Lu Mingfei instinctively looked toward Pingyangzi, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed.
"Daoist Priest Pingyangzi, those three, their brains—uh—"
He did not finish, but the meaning was written plainly across his face.
Pingyangzi smiled and nodded. His smile was faint, as faint as morning mist in the mountains—impossible to see through, yet somehow reassuring.
"What you perceive is true, sir." The old Daoist spoke in a calm, unhurried voice, like the lingering notes of a guqin. "The spirits of these three are obstructed, their minds confused, their souls unsettled in their vessels, and so they suffer delusions. Some believe themselves ministers of a former dynasty, some believe themselves hermits beyond the secular world. Their obsessions run too deep, disturbed by the Heart Devil; they are immersed in it and cannot free themselves."
He paused, his gaze slowly sweeping over the three men with an expression of compassion.
"In medical terms, this is called visual and auditory hallucination. In Daoism, it is a failure to guard the mind, an unrestful primordial spirit. They have mistaken themselves for someone else. Having immersed themselves too deeply in the role, they have forgotten their true faces."
Lu Mingfei was left completely dumbfounded.
"—Daoist Priest, can you speak like a normal person?"
"Very well. Put simply, it means those three are exactly what you think they are: lunatics," Pingyangzi answered concisely.
Lu Mingfei suddenly thought of something.
To ordinary people, the people at Kassel College were probably a bunch of lunatics too.
But they were "fake lunatics." Their worldview was simply different; their minds were still sound.
Yet there were real lunatics at the college too—people whom even Hybrids considered insane. For example, some unfortunate souls whose minds had completely collapsed after being eroded too severely by Dragon Blood. He had heard that the