Even though it was broad daylight, the people in the ward were horrified by what they heard.
The patient in the next bed then pulled back the curtain and spoke up, "Hey, are you telling a ghost story, old lady?"
Yao Jingjing also said, "Yes, Mom, what are you saying!"
Mama Yao said, "I'm not in the mood to tell ghost stories. These are all my personal experiences and stories from books. I was so scared that day that I developed a high fever the next day and had to go to the hospital for a checkup. That's when they found out I have this problem. I even told your dad that I had encountered a ghost and wanted to go to Yuantong Temple to burn incense!"
Papa Yao said, "That's true, but you didn't mention looking in the mirror! Who plays rock-paper-scissors in front of a mirror? You must be hallucinating."
Mama Yao said, "How embarrassing is this to tell anyone! If you find out, you'll laugh at me for the rest of my life!"
Papa Yao said, "Even in this situation, you're still so stubborn about saving face! So why did you say it out loud now?"
Mama Yao said, "Didn't my son-in-law ask?"
When Yao Jingjing heard her mother start talking about her son-in-law again, she quickly changed the subject and asked, "Did you go to burn incense later?"
Mama Yao said, "I didn't go. Later, I was diagnosed with this disease, so I thought it might just be hallucinations caused by poor health. But for a long time, I was afraid to look in the mirror and afraid to go to the bathroom at night. And I felt like someone was following me all the time, like I was being watched."
"You've been watching too many spy dramas," Papa Yao said.
"Don't interrupt!" Mama Yao glared at him. "Actually, it's not the same as stalking. It's not the kind of person who follows you from afar, but someone who's right next to you, overlapping with you, like your shadow. It's a strange feeling. Sometimes it scares me, and sometimes it makes me feel close, like I suddenly have a companion. We can discuss everything, and even when I'm sick, it's like someone can share my pain. But I just can't see her."
"Later, I don't know how, I started dreaming. I would fall asleep as soon as I sat down, and then I would dream, dreaming all day long. The dreams were all kinds of things, but strangely, all of them were real things that happened when I was a child and young. It was like watching a movie and replaying my whole life. Except that the order was messed up, the events were all real. I had forgotten many things completely, and I even had the letters I exchanged with my pen pals when I was in school. Every single word was exactly the same."
Qingmu knew this was a process of memory extraction under deep hypnosis, much like a computer virus constantly searching for files on a hard drive in the background. This process is extremely resource-intensive, consuming a lot of CPU and memory. Similarly, searching memories under deep hypnosis causes significant damage to the mind and brain. Maintaining this frequency of hypnosis for extended periods also requires immense Mental Power from the hypnotist, sometimes even more than the damage inflicted on the hypnotized person. However, hypnotists are generally professionally trained and possess far greater Mental Power than the average person. Therefore, hypnotists would never do such a thing unless absolutely necessary.
Qingmu wanted to ask Mama Yao if she had ever had a nightmare about a shadow because her brain condition was similar to Xia Wenyuan's, in order to determine if there was a connection between Elder Xia's illness and the shadow in his dream. However, he did not expect that Mama Yao's condition seemed to be more complicated than Elder Xia's; she had actually been infected with something like Consciousness Virus, which was searching her memories.
"Auntie, did you dream about anything special afterwards?" Qingmu asked.
"I saw her later," Mama Yao said.
"Who?"
"It's that person who's always been following me, the one I played rock-paper-scissors with in the mirror." Mama Yao's face paled as she spoke of this person. "That day, I had just started chemotherapy, and I was feeling extremely unwell. As soon as I fell asleep, I saw her. She looked exactly like me, and she was wearing a hospital gown too. Seeing her was like seeing myself in a mirror, but I knew at a glance that it wasn't me."
"Back then, Jingjing and her father kept it from me, not telling me what illness I had. They only said the chemotherapy injections were antibiotics. I already suspected I had a serious illness, but I was truly certain when the person in my dream told me. She said I was dying, that there was no cure, and that I should confess honestly, or she would kill me before I died."
Qingmu and Yao Jingjing asked in unison, "What does she want you to explain?"
Mama Yao said, "I don't know either! She never said anything, she just kept demanding an explanation from me, and then she would start choking me. Every time, I felt like she was about to strangle me to death, and then I would wake up."
"Speaking of nightmares, I've had them before. I've seen ghosts, fallen into rivers, all sorts of things in my dreams, but I can't remember them clearly after waking up, so I've never found nightmares scary. But this dream was so real, like it really happened. At that time, I was undergoing chemotherapy and was barely recognizable, my hair had fallen out, and I was in a daze all the time. Ironically, the things in the dream felt more real. Every day, there was someone who looked exactly like me trying to kill me, but without actually killing me. You guys haven't experienced that kind of situation. If you did, you'd know what it means to wish you were dead. If it weren't for Jingjing's marriage..."
Just as Yao Jingjing was worried that her mother would start calling Qingmu her son-in-law again, her roommate in the next bed came to her rescue, interjecting, "Sister-in-law, you're not dreaming, you have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have a relative like that too, he always feels like someone is trying to harm him, he's paranoid, one minute he's saying the food he ate is poisoned, the next he's saying someone is following him. He'll get up in the middle of the night, take a taxi and drive around the city, telling the driver that there are spies chasing him and he needs to deliver intelligence to the organization's liaison station. But if you ask him what intelligence, he'll refuse to say anything."
A little embarrassed, Mama Yao said, "I secretly asked the doctor, and he said it might be because I'm too nervous due to my illness, and he told me to relax."
"Do you still have dreams like that now?" Qingmu asked.
Mama Yao said, "I stopped having that dream a long time ago. I stopped having it after my chemotherapy ended."
Qingmu is now certain that Mama Yao's situation is similar to Xia Wenyuan's, except that Xia Wenyuan's Mental Power is stronger, and he has been resisting the invading consciousness, so his consciousness has remained in a shadow state. Mama Yao, on the other hand, is just an ordinary person with weak Mental Power, and the invading consciousness quickly became a person exactly like her.
The only thing I don't understand is, since the invading consciousness clearly had the ability to kill her and take over, why didn't it kill her and instead forced her to confess something?
If Mama Yao knew any secrets, the invading consciousness had already searched her memories through the Consciousness Virus. A subconscious search of memories wouldn't miss anything, unless someone used powerful Mental Power to create a protected area in a certain region of Mama Yao's brain, like encrypting a computer hard drive. If even administrator privileges couldn't decrypt it, the virus couldn't search that area either.
Why did the invading consciousness eventually give up? Was it because Mama Yao had a terminal illness, so the invading consciousness deemed her worthless?
"Auntie, do you remember the circumstances under which you stopped having this dream? Where did she go in the dream? Did she leave any message?"
Mama Yao said, "I remember, I remember. That day, that 'me' came again to force me to confess some secret. Just as she was about to strangle me, my cat came. She seemed to be terrified of cats, so she ran away."
"A cat?" Qingmu hadn't expected this outcome at all.