The cold wind is howling in the sky above Gotham City, and faster than the wind is Bruce, who is running for his life in the black rainy night.
Chasing behind him was a deformed monster. It was a monster with extremely long limbs, like a spider. More importantly, this monster had the face of Alfred, and one of his arms had an even shape.
With a glass of hot milk.
Alfred's voice came from behind with constant screams, becoming weird and shrill: "Master, you can't sleep until you drink milk, have you forgotten?!"
"You are not a good boy!!" Alfred's face became more and more distorted. He waved his limbs several meters long and crawled on the ground, like a giant arthropod. His head rotated 180 degrees and he kept talking.
Shouting: "Good children must drink milk before they can sleep!!!"
As Bruce ran forward, he recalled what happened a few minutes ago.
After discovering the globe and the note, he was attacked again by the clown under the bed and sat up from the bed again.
Undoubtedly, he has more clues, globe? Bruce thought, what would a rotating globe represent?
But the guy under the bed is very difficult to deal with. Bruce will be hit by his dagger at any angle and wake up again.
Unable to achieve results in this area, Bruce could only walk out of the door again and explore the corridors and other rooms, but just like the traps in the bedroom, Bruce was killed again and again by clowns in other rooms.
Soon, Bruce stopped in the middle of the corridor, then looked back at the door of his bedroom.
Every time he woke up, he would open the door from the bedroom to the outside. Then after being killed by the clown outside, he would return to bed and open the door from the inside again.
But he never stood in the corridor and opened the door from the outside in.
When Bruce stood in the dark corridor and held the doorknob of his bedroom, he thought for a long time and then deduced the rules here - he had to face his fears.
When he was in the bedroom, his biggest fear was the story he heard in his childhood. Maybe he thought he had forgotten it all long ago, but obviously, he had not forgotten it in the dream. This fear was engraved on him.
The deeper consciousness has only been uncovered now, and it has become a big mountain that hinders him from finding the truth.
In the corridor, perhaps what he feared most was opening his bedroom door, because he knew that it not only meant the end of one desperate day, but also meant that the next desperate day was about to begin.
Bruce recalled that for a long time, he was very afraid of going back to his room to sleep. Whenever he opened the bedroom door to rest, he would feel a strong sense of guilt and guilt because he
He felt that there were more important things waiting for him to do than sleep.
And now, when he held the bedroom door handle again, that familiar feeling came back to him again, just like the fear he felt when he looked under the bed before.
But he still opened the door directly, and on the other side of the door was the second floor of Wayne Manor.
When he stepped onto the second floor, the door behind him disappeared, but Bruce knew that something more terrifying would happen next, because there were more rooms on the second floor than on the third floor, and more importantly, this was Alfred
A place of rest.
When he walked into the corridor on the second floor, he met Alfred who was carrying a tray with a cup of hot milk on it. Alfred looked at Bruce and asked with concern: "Master, are you having another nightmare?"
?Have a glass of milk."
Bruce made no move, and then suddenly, the glass of milk turned into a funny bomb and exploded with a bang. Alfred was blown to pieces, and Bruce woke up from the bed again.
The second time, he tried to pick up the glass of milk, but the milk still turned into a bomb, killing him and making him have to do it all over again.
"Facing your fears..." Bruce muttered to himself.
What is he afraid of? Is he afraid of Alfred? Or is he afraid of facing Alfred's concern?
Waking up again and again, no matter what posture Bruce used to get the glass of milk, no matter what he said, he would eventually wake up.
But soon, Bruce's thinking became clear. When he faced Alfred again, he said: "Thank you, Alfred, but can you please deliver the milk to my room?"
This time, the milk did not explode, and neither Alfred nor Bruce were killed. Alfred just smiled and nodded, saying: "Okay, Master."
Now, Bruce is on the second floor, and his instruction is for Alfred to deliver the milk to his bedroom on the third floor, so he must now go back to the third floor, but there are no stairs for him to walk here.
The quickest way was to wake up again and appear on the bed in the bedroom on the third floor. However, Bruce was surprised to find that the entire second floor was too normal. There were no scary clowns holding daggers or falling down the stairs.
Bruce found that he could not continue the next cycle.
What do you do when you realize you are dreaming and want to wake up?
Most people will choose to jump off a building. The feeling of falling will quickly wake people up from their dreams, but there is another way, which is to cause enough pain, or in other words, commit suicide.
"Facing the fear..." Bruce muttered the word again, and then he thought that as long as humans are human, they cannot avoid the fear of death, so suicide should be the best way to face the fear.
He found a screwdriver from one of the rooms. The tool was sharp enough to pierce his heart. But when he held the tool against his chest, Bruce discovered that in addition to death, there was also
Another fear surrounded him, making his hands tremble.
What if this isn't a dream?
What if he was deceived?
What if this time, from waking up in bed to walking out of the bedroom, coming to the second floor, meeting Alfred, and asking him to deliver the milk upstairs, everything happened in reality?
What if when the screwdriver was inserted into his heart, he did not wake up, but fell to the ground in pain, and could only wait desperately for death?
That would be the biggest joke of the century.
Bruce had no doubt that a madman would lay traps one after another in order to create this joke, until he was led to voluntarily insert a sharp weapon into his own heart, and then meet death.
Bruce suddenly discovered that he understood all the lunatics in the world, whether they laughed crazily, yelled, harmed themselves, or attacked others, maybe they were just like Bruce now.
Perhaps they attack themselves just to escape from a terrible dream, and when they attack others, they are also attacking some kind of monster in the dream.
Just like if you watch Bruce's actions during this period from the perspective of a bystander, no matter who you are, you will think that he is a madman.
He jumped up and down in his bedroom, lifted the mattress, moved the desk, walked into the bathroom repeatedly, turned the door handle, and checked everything in the room all the time, like a man with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Patients continue to repeat stereotyped behaviors.
In the eyes of onlookers, he had an inexplicable fear of stairs. He would rather jump from the patio than step onto the stairs. He lay on the ground, crawled under the bed, and took out a perfectly normal globe.
After I came out, I thought about it for a long time.
He stood sluggishly in front of the door of his room, but did not push the door open. Facing the butler who brought him milk, he suddenly showed a sad and frightened expression. He held the milk cup as if he was holding a bomb.
Then he waved his arms and threw the milk cup away...
The moment the screwdriver was pressed against Bruce's chest, he suddenly understood the clown.
The clown kept laughing, and others called him a madman, but maybe he just saw a funny joke in his own hallucination. In his own dream, the choice he made was normal.
Every madman is a normal person in his own world.
Just when Bruce was holding the screwdriver and slowly applying force to make a wound on his chest, he suddenly heard a shrill scream, and then, behind Bruce, a monster with Alfred's face
Appeared, he turned his head and shouted: "Master! Why are you not in the room?!"
"You came here to avoid drinking milk! Come back with me quickly, and you can't sleep until you drink milk!!"
No matter what, seeing his butler turn into an arthropod with slender limbs and his head still turning, the impact was a bit too much for Bruce, so his first reaction was to avoid the attack.
He rolled to the right, and then took advantage of Alfred's turning to escape.
There were no stairs on the entire second floor, but the moment Bruce rushed into the corridor, the window at the end of the corridor opened with a bang, and the cold wind rushed in. Bruce had no choice.
When he jumped from the window, he thought that the feeling of weightlessness and dizziness would make him wake up again, but it didn't happen. He fell solidly to the ground, and severe pain shot from his back. and shoulders.
This kind of pain that was so real made Bruce start to wonder if he had really returned to reality, but it was obvious that the monster that violated common sense reminded him that this was still a dream.
The rain began to get heavier and heavier, and the roars of the monsters behind him began to get louder and louder. Everything seemed to become more chaotic, as if it suddenly changed from a puzzle game to a horror game, and there was still an extreme chase. kind.
Bruce sped up his running pace because he was not sure if he would have a chance to wake up again if he was really caught by the monster.
Bruce was very familiar with the road outside Wayne Manor because he had walked it countless times, but now, he found that the area around his home seemed to have become an endless maze.
The monster keeps chasing and Bruce keeps running, just like the common nightmare of being chased. As time goes by, the spirit and physical strength are constantly consumed.
What are the rules? Bruce thought, face your fears?
fear……
Suddenly, he stopped at a familiar intersection, which he had passed several times but ignored.
It was an intersection that he was very familiar with. He knew exactly how many pieces of gravel there were and how many wires there were, because it was the sound of a gunshot there that changed his life.
