Sanity

Before registering, Ji Tan was still a little apprehensive.

Based on the movies he had watched before, medical care in a cyberpunk-like district like this was no different from a horror movie. Mental problems? Strap you to a treatment chair and give you a few shocks. Broken leg? Take it off and replace it with a mechanical one. Burns and scalds? Weld you a suit of titanium-alloy armor...

"If they want to use electric shocks, we're not getting treatment," Ji Tan muttered softly, pinching his brother's ID card as he practiced turning the doctor down. "No electric shocks. No electric shocks."

The nurse handling registration took the ID card. "Do you need electroshock therapy?"

"No, no." Ji Tan hurriedly waved his hand.

They actually had electroshock therapy here! Did that mean they also had brain replacement therapy and treatments that drilled through the frontal lobe? The more Ji Tan thought about it, the more nervous he became, planning to take his brother and run if anything seemed wrong.

"It's fine. Electroshock therapy is great. I used to talk to phantom figures in the air all the time, but after a course of shocks, I only talked to real people!" A man in line behind them encouraged Ji Tan, then turned toward the empty air on his left. "Right, Six?"

Ji Tan's mouth twitched. "...So your treatment treated Six?"

People in the Western District really were flexible thinkers. If they couldn't treat the person, they treated the "illness." Turn the "phantom" into a "real person," shock Six into physical form, and discharge the patient. Speechless, Ji Tan gave the man a thumbs-up.

With a beep, the information appeared. The nurse saw the familiar name and photo, paused for a moment, and said, "Dr. Ji, here for a follow-up? We'll register you with Director Yuan again, then."

Ji Tan took the registration slip and glanced at it:

[Sanity department, consultation room 2, chief physician Yuan Xingxing, Ji Sinan, follow-up, no. 7]

"Was this Director Yuan the one you saw last time? How did he treat you?" Ji Tan asked his brother, who sat obediently beside him, neither speaking nor playing on his phone.

Ji Sinan nodded, then shook his head. "He was the one I saw. I don't remember how he treated me."

He didn't remember. That sounded a lot like an aftereffect of electroshock therapy. Ji Tan knitted his brows, gripped his brother's wrist, and instructed him, "When I say go, follow me. If the doctor tries to tie you up, punch him and run behind me. Understand?"

Ji Sinan blinked. He didn't quite understand, but nodded anyway. "Okay."

Director Yuan was an old man with graying hair who looked quite kindly. He invited them to sit, asked a few simple questions, and patiently listened as Ji Sinan repeated his symptoms three times.

The doctor made no comment on Ji Sinan's condition. He stood and motioned for Ji Sinan to go behind the curtain.

The blue curtain lifted, revealing a silver metal chair. Numerous colorful electrodes were connected to it, and above it sat a pot-shaped device that looked like a "brainwashing machine" from a movie.

Ji Tan immediately tensed and blurted out, "Doctor, we're not doing electroshock therapy!" Practicing really had helped.

"You're Ji's younger brother, aren't you? He used to mention you a lot," Yuan Xingxing explained with a chuckle. "This isn't electroshock therapy. It measures sanity."

Seeing the doctor stick electrodes onto his brother's forehead, Ji Tan still couldn't relax. He watched the doctor's movements without blinking.

Director Yuan pulled apart a Velcro strap and tried to secure Ji Sinan's neck. The next second, Ji Sinan swung a fist at the old man without warning.

"Don't!" Ji Tan cried. He hadn't expected his brother to skip the part where he said "go" and start punching immediately.

Ji Sinan looked lean, but his arms were strong. This old man definitely couldn't take a beating like young Dr. Zheng. After seven punches, Director Yuan would be Director Flat.

"Hey, Ji, what are you doing?" Before Ji Tan could grab his brother, Director Yuan sidestepped, neatly dodging the punch.

Ji Tan watched, dumbfounded. Like a martial arts master, the gray-haired Yuan Xingxing dodged left and right, fluidly exchanging seven moves with "Iron Fist Ji Sinan."

"All right, that's enough. The doctor isn't trying to tie you up." Ji Tan hurried forward to stop his brother.

"It's fine, it's fine. He's quite lively." Director Yuan didn't mind at all. Abandoning his attempt to secure Ji Sinan's neck, he simply lowered the device and began the test.

The test was very quick. Within seconds, it produced a long strip of paper covered in waveforms.

"Director, are you an orderly?" Ji Tan had felt that familiar dizziness just now. It was so faint that he wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't experienced it several times before.

"Oh? You know about orderlies too?" Director Yuan gave Ji Tan a surprised look and nodded in acknowledgment. "I'm an orderly of the Doctor Sequence. That dodge just now was cool, wasn't it? Haha, I told you it was especially useful against violent patients."

Sequence.

Ji Tan had heard another unfamiliar term. He guessed it was a classification of supernatural abilities. The Doctor Sequence meant a supernatural ability with the sequence name [Doctor].

Earlier, Huo Zhaixing had said he was a C-rank overlord. So supernatural abilities were divided into [sequences], with [ranks] within each sequence.

Could Huo Zhaixing's sequence name actually be [Overlord]? He was a C-rank overlord, and his grandfather was a B-rank overlord...

"Then what rank of doctor are you?" Ji Tan asked tentatively.

"What rank could I be? The lowest, E-rank, of course. If I were some high-ranking powerhouse, why would I still be seeing patients here?" Dr. Yuan shook his head, apparently thinking the young man was indulging in wild fantasies.

Ji Tan understood.

It seemed orderlies weren't a dime a dozen after all. They were still quite rare. And advancing in rank wasn't easy for them either. Director Yuan was nearly retirement age, yet he was still E-rank.

Old Yuan pushed over a simple numerical report. It showed:

[Sanity: 53.23%]

"Do you know what this sanity value means?" Director Yuan asked, looking Ji Tan in the eye.

Ji Tan curled his toes guiltily, keeping his expression composed. "Not particularly." He didn't know how much an ordinary citizen should know, but he knew absolutely nothing about it.

Yuan Xingxing's eyes lit up at that, and he enthusiastically began explaining sanity to him. He was far more animated than he had been when discussing orderlies.

Sanity was a bodily metric that everyone in City A had to monitor, more important than blood sugar or blood pressure. The maximum was 100%, but normally, no one could reach it. Living in this uncanny place, people could be frightened at any moment, see things they shouldn't see, or hear sounds they shouldn't hear. All of these could lower their sanity.

"Once it drops, it can't recover on its own." Director Yuan spread his hands and pointed to a diagram on the wall.

The colorful diagram showed a segmented straight line, with human sanity divided into brackets of twenty points each.

The region above 60 was green. Below 60, the colors shifted from yellow to red, then dark red, and finally pitch-black. The 60-40 region was labeled "Severe mental illness," while 40-20 bore the bright-red words "Uncontrollable lunatic."

As Ji Tan looked at the three dark-red characters in the region below 20, the hairs on his arms began to stand on end. It was the name of a condition that shouldn't have appeared in a scientific theory-ghoul.

"Are ghouls still human?" Ji Tan didn't understand what the word meant.

"No, and it's irreversible. Once someone becomes a ghoul, they can never become human again."

There was also a line of small print on the color chart:

[Anyone who sees a ghoul may kill it without bearing legal responsibility.]

Ji Tan slowly drew in a cold breath and looked at his brother, who sat quietly, his heart turning ice-cold. City A was even more dangerous than he had imagined. Ordinary people could slip into an abyss beyond salvation at any moment. He had to grow stronger as soon as possible to protect his brother.

Director Yuan pulled out Ji Sinan's medical records.

When Ji Sinan had first been brought in for emergency treatment, his sanity had collapsed to 39%, and he was already uncontrollable. The medication record showed that Ji Sinan had received one injection.

The prescription for the drug was... blank.

"What drug did he receive?" Ji Tan frowned.

"A drug that raises sanity. It's the only drug in all of City A that can treat this. But its effects are limited. One injection usually only raises sanity by 10%-15%. Your brother recovered to this value, an increase of more than 14%. That's already a miracle."

But even with that miracle, he still hadn't returned to normal. Holding his brother's hand, Ji Tan stood in a daze outside the pharmacy, clutching a blank prescription Director Yuan had just written.

"A special medication, one million per dose. It can raise sanity, with the side effect of losing a random stretch of memory. Are you sure you want to buy it?" the pharmacy staff member asked cautiously.

One million. That number again.

Ji Tan finally knew where that million from the loan shark had gone.

"Let me think about it." Pinching the gold card Xie Zhi had given him, Ji Tan regretted not taking the black card. Just what sort of incorruptible-in-poverty act had he been putting on?

Still, even if Ji Tan had the money right now, he would have to think it through first.

According to Director Yuan, someone with sanity above 40 could still barely get by, but there was always a risk of it dropping further. Ji Sinan only had 53 left. If it fell a little more, below 50, even an injection might not bring him back to normal, making it even less worthwhile.

And with someone mentally ill, there was no knowing when something might frighten him. Even seeing his younger brother riding a motorcycle with a blond delinquent could cause his sanity to plummet.

Ji Tan: "..."

But when he had asked Director Yuan, "Is this drug safe?" Yuan Xingxing's meaningful expression had made Ji Tan's heart pound. He kept feeling there was something here he hadn't figured out.

"Wait here for me a moment. I'm going to the restroom." Ji Tan told Ji Sinan to stay where he was and not wander off.

"I'm not a child." Ji Sinan reached out and ruffled his little brother's head. He only had severe obsessive-compulsive disorder right now, not an intellectual disability. He wouldn't get abducted.

Ji Tan answered and hurried into the restroom, washing his face with cold water. Only after splashing it more than a dozen times did his heart, which felt as though it were being fried and flipped in boiling oil in a hot pan, calm down a little.

He was going to call Xie Zhi again-his only connection in City A.

Just as the call connected, he suddenly heard people talking in the stairwell next door. Their voices sounded very familiar. Ji Tan left the restroom and moved closer to the emergency exit, then heard a woman's tearful voice.

"This is all your fault. You just had to go provoke him. Happy now? The whole hospital's saying my family's so poor we can't put food on the table and have to scam people for meals." Wanwan's voice was a little shrill, echoing through the empty stairwell along with her sobs. It was rather creepy.

"I just wanted to know whether he really forgot that part or was pretending." Young Dr. Zheng's voice was easy to recognize. He kept hissing in pain as he spoke; clearly, the places that had been struck still hurt.

"Boo-hoo..."

"Stop crying. It's creepy. My sanity's right on the safety threshold. I can't listen to this."

"You're yelling at me!"

"Ow, hiss..."

Ji Tan tightened his grip on his phone. Those two definitely knew something about the stretch of memory his brother had lost. Just as he held his breath, Xie Zhi's puzzled voice came through the phone:

"Little Ji Tan, did you call me in the middle of the day just to make me listen to... porn?"