Main World.
In a psychiatric hospital, the pungent smell of disinfectant permeated the ward.
An ordinary man lay on a hospital bed.
Director and Pan Yisheng stood beside him.
"Which number is this among those sent to your hospital?"
"The thirty-second." Pan Yisheng shook his head.
"Why were there suddenly so many coma patients?" Director asked again.
"According to the examinations, they seem to be trapped in long-term dreams, similar to the folk condition known as a lost soul." Pan Yisheng used an analogy.
"A lost soul?" Director pondered those words.
Back then, children would sometimes get frightened for no apparent reason, become depressed, run fevers, lose their appetites, and grow muddleheaded...
The elderly often said they had "lost their souls." Seeing doctors was useless, but if they found an old woman in town to burn incense, scatter flour, and draw a few things, some mysterious ritual in the child's eyes, the child would recover afterward.
Director naturally knew those rituals were merely psychological placebos, but they worked, which was why they had endured.
And it was not just children. Didn't adults also throw around piles of money at all kinds of temples for similar psychological comfort?
Now that there were so many people with lost souls, should they find some witches to give it a try?
No sooner said than done.
Very soon, a group of wandering charlatans who could only fool village women in the countryside were brought into the psychiatric hospital.
They put on helmets and entered the same scripted world. After a round of maneuvers, the patients did not recover, but all the charlatans went mad...
The good news was that one of them regained consciousness for a while.
He said, "Those people chose to remain in the dream world willingly."
Director suddenly understood.
Because something