Mental Patient: Creator God

Parallel World.

Arizona.

Eight p.m., a Chinese restaurant.

"Drink more. You'll be returning home next week, so you won't have to intern at the Mental Hospital anymore and suffer that Old Man's temper." Li Qing's friend raised his glass in celebration.

"Ugh! I'm going to the bathroom."

Several friends drank and sang, their faces flushed red.

Suddenly, Li Qing's phone rang.

He set down his glass and answered. It was a call from a mental patient who had been out of contact for two months: "I want to make some arrangements for after my death. Before I die, I have a world to give you."

Li Qing: "."

He knew the person on the other end very well. He was a mental patient Li Qing had treated before, one who had once claimed to be the first zombie in the modern world. And now he possessed an entire world? His condition had clearly worsened.

"Why did you give this patient your private number? Haven't you already resigned? Are you still going to see him?" his friend asked curiously from beside him.

Li Qing was somewhat helpless. "I've been secretly supporting him a little. We're both Chinese, after all, and he's rather pitiful, with no one to rely on. I'll have to check on him tomorrow. Then I'll be able to return home with peace of mind."

The next morning.

After completing his final handover, Li Qing drove to a small house on the outskirts of Phoenix City.

The patient was named Ning Guochang, an overseas student who was often bullied and extorted by others at school.

A year earlier, back home, his parents—who had worked themselves to the bone to support his studies—had died together in an accident. Struck by blow after blow, he had become taciturn and mentally unstable.

Ning Guochang had undergone psychiatric treatment for some time without improving. Instead, his condition grew worse. He gradually began having nightmares, claiming to see another version of himself in a different spacetime, where a zombie crisis had erupted and he had become a zombie.

He described a very ordinary zombie story.

A biological disaster—a remake of Raccoon City.

The apocalypse had first erupted in the Free Nation, the place that fit the source material of all kinds of films and novels.

He had been bitten and turned into a zombie while saving a girl. After constantly eating people, he had gradually regained his sanity from before death, becoming a zombie whose mind controlled twenty-eight enormous eyeballs. He had become a zombie monarch around Phoenix City, madly hunting down survivor settlements.

Li Qing had continued counseling and treating him, always serving as a listener.

Then one day, Ning Guochang suddenly ran away, and no one could find him again.

The address he sent was not far away.

Half an hour later, after entering the house, Li Qing finally sensed something strange.

The entire bedroom had been remodeled by Ning Guochang into what looked like a sterile pharmaceutical workshop.

Through a huge pane of glass, Li Qing saw Ning Guochang sitting across from him in self-isolation, as though visiting a prisoner.

The honest, simple, strapping young man had been reduced to skin and bones. He wore a pair of huge sunglasses, while the exposed skin on his face was covered in fine, dry cracks like white paint. Every gesture radiated an aura of terror.

Behind him stood a huge rack, with bottled water, canned food, and all kinds of provisions stacked densely throughout the bedroom.

"How long have you been isolating yourself and locking yourself in here?"

After quite some time, Li Qing suppressed the strangeness in his heart and could not help asking, "Do you think you've become a zombie? Are you afraid of infecting people?"

"I know you don't believe me. You'll believe me after seeing this."

He extended the back of his hand. A bizarre diamond-shaped gem emerged through his skin, winding around the veins and flesh like a living thing.

"This is my Zombie Crystal Core."

Through the window between them, he said with extreme calm, "I ran away because of this. I didn't want you to experiment on me. I heard that the Zombie Virus in another world also erupted in a laboratory in the neighboring state."

Li Qing stared at it impassively for several seconds.

He's terminally ill. He thinks reality has a Raccoon City now?

But what was that crystal core writhing out of his skin?

A magic trick?

Li Qing did not know whether it was real, but he immediately put on a gentle smile and said, "I've always believed you. Running away was the right choice. My mentor is a real scoundrel. I also think he secretly conducts all kinds of experiments on patients in the Mental Hospital. If you kept receiving treatment there, he might really have used you for experiments!"

Li Qing took the opportunity to smear his capitalist mentor.

It was an empathy technique from psychology: make the patient feel that you were on the same side, lower his guard, and make him feel that you were all allies.

Ning Guochang said, "In my dreams, the moment the Zombie Lord looks at something, he can control large zombies, animals, beasts, and mutated humans. He also has telekinesis strong enough to lift a one-ton car."

"My superpower level here is currently very low. After undergoing some spacetime-crossing mutations, I have to stare for more than three seconds to control bacteria and grant them intelligence. My telekinesis can only lift a tiny tuft of cotton."

Li Qing followed his lead. "That's a huge drop, isn't it? You used to control humans and large animals, but now you're so weak that you can only control some bacteria?"

Ning Guochang pointed at a patch of shattered black mud writhing on the table. "This is the Bacterial Army I currently control. It hasn't reached the nanoscale, but it's definitely at the micron scale. It weighs 0.0023 grams."

This writhing black mud is magnetic sand, right?

Li Qing had seen too many severely delusional mental patients who took themselves for the protagonists of novels and could no longer distinguish reality from fictional stories.

"Look at this next. My telekinesis."

He really took out a piece of cotton the size of an ant and controlled it into flying through the air, though he looked extremely strained.

Li Qing fell silent for a moment.

He quickly recovered and said, "So you're a Zombie Lord now, and you built this sterile workshop to prevent your Zombie Virus from spreading outside?"

"No."

Ning Guochang shook his head. "Dr. Li, you're overthinking it. I'm not trying to prevent the Zombie Virus. High-level zombies like us aren't contagious. We've already become another new supernatural species. I even conducted experiments on myself. There's no infectiousness."

Li Qing immediately put on a relieved expression and asked, "Then this workshop is..."

Ning Guochang suddenly shuddered. "I built this sterile workshop to keep my eyes from getting contaminated. They can control bacteria and see them extremely clearly—clearly enough to function like a microscope. I can zoom in or out at any time."

His mental state suddenly began to destabilize, and pain appeared on his face.

Like most mental patients, Ning Guochang abruptly became agitated and erupted emotionally.

"Do you know what this Microscopic Ability feels like?"

"The world of you normal people is like watching a pixelated movie. My eyes see everything in 4K ultra-high definition. I can clearly see the mites crawling back and forth across your face!"

"The wall behind you looks perfectly clean to your eyes, but to me, it's a wall of insects that triggers intense trypophobia—mold, worms, dust lice, mites, forming a nauseating empire of billions."

Li Qing's mouth fell open.

He inexplicably felt itchy all over his face.

Disgusting mites were crawling densely across it.

Fortunately, medical students were not afraid of such things. They had seen worse.

But theoretically, if Ning Guochang's eyes had reached the level of an electron microscope, wouldn't Li Qing appear before him as a furry humanoid monster covered from head to toe in carpets of microorganisms?

He could not quite understand such visual precision.

Perhaps the structures of their eyes had already become those of two different creatures. Ning Guochang had already stepped into the strange and mysterious.

"You know I have trypophobia! I have severe mysophobia!"

Ning Guochang, sitting across from him inside the isolated sterile workshop, grew agitated. In a restless tone, flustered and helpless, he said in great pain:

"I started washing my hands obsessively. I sprayed disinfectant every day. I had to bathe with purified water, scrubbing until my body was wrinkled and aching!"

"Then I built this sterile workshop. I wanted to live in the cleanest world possible!"

"I even wear a bubble helmet and a specially made protective suit whenever I go outside! Have you watched One Piece? I want to become a Celestial Dragon Person!"

He looked like a patient sunk in extreme mania. Madness radiated from his entire body, while endless suffering had taken deep root in his twisted expression.

If things had stopped there, Li Qing would have taken it for nothing more than a story about a mysophobic person evolving into a new human.

He had even begun imagining a science-fiction future.

He looked at it from a bizarre angle: perhaps cultivators from a high-definition world would develop the same trypophobia upon seeing this Mortal Realm, finding the bacteria everywhere in the human world so disgusting that they wanted to vomit. They would immediately hide in a sterile room within a celestial grotto, cultivate in seclusion on an immortal mountain, and refuse to enter the Mortal Realm...

This was not even Xianxia mythology, but modern technology.

In the distant future, after technology exploded over the next few hundred years, wouldn't new humans with such eyesight go mad as well?

Forget the future.

Even the visible mites on the quilts today had begun attracting attention as people's lives improved, making them feel disgusted.

The degree of civilization was tied to the degree of cleanliness obsession.

The common people of the old era did not care whether anything was dirty. As the saying went, if it was neither clean nor filthy, eating it would not make you sick. Some even considered it protein and nourishment.

But the story of mysophobia gradually began turning into a ghost story.

"If this were merely a matter of constantly improving eyesight and seeing a high-definition world of bacteria, that would be one thing."

"But my eyes can control them and grant them intelligence."

Ning Guochang suddenly wore a bitter expression. "I'm terrified. These microorganisms have gained intelligence, and now it's horrifying! They're developing a civilization, just like our ancient apes once built tribes in Earth's distant past."

Li Qing tried to follow his line of thought.

If it was true, then so what if microorganisms built a civilization and possessed intelligence?

Their structures doomed them to be low-level organisms.

What could a group of low-level creatures relying on flagella do, even with intelligence?

Build campfires? Farm and herd animals? Construct machines? Develop a steam age? Enter the age of electricity?

They could not.

They could not even make fire.

Because of their size, even with intelligence, they could not replicate the course of human civilization.

If they possessed intelligence, what difference did that make from possessing none?

"I initially thought the same."

Ning Guochang gave a bitter laugh. "But later I realized that humans are merely monkeys who know how to use tools. Measuring other unknown civilizations through our own arrogant understanding is ridiculous."

"Do you know?"

Through the workshop, he looked at the tiny Bacterial Army on the table.

"They have no eyes, yet possess a mysterious spiritual sense. They herd other unintelligent microorganisms as my dependents. Using telekinesis weaker than mine, they painstakingly split RNA structures, compile and transcribe them, and build their own biological robots, flagella, and shells. They directly entered the age of biological herding."

"They built flagella mounts and used enormous mites to construct giant biological houses, forming microscopic cities."

"Humans took 3.5 billion years to evolve from microorganisms in the ocean to what we are today, but they were reliving that process at an astonishing speed."

"These Single Cells were evolving themselves!"

Only as he watched the patient pour out his agony did Li Qing finally understand what Ning Guochang was talking about.

This patient had witnessed the terrifying history of life's evolution.

When the microorganisms invisible to the naked eye gained humanlike intelligence, their civilization far surpassed that of modern humanity.

They were naturally a group of great Creator Gods in the microscopic world.