Mental Patient: Creator God

Parallel World.

Arizona.

Eight o'clock in the evening, a Chinese restaurant.

"Drink up, you're heading back to the country next week. No more interning at that mental hospital, no more putting up with that old man's attitude." A friend raised his glass to toast Li Qing.

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

The friends were drinking and singing, their faces flushed red.

Suddenly, Li Qing's phone rang.

He set down his glass and answered the call. It was from a mental patient who had been missing for two months: "I want to settle some affairs. Before I die, I have a world I want to entrust to you."

Li Qing: "."

He was very familiar with the person on the other end of the line. It was a patient he had treated previously, someone who used to claim he was the first zombie in the modern world and now sat on a world of his own? It seemed his condition was worsening.

"Why did you give your private number to that patient? Didn't you already resign? Are you still going to see him?" his friend asked curiously from the side.

Li Qing felt a bit helpless. "I've been supporting him privately. After all, we're both Chinese, and he's quite pitiful, with no one to rely on. I have to check on him tomorrow so I can leave for home with peace of mind."

Early the next morning.

Li Qing finished his final handover and drove to a small house in the suburbs of Phoenix City.

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

A year ago, his parents back home, who had worked hard to put him through school, both died in an accident. Under the weight of such blows, he became reticent and his mental state grew unstable.

Ning Guochang had received psychiatric treatment for a period, but instead of improving, he grew worse. He began having nightmares, claiming he saw a version of himself in another space-time where a zombie crisis had occurred and he had become a zombie.

What he described was a very typical zombie story.

A Resident Evil, a carbon copy of Raccoon City.

The apocalypse had broken out first in this Free Nation, which fit the origins of various movies and novels perfectly.

In his story, he was bitten while trying to save a girl and turned into a zombie. By constantly eating people, he gradually regained his human reason and transformed into a zombie with twenty-eight large, eyeball-like organs capable of mental manipulation. He became a zombie lord in the Phoenix City area, frantically besieging survivor settlements.

Li Qing had constantly provided him with counseling and treatment, always acting as a listener.

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, upon entering the door, Li Qing felt a sense of eeriness.

The entire bedroom had been converted by Ning Guochang into something resembling a sterile pharmaceutical workshop.

Separated by a large pane of glass, Li Qing saw Ning Guochang sitting on the other side in self-imposed isolation, much like visiting a prisoner.

The honest and simple-minded young man had become skin and bones. He wore a pair of large sunglasses, and the exposed skin was covered in fine, dry cracks like white paint. Every movement he made radiated an aura of fear.

Behind him was a massive rack, with mineral water, canned goods, and various foods piled densely throughout the bedroom.

"How long have you been in self-isolation, locking yourself in here?"

After a long moment, Li Qing suppressed the strangeness in his heart and couldn't help but ask, "Do you think you're a zombie? Afraid of infecting others?"

"I know you don't believe me, but you will once you see this."

He extended the back of his hand. A strange, rhomboid gem circled beneath his skin, entwined with veins and flesh, wriggling its way out of the surface of his hand.

"This is my Zombie Crystal Core."

Through the window, he said very calmly, "I ran away because of this. I didn't want to be used for your experiments. It's said that the zombie virus in the other world also broke out in a laboratory in a neighboring state."

Li Qing stared for a few seconds, his expression unchanging.

He was sick to the core, thinking reality had become Raccoon City.

But what was this crystal core wriggling out of his skin?

A magic trick?

Li Qing didn't know if it was real or fake, but he immediately put on a gentle smile and said, "I have always believed in you. Running away was the right thing to do. My mentor is a real snake; I also suspect he's been using patients for secret experiments in the mental hospital. If you had stayed there for treatment, he might have really used you as a test subject!"

Li Qing took the opportunity to smear his capitalist mentor.

This was a psychological empathy tactic, making the patient feel you were on his side, causing him to lower his guard and view you as one of his own.

Ning Guochang said, "The zombie lord in my dreams could manipulate large zombies, animals, beasts, and mutated humans the moment he looked at them, and he possessed telekinesis, able to lift a one-ton car."

"My superpower level here is currently very low. After experiencing some space-time mutation, I must stare for more than three seconds to grant control over bacteria and imbue them with intelligence, and my telekinesis can only lift a tiny piece of cotton."

Li Qing followed up, "That's quite a huge gap, isn't it? From controlling humans and large animals to being so weak you can only control some bacteria?"

Ning Guochang pointed to a piece of fine black mud wriggling on the table. "This is the Bacterial Army I currently control. It hasn't reached the nanoscale, but it has definitely reached the micron scale. It weighs 0.0023 grams."

This wriggling black mud—was it magnetic sand?

Li Qing had seen too many severely delusional mental patients who viewed themselves as protagonists in novels, unable to distinguish reality from fictional stories.

"Look at this, my telekinesis."

He actually took out a piece of cotton the size of an ant and controlled it to fly through the air, though he appeared to be struggling immensely.

Li Qing fell silent for a moment.

He quickly regained his composure and said, "In other words, you are a Zombie Lord now, and this sterile chamber is to prevent your Zombie Virus from spreading to the outside world?"

"No."

Ning Guochang shook his head. "Dr. Li, you are overthinking it. I am not trying to contain the Zombie Virus. We high-level zombies no longer possess the ability to infect others; we have already become a new, transcendent species. I have conducted experiments myself, and there is no contagion."

Li Qing immediately put on a look of relief and added, "Then what is this chamber for..."

Ning Guochang suddenly shuddered. "I built this sterile chamber to protect myself from my own eyes. They can control bacteria and see with extreme clarity—clear enough to act like a microscope, zooming in and out at will."

His mental state suddenly began to destabilize, and a look of agony crossed his face.

Like most psychiatric patients, Ning Guochang suddenly erupted into an emotional outburst.

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

"The world you normal people see is like watching a pixelated movie, but my eyes are filled with 4K ultra-high-definition quality. I can clearly see the mites crawling back and forth on your face!!"

"The wall behind you looks perfectly smooth to you, but to me, it is a wall of insects that triggers my trypophobia. Mold, worms, dust mites, and bacteria—they form a nauseating, billion-strong empire."

Li Qing's mouth hung open.

He inexplicably felt his face start to itch.

He imagined disgusting mites crawling in dense, swarming masses.

But fortunately, those trained in medicine were not afraid of such things; he had seen far worse.

However, theoretically, if his eyes reached the level of an electron microscope, wouldn't he see Li Qing as a fuzzy, humanoid monster covered in a carpet of various microbial colonies?

He couldn't quite grasp that level of visual precision.

Perhaps their eye structures had already diverged into two different species; he had already drifted toward something eerie and mysterious.

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

Sitting across from him in the isolated sterile chamber, Ning Guochang became agitated. With a frantic tone and flailing limbs, he said in great pain:

"I started washing my hands obsessively. I spray disinfectant every day, I use purified water for my showers, and I scrub my skin until it's wrinkled and raw with pain!"

"I even built this sterile chamber. I want to live in the cleanest world possible!"

"I even wear a bubble helmet and a custom-made hazmat suit whenever I go out! Have you watched One Piece? I want to be a Celestial Dragon Person!"

He looked like a patient trapped in a state of extreme mania, radiating an aura of madness, with endless suffering deeply rooted in his distorted facial expressions.

If it had stopped there, Li Qing would have merely thought this was a story about a new human evolved with a germ phobia.

He even briefly indulged in a sci-fi fantasy about the future.

He thought from a sharp angle: If a cultivator in the Mortal Realm saw the world with such high-definition vision, they would surely develop the same trypophobia. Seeing the bacteria covering the mortal world would make them want to vomit, prompting them to hide in a sterile cave-heaven to cultivate, retreating to immortal mountains and refusing to enter the Mortal Realm...

This wasn't just about Xianxia mythology; it was about modern technology.

If new humans from a future of technological explosion possessed such vision, wouldn't they go insane too?

Never mind the future.

Even now, people were starting to pay attention to the visible mites on their blankets as their quality of life improved, finding them disgusting.

The level of civilization was linked to the level of mysophobia.

In the old days, common folk didn't care about dirt; they believed that if it wasn't clean, it wouldn't make you sick, and that it was just protein and nutrition.

However, the story of mysophobia was slowly turning into a ghost story.

"If it were just about the vision constantly sharpening to see 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 am terrified. These microorganisms have gained intelligence, and it is horrifying! They are developing a civilization, just like our ancient ancestors did in the distant days of Earth when they built their tribes."

Li Qing tried to follow his train of thought.

If what he said was true, even if microorganisms built a civilization and possessed intelligence, so what?

Their structure destined them to be low-level organisms.

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

Build campfires? Farm and herd? Construct machinery? Develop a steam age? Enter the electrical age?

They couldn't.

They couldn't even light a fire.

Because of their size, even with intelligence, they could never replicate the progress of human civilization.

If they had intelligence, what difference did it make from having none?

"I thought the same thing at first."

Ning Guochang smiled bitterly. "But later I discovered that humans are just monkeys who know how to use tools. It is ridiculous to use our own arrogant perceptions to measure other unknown civilizations."

"Do you know?"

He looked through the chamber at the tiny Bacterial Army on the table.

"They possess no eyes, yet they wield mysterious psychic perception to herd other mindless microorganisms. As my kin, they use telekinesis weaker than my own to arduously dismantle RNA structures, compile, transcribe, and construct their own biological robots, flagella, and shells, directly entering the era of biological herding."

"They build flagella mounts and use giant mites to construct massive biological houses, forming microscopic cities."

"Humans took three and a half billion years to evolve from microorganisms in the ocean to where we are today, yet they are reliving this process at an incredible speed."

"These Single Cells are undergoing self-evolution!"

Watching this patient pour out his heart in extreme agony, Li Qing finally realized what he was talking about.

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

When the microorganisms invisible to our naked eyes gain human-like intelligence, their civilization far surpasses our modern human civilization.

They are, by nature, a group of great creators within the microscopic world.