Chapter 1 The Lonely Confinement

When the door was shut, Feng Bujue was once again left alone in the narrow ward.

He sat down on the spot and began to think.

"Although I said what I wanted to say, I can't have too high expectations for this doctor..." Feng Bujue thought to himself. "Judging from his attitude, it's not like he intends to 'cure' me... He's just thinking about completing the basic work requirements, finishing his two-month rotation, and then he won't have to stay in this hellhole for the next ten months."

While thinking, Jue-ge moved to the wall and slowly lay down.

"Not just him, I'm afraid the other doctors have the same mentality...

"First of all, this mental hospital is a state institution, and the salary they receive for rotating here must be fixed; that is to say... there's no extra gravy to skim. Therefore, the motivation in terms of profit... can be ruled out.

"Secondly, we 'patients' who are locked up here are basically a bunch of guys who wouldn't be wrongly judged even if we were shot twice; according to ordinary people's logic, being locked up here for life is already a bargain... Under this premise, if someone really 'recovers and is discharged' from here and re-enters society, it will inevitably bring great public pressure.

"In short... from the doctors' personal point of view, there's no benefit to treating each patient seriously. On the contrary, if they accidentally 'cure' a patient, the troubles and responsibilities they'll face next... are unimaginable.

"Well... thinking about it this way, putting my hope of leaving here on the doctors is probably a waste of time.

"That report that was written for fourteen years, if even one doctor had seriously studied it... it would have been impossible not to discover the 'knowledge reserve' suspicious points.

"The reason why no one has brought it up so far is nothing more than two possibilities: one, no one has seriously looked at that thing at all; they just treat it as a story to read casually, or skim through it hastily out of work needs; two, someone has indeed seen some suspicious points in it, but... they didn't say anything because they didn't want to expend time and effort for a 'hopeless super-madman' like me, and even more so, they didn't want to bear unnecessary huge risks for me."

Thinking of this, Feng Bujue stretched and muttered, "Hoo... it seems that if I want to leave this place, I can only rely on myself..."

...

More than an hour later, it was lunchtime.

The person who brought the food today didn't even say a word; they just knocked on the door twice from the outside with some hard object (the orderly was equipped with a stun baton), and then directly pushed the tray in through the lower section of the door.

"Ah... it's mealtime again..." Feng Bujue muttered as he saw this, crawling to the door. "To be fair, the food here is not bad..."

He brought the tray in front of him, took a look around, and then began to formulate his eating strategy.

Here's an explanation: the so-called "eating strategy" is actually about... what to eat first, what to eat later, how to eat it with the rice, and how long it will take to finish.

Generally speaking, children from poorer families, as long as they're not too stupid... will easily develop this habit.

Because children from poor families don't have the luxury of "eating whatever they want," nor do they have the luxury of "leftovers" or "picky eating."

The moment they sit at the dinner table, they're usually considering the question—"How can I use this half piece of old fatty meat and two mouthfuls of salted vegetable lumps to finish this bowl of overnight rice, and at the same time, make my mouth and stomach feel like I've eaten my fill?"

And this... is undoubtedly a science; it's a skill of "improving the quality of life through methods and means."

As the saying goes, the environment shapes people, and that's the way it is...

People who work their butts off every month and earn just over two thousand yuan are living their lives; people who have never worked a day but can easily take out more than twenty million yuan are also living their lives; these two kinds of people will naturally have great differences in their thoughts, habits, and vision.

Here, we won't discuss what is noble or lowly, good or evil, right or wrong, cause or effect... we'll just say that in terms of "saving costs and improving the quality of life under limited conditions," the former certainly has more knowledge.

Things like renting a suit for a job interview, specifically choosing to buy airline tickets in the morning, reusing old household items, and going to the supermarket late at night to buy discounted vegetables... are common sense or common occurrences for the former, but for the latter, they are unknown or unnecessary to know.

Feng Bujue was obviously someone who "had been poor," of course, he had never been so poor that he had to learn the survival skills of a vagrant (there are also many routines for picking up trash and begging for food, which I won't write about in detail here), but the habit of "eating strategy" to this extent... he had developed since he was a child.

"This kind of combination, huh..." Feng Bujue thought to himself as he looked at the plate of food. "Half of the fried pork chop can be eaten first, and the remaining half can be placed on the rice to keep it warm and let the rice soak up some of the oil; then there's the kao fu (wheat gluten)... it seems that it hasn't been made in the common sweet way, but rather in a salty way, which has to be said is a failure, because this salty taste conflicts with the taste of the salted fish, and needs to be paired with the seaweed and egg drop soup..."

Just as Jue-ge was thinking about these broken things that even I thought were just filling words... suddenly!

"Eh?" He discovered something... something that couldn't help but make him wonder, "What... is this?"

While talking to himself, Feng Bujue opened his mouth halfway, moved his tongue a few times, and then... he simply put his hand into his mouth.

Seconds later, he used the index and middle fingers of his right hand to take something out of his teeth...

"This is..." After staring at the food residue for a few seconds, Feng Bujue quickly came to a conclusion, "Orange?"

Indeed, what he was holding in his hand at this time was a small handful of orange pith.

"Could it be..." Not knowing what he had remembered, the next second, he wiped the saliva that had gotten on his hand on his clothes, and then brought all ten fingers of both hands to his nose, carefully sniffing them.

"Hmm... there really is a smell." After Feng Bujue finished saying this, he turned his head and thought, "But... I don't remember eating any..."

Apart from the plate of food in front of him, Jue-ge had only eaten one meal since he came here, and he remembered very clearly... there were no oranges for dinner yesterday.

"There's a residual orange taste on my fingers, which means that I not only ate oranges, but I also peeled them myself, and it wasn't someone who stuffed them into my mouth while I was unconscious..." Feng Bujue then muttered, "But I don't have any memory of eating oranges at all, it's as if..."

In that instant, a flash of inspiration came to his mind: "It's as if... a section of my memory has been erased."