memory!

But why did I not realize it when I arrived in the Split Zone that Mr Blond's face belonged to this mixed race doctor?

A thought struck me as I looked at the smile on the mixed race doctor's face. Balling up my fists, I stared at him. "So, you actually… hypnotized me?"

The eyes of the mixed race doctor lit up and his lips turned up into a smile. "Looks like you're pretty smart." He then casually looked down at his wristwatch.

"It's only been a minute and thirteen seconds. You realized that this was hypnotism in such a short amount of time after regaining consciousness. That brain is no ordinary one. I seem to have chosen the right person this time."

Though I was praised, my heart felt heavy. This was the only part I could wrap my head around, and I couldn't wrap my head around anything else!

I was impressed with how I had not gone insane by this point, and how I could actually engage in such a calm conversation with him!

As if noticing that I couldn't suppress my emotions for much longer, he snapped a finger in front of me. "Calm down. Listen to me slowly."

Snapping a finger was so effective that it did calm me down wondrously. It felt as if a sturdy rock was placed atop my pounding heart, preventing it from moving too much.

"As you can see, I'm Mr Blond. The ruler of the Split Zone, Mr Blond."

He kept those blue eyes on me as he continued. "What I'm about to tell you might be a huge blow to you, so to prevent any unforeseen events, I can only suppress your emotions and stop you from talking for the time being."

I tried opening my mouth as he said this, but I realized that I wasn't able to speak at all. It isn't like my ability to speak had been taken away. It was a kind of hypnotism where I was temporarily rendered incapable of speech.

"Li Shen, I'm Mr Blond because whatever you had seen in the Split Zone was actually an illusion that I had planted in your brain. You can interpret it as an illusion, but the fact is that it is very different from the illusions you had been through.

"You were covered in blood when you were sent here half a year ago. There was nothing but hopelessness in those eyes of yours. Nobody knew how to help you, and ordinary sedatives couldn't calm you down. Your second personality had burst out of its shell and it manifested as an aggressive lunatic.

"Your family and friends were terrified, and they sought my help as a last resort. At that time, I happened to be involved in a study that looked at deep hypnosis for split personality disorders. Your situation was unique and never-before-seen. You were a great experimental subject, but that experiment was dangerous.

"In your mind, your personality disorder had been suppressed and for many years, it wasn't that serious that it could actually affect your daily life. You thought that even when your friend Pomelo spread the news of your medical diagnosis and you were ostracized, you simply kept to yourself and your second personality did not come out. You thought you had been suppressing it up until you were faced with Gao Qi, when you finally broke and killed him. But all these memories were actually wrong.

"A unique symptom of split personality disorders is that it's difficult to keep the memories of what actually happens when the other personality takes over. It isn't considered amnesia if one cannot keep these memories because it's caused by your subconscious keeping them away from you.

"In fact, your personality disorder had been manifesting itself since you were younger, and there would be times when you engaged in self-harm or suffered from sleepwalking. Your parents haven't been able to find a way to cure you in all these years, and all they could do was to keep an eye on you so that your second personality wouldn't affect your daily life to a large extent. When you entered university, your parents had already met Pomelo before that, and she had been told to take care of you. It was the same in high school

"All of that was selectively forgotten by you. Pomelo wasn't the one who spread the news about your medical diagnosis. You were the one who stuck it on the blackboard yourself.

"But Pomelo cannot tell you the truth when you confronted her about it. She can't tell you about the things that your second personality did, since it wasn't congruent with the truth in your mind. Your subconscious mind kept these things from you, and if the truth were to be revealed, there would be a dichotomy between what you know in your head. The dissimilarity might then agitate you and directly trigger your mental illness.

"To us, triggering your illness would be the worst scenario. It gets triggered when the balance between the two personalities is broken and when you don't have the capacity to handle that unevenness. Once it's triggered, it's extremely difficult for you to regain your awareness.

"Under such circumstances, Pomelo can only take the blame for your subconscious. We then thought of ways to treat you while calming you down at the same time."

He paused at this point, but my brain felt as if it wasn't working anymore.

He then continued. "For a unique case like you, you had the criteria needed for being a subject for my new experiment, and to be honest, I was very excited at that point. Though the experiment had been ongoing for a long time, we were only able to find twelve suitable subjects after doing a search throughout the entire nation. Furthermore, they weren't even perfect subjects for it. When you appeared as the thirteenth subject, all of us on the research team were overjoyed.

"We thus reached out to your parents and your best friend, Pomelo, someone who knew you extremely well and who had been with you through high school and most of your time at university. We discussed this method of treatment with them. At that time, you were already at the very edge of sanity, and Gao Qi's attempted suicide had affected you greatly. Your subconscious mind kept telling yourself that you were the one who killed Gao Qi, that it was that long-suppressed second personality who killed him. Because of that, your hatred for your second personality suddenly increased exponentially.

"You had been lying to yourself that you were suppressing your second personality, and that it would only get triggered if you were agitated, but that wasn't what happened. The truth is that you weren't suppressing it at all. Your second personality had always been by your side the entire time.

"But it was useless explaining all that to you at the time. After you were sent to the hospital, you were basically in an extremely aggressive state where you didn't sleep if you were not sedated, and you sometimes even engaged in self-harm. I'm a doctor, not some sick experimenter who toys with people's lives. Although you checked all the criteria for being a subject, you were still too young to be one, and I was hesitant about it. I tried to think of ways to cure you without having you participate in that experiment.

"But what happened next was scary. I tried to use sedatives to adjust your sleep patterns, but I realized that you were beginning to build immunity against the sedatives. At the very start, the sedative could make you sleep for twelve hours, but it began to lose its effectiveness after a while, where it became effective for only ten hours, then eight. Everyone on the team began to worry that the sedative would no longer be effective for you.

"Everyone was physically and mentally tired because of your case. Your immunity against the sedatives grew stronger and stronger, and your mental state was also getting stronger. You had great strength when you were conscious, but that was you pushing your body to its limits. If that continued up to a certain point, your life would be in danger. This is why everyone had decided that you had to participate in the experiment.

"We thus sent you to the experimental grounds after a treatment plan had been lined out for you." He then smiled. I was feeling a little agitated and emotional as I heard him speak, but that smile calmed me down immediately.