Dragon Raja 4; Chapter 112: Fun at the Mental Hospital (1)

Dragon Raja 4

Lu Mingfei opened his eyes, surrounded by a soft white light. He was in a small room, roughly ten square meters in size, with no windows and a large mirror on one side. The room contained only a desk and two chairs, with Lu Mingfei sitting in one of them. Across from him sat an unfamiliar middle-aged man in a short-sleeved shirt and wearing thin-rimmed glasses.

“You’re awake? How are you feeling? Dizzy?” the man asked gently, jotting something down in the notebook he held.

Lu Mingfei rubbed his forehead. His last memory was sitting on the ground in exhaustion when suddenly there was a loud noise in his head, and he passed out.

“This is a hospital. Your family sent you here for a checkup. I’m the doctor,” the man said, raising his head to gaze at Lu Mingfei. “Don’t be nervous. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

Lu Mingfei glanced around. This place felt nothing like a hospital and more like a police interrogation room, though the air had a soothing, pleasant scent.

“This is a psychiatric hospital, right? Who sent me here? Zhang Facai or Park Jiyu?” Lu Mingfei asked, locking eyes with the doctor and cutting straight to the point.

As a seasoned PTSD patient, Lu Mingfei had once gone to chat with Toyama weekly. His office had a similar style—minimalist to avoid distractions, with carefully designed aromatherapy and lighting to help the patient relax and open up. In terms of experience with mental health, Lu Mingfei figured the doctor in front of him might not even match his own.

The doctor subconsciously gripped his glasses, clearly trying to mask his surprise. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions. Relax and answer them. Do you remember your name and identity?”

“Lu Xiaochuan, local, lives in Pinghe neighborhood on Tonghua Street. My passport is in my trench coat pocket,” Lu Mingfei replied absentmindedly.

“How have you been lately? Sleeping well? Dreaming much? If you have any emotional issues, we can talk about them. There’s no need to resist. Coming to a psychiatric hospital doesn’t necessarily mean you’re mentally ill.”

Lu Mingfei shrugged. “Since Hippocrates, humans have been studying their own minds. Before the 1950s, doctors always tried to distinguish between the normal and the ill. They even attempted lobotomies to make patients seem more normal. But by today, we know that doesn’t work. Illness and health are relative concepts. Broadly speaking, we’re all patients. As long as our mental worlds diverge significantly, then from my perspective, you are the patient.”

The doctor was visibly taken aback. “You seem quite knowledgeable about psychiatry. Perhaps I could learn something from you. What’s your take on the relationship between reality and illusion?”

“Illusion and reality are relative concepts. There’s always a discrepancy between the world we perceive and the real world. When that discrepancy becomes large enough, the boundary between them blurs. My sense of boundaries is blurred, but that doesn’t mean I have a cognitive disorder. To explain it away with schizophrenia or mere hysteria would be crude. The blurriness could be seen as a state where self-correction is not yet complete…”

Lu Mingfei and Toyama had conversations like this for over three hundred hours, blending casual chat with philosophical debate. By now, he could recite the history and schools of thought in psychiatry backwards and even turn the tables, leaving the doctor wondering if they were the one with the problem. But Lu Mingfei’s thoughts were still on that strange overpass. Philosophy wasn’t helpful right now. Time was slipping away, and he needed to solve the problem.

He was the only one who could solve it. He couldn’t fall, and he couldn’t stop.

Behind the one-way mirror, Nono, Finger, and a solemn psychiatric expert observed the conversation. This was the city’s Third Municipal Hospital, known for its psychiatric department. A few hours earlier, Finger had carried the unconscious Lu Mingfei here.

They had already suspected Lu Mingfei might have some mental health issues. His loss of control the night before had cast a shadow over everyone’s minds, and when he drew a gun in front of everyone at the library near Qixing Lake, it all but confirmed their fears. The incident would likely make tomorrow’s headlines and cause them serious trouble, perhaps making it impossible for them to stay in the city. With their names now on the College’s wanted list, they had to be extra cautious about hiding their identities, and any news coverage could easily attract EVA’s attention.

What worried Nono even more was Lu Mingfei’s condition at the time. He was talking to himself, his expressions shifting from sorrow to rage, as if some unseen force was chasing him. After discussing it with Finger, they decided to take him to the most professional psychiatric hospital in the city for a checkup. In his current state, there was no way they could risk bringing him back to his uncle’s house. Upon admitting him, the hospital found his case fascinating and had called in the city’s most renowned psychiatric expert, who was also the teacher of the doctor in the small room.

“Should we keep going? At this rate, your student might break down from his questions,” Finger asked.

“He’s certainly articulate and well-read but lacks formal training. I’d say it’s a case of ‘a long illness makes the patient a doctor,’” the expert replied, glancing at Finger. “What’s your relationship with him?”

“The three of us are college classmates, but Miss Chen and I are sort of acting as his guardians, so you can speak with us.”

The expert scrutinized this foreigner, whose Mandarin was fluent but whose logic was scattered, wondering if he, too, should be checked in.

“Let’s get to the point. What exactly is wrong with him?” Nono asked coldly. “Your student suggested schizophrenia, but his logic seems stronger than your student’s.”

“It’s too early to diagnose, but I can almost guarantee that something is seriously wrong. It’s more than just schizophrenia. When he came in, he smelled of alcohol. Does he drink heavily?”

“Whether he drinks heavily depends on his credit card balance, but I don’t think drinking is the issue. Most of his drinking was with me, and I’m perfectly fine, aren’t I?” Finger chimed in.

The expert responded politely, saying that the effects of alcohol vary with each person, but his eyes remained fixed on Nono, as she seemed to be the only normal one among them.

“In recent years, the increase in societal pressure has led to a rise in severe schizophrenia among young people. Both chronic and acute cases are common, and clinically, the symptoms often vary greatly, encompassing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral disorders,” the expert said with a grave expression. “Each case requires a unique analysis, but since he’s already experiencing hallucinations, it’s likely a moderate to severe case. I recommend immediate hospitalization. Such patients pose a danger to both themselves and others if left in society.”

“Doctor, you’re exaggerating,” Finger interrupted. “Right now, it looks like my brother is the one interrogating your student.”

“Dr. Chen set a trap for him, coaxing him to prove that he isn’t ill. Your friend walked right into it, going on and on trying to convince us he’s fine. But a normal person has no need to prove they’re sane. The more he tries to convince us, the more it shows his inner tension. His logical reasoning is indeed strong, but that logic is his armor—he hides himself deeply within it. We can’t see his true self. This kind of patient is scarier than those who are obviously deranged,” the expert explained.

Nono suddenly thought of Su Xiaoyan, who was similarly trapped in her own little world, appearing calm on the outside but truly shrinking into a space that only she could inhabit.

“Was his childhood happy? Any traumatic experiences?” the expert hesitated for a moment before asking, “For example, was he ever sexually abused?”

“I don’t know much about his childhood, but if something like that did happen, it wouldn’t be abuse—it’d be filling in the gaps of my junior’s dull life…” Finger said.

Nono pushed Finger aside and stared the expert straight in the eyes. “I need evidence. I don’t need your feelings or impressions. I want proof that he’s insane, or I won’t believe it.”

The expert pondered for a while before pulling out a folder and opening it in front of Nono. “Have you heard of corpus callosotomy? In medical terms, we call it ‘corpus callosum disconnection surgery.’ The human brain’s two hemispheres have different functions, with the corpus callosum acting as a bridge to exchange information between them. If it’s severed, the two hemispheres operate independently. A patient might be able to write words perfectly, but not understand their meaning. In some cases, it can even result in a split personality. When your friend was admitted, we used electrodes to monitor his brain activity. We found that his left and right hemispheres are functioning independently. Sometimes his left hemisphere is highly active while his right is dormant, and vice versa.”

Nono flipped through the reports in the folder. “Has someone performed corpus callosotomy on him?”

“That’s the strange part. His brain scans show that his corpus callosum is completely intact and functioning normally,” the expert replied. “He hasn’t had the surgery, yet his brain behaves as if he has. Each hemisphere is fully capable of operating as an entire brain. We’ve never encountered anything like this before. His mental confusion may stem from this—each hemisphere holds different memories.”

Nono mused, “Using each hemisphere as a full brain—is that medically possible? Wouldn’t that make his IQ twice as high as a normal person’s?”

“Technically speaking, his brain’s efficiency is double that of an average person’s. However, he rarely uses both hemispheres simultaneously, which keeps his IQ within normal limits.”

Nono and Finger exchanged glances. There had been a similar case at Cassell College before—a guy who never needed sleep because he could consciously activate and deactivate different regions of his brain. While part of his brain worked, the other part rested. When he exercised on a treadmill, only his cerebellum was active, making him look like a zombie, but he still achieved his fitness goals. However, even he couldn’t completely separate the operations of his brain’s hemispheres. His language abilities remained in the left hemisphere, and spatial reasoning in the right. What Lu Mingfei was experiencing—or capable of—sounded far more extreme than that.