Коллекция Хироми

Глава 15

Yan Hao was baffled. What kind of hypnosis was this? He had been fully conscious the whole time.

“That was just a test. It went well—you’re easily hypnotized,” Zhou Yifeng said. Seeing that Yan Hao was still a little confused, he added, “Some people can’t follow the hypnotist’s feelings; they have too much resistance, so they can’t do hypnotherapy.”

Yan Hao then realized that the real hypnosis hadn't even started yet.

Next, Zhou Yifeng had Yan Hao sit down in a chair. Then, as if by magic, he pulled a crystal ball with a silver chain from his work clothes pocket.

"Adjust your breathing, make it even and calm." Zhou Yifeng stood a step away from Yan Hao. "Yes, now take a deep breath... then exhale... very good, very good, inhale again..."

After the inhalation and exhalation were repeated three times, Zhou Yifeng continued, "Okay, now slowly feel it—the muscles in your head relax, then the muscles in your neck, completely relax..." He spoke very slowly, repeating each sentence several times, starting by instructing Yan Hao to relax his head muscles, all the way to finally relaxing his feet completely.

Yan Hao felt quite comfortable. His consciousness was no longer so clear. He had to admit that Zhou Yifeng's tone and volume were very well controlled—they gave him an extraordinary sense of security and peace, and he found himself unconsciously doing what he said.

Zhou Yifeng placed the crystal ball between Yan Hao's eyes and began to slowly swing it from side to side.

“Look at it, yes, keep looking at it, let your gaze follow it. Don’t have any other thoughts.” Zhou Yifeng’s voice was very low, almost a murmur.

The crystal ball had been swinging for two minutes. Yan Hao felt his eyes were sore and swollen. At this moment, Zhou Yifeng said, "Now you're starting to want to sleep, you really need to sleep... Sleep, sleep... Your eyelids are getting heavier and heavier, sleep..." His speech became slower and slower, and his voice became lower and lower.

Yan Hao closed his eyes. His consciousness grew increasingly blurred...

Once Zhou Yifeng was certain that Yan Hao was fully in a treatable hypnotic state, he began asking questions. His voice was lower and his speech was much slower.

"Now, all you need to do is nod or shake your head to indicate whether you agree or disagree with the question. Tell me, is your name Yan Hao?"

Yan Hao leaned his head back in the chair, but it was clear that he was shaking his head.

Zhou Yifeng paused for a moment, taken aback. He clearly remembered that the student had introduced himself as Yan Hao. He then asked in a different phrasing: "Your name isn't Yan Hao, is it?"

Yan Hao nodded slightly this time.

Zhou Yifeng continued, "Is the power that controls you something you're familiar with?"

Yan Hao did not react.

"You're feeling very painful and uncomfortable right now, aren't you?" Zhou Yifeng changed the subject.

Yan Hao nodded slowly again.

"Okay, find the root of this pain, you can find it! You definitely can! Then tell me, what do you see?"

A moment later, Yan Hao began to fidget restlessly in his chair. His breathing became rapid, and his hands clenched into fists.

Suddenly, Zhou Yifeng heard a low, rumbling sound in Yan Hao's throat. "Don't get involved in this." This voice was clearly different from Yan Hao's earlier tone. It was the voice of an unfamiliar man, filled with anger and unease.

Zhou Yifeng was somewhat bewildered and at a loss; he seemed to have never encountered such a situation before.

Almost as soon as Zhou Yifeng was considering what to do next, Yan Hao jumped up from his chair and grabbed Zhou Yifeng's neck with both hands.

Yan Hao's face was contorted with extreme anger, but his eyes remained tightly shut. He was still uttering those hoarse, low murmurs that didn't belong to him: "What do you want to know? What do you want to do?"

Zhou Yifeng was quickly pinned against the wall by Yan Hao. He tried to pry open those two unusually strong hands, but to no avail, and even breathing became increasingly difficult. "Help, help, help!" Zhou Yifeng could only extend his left foot to kick the closed wooden door. His voice grew weaker and weaker. "No, don't do this, please..."

Shen Zihan wasn't in the outer office. After being kicked out by Zhou Yifeng, he glanced at the China Youth Daily on the table for a while, and then, feeling bored, he simply went to the balcony to watch the pretty girls passing by.

When he heard the shouts and the sound of the door being kicked open from inside, and then kicked the door of the treatment room open, Yan Hao was still tightly gripping Zhou Yifeng's neck with his eyes closed. Zhou Yifeng's face was ashen, his eyes were bulging, and he looked like he was about to die.

Without thinking twice, Shen Zihan roared, "What are you doing?!" and desperately grabbed Yan Hao's hands and pulled him away.

Having managed to break free, Zhou Yifeng leaned weakly against the wall, coughing violently. His face was filled with fear.

After Yan Hao was dragged back to the chair by Shen Zihan, his head slumped backward, and he seemed to lose consciousness again. No matter how much Shen Zihan patted him, he couldn't wake him up.

Zhou Yifeng gestured to stop Shen Zihan. He coughed as he said, "No... don't touch him, don't touch him! He's still... still in a hypnotic state. Calling him like this will cause trouble."

Shen Zihan looked at Yan Hao, then at the disheveled Zhou Yifeng, unsure of what to do.

“Let’s go out first,” Zhou Yifeng said to Shen Zihan as he slowly straightened up. “Please…don’t disturb him again! Is his name really Yan Hao?”

“Of course, that’s his only name.” Shen Zihan found his question rather strange. “Professor Zhou, what just happened? Yan Hao, has he gone mad?”

"No, no," Zhou Yifeng said weakly, sitting on the sofa in the outer room. He was panting heavily as he spoke. "It's because the subconscious energy within him is too strong, too strong."

"Professor Zhou, are you saying that someone is really controlling him?" Shen Zihan handed a glass of water to Zhou Yifeng. "Have some water, I was terrified just now."

“Yes, someone is controlling him—you could say that! But I don’t know what it is yet.” Zhou Yifeng, still shaken from the shock, muttered to himself, his left hand trembling as he took the cup, a fine layer of sweat on his forehead. “This case is strange, very strange!”

About seven or eight minutes later, Zhou Yifeng returned to the treatment room. Yan Hao, still fast asleep, was in the chair.

“Now, I’ll count from ten to one, and you’ll slowly, slowly wake up. Ten, nine…” Zhou Yifeng’s voice trembled slightly. He spoke very, very slowly.

Yan Hao stirred in his chair. His lips and eyes trembled. He seemed to be slowly waking up.

"Three...two...one...okay, you're awake, you're really awake." With the last command, Yan Hao's eyes opened completely.

The first thing he showed was a shy smile.

"I really felt like I fell asleep. I don't know anything." It seems he was satisfied with this hypnosis experiment, and his mental state was quite good after a nap.

Shen Zihan looked at him as if he were a stranger. After a long while, he asked, "Haozi, were you about to kill someone just now?"

Yan Hao rubbed his eyes and said, "Kill who? I don't understand what you're saying."

"You didn't choke Professor Zhou just now?" Shen Zihan asked. "I mean, just now, you were acting like a madman."

Yan Hao looked puzzled.

"It's alright, it's alright, it's not his fault, it has nothing to do with him." Zhou Yifeng waved his hand, his face dark and dejected, completely lacking the spirit he had just displayed. "You guys, go... Let me think, I need to think about it."

Only Yan Hao was still looking at Zhou Yifeng with anticipation, waiting for his final conclusion.

"Haozi, why do I always feel like you smell like formaldehyde?"

That noon, Liao Guangzhi went to work as a porter at the school's charity club, while Alien Boy Li Yuanbin was called out by Ren Xuefei to go shopping and accompany her. Only Yan Hao and Shen Zihan were in the dormitory, one washing his hair and the other studying chess scores—besides enjoying online games, Shen Zihan was also very good at Chinese chess, sometimes even playing blindfold chess with Alien Boy in bed and always winning.

"You're talking nonsense. I can't smell it at all." Yan Hao stood by the sink on the balcony, scratching his head full of Head & Shoulders foam as he laughed and cursed.

The entire dormitory was filled with the rich scent of Head & Shoulders shampoo. But Shen Zihan still sniffed hard. "Really, especially at noon, when the sun is shining brightly, it's like it's emanating from you."

Yan Hao stopped what he was doing. He slowly turned his face. "What did you say?"

Shen Zihan looked up from the chess score. Just as he was about to reply, he saw an unfamiliar face appear above Yan Hao's face—a face that looked unnatural and pale.

Shen Zihan steadied himself, and all he could see was the bright sunlight shining on Yan Hao's face.

Shen Zihan got goosebumps all over. Despite the midday sun, he felt a chill run through him. He remembered the old man Zhou Yifeng's question: "Is his name really Yan Hao?"

His head was buzzing for a moment. Then he suddenly changed his mind and said, "Oh, maybe I'm just too sensitive to that smell. It's nothing."

While washing his face, Yan Hao said, "Damn it, do you have rhinitis? You're just trying to frame me!"

A faint smell of formaldehyde wafted into Shen Zihan's nostrils. He remained silent.

Yan Hao went to see Director Zhou Yifeng again by himself. That was four days after his hypnotherapy session.

He was still waiting for Zhou Yifeng to tell him the conclusion of the treatment—when he left last time, the old man said in a strange way that he needed to think about it.

He just felt like he had a good nap. As for what Shen Zihan said—that he had choked Professor Zhou—he didn't believe it at all and refused to admit it. Later, Shen Zihan said that this was called "ignorance is bliss."

Yan Hao felt he needed to re-evaluate himself; for the first time, he felt he had wasted nearly nineteen years of his life. And the most fundamental and crucial question he needed to answer was, "Who am I?"

This question, which is almost like an ultimate philosophical question, is now haunting him day and night.

Unexpectedly, Zhou Yifeng now seemed to avoid his gaze.

"Well... it's really hard to say... Based on your behavior at the time, it could stem from a deep childhood trauma, or... or a projection of unmet desires in reality... For example, some people lack maternal affection as infants, so they don't have enough security as adults... which can lead to anxiety or even violent tendencies like yours... Hmm, there's another possibility, there's another possibility..."

"Professor Zhou, what exactly is the reason?" Yan Hao couldn't help but interject. Zhou Yifeng had just spouted a bunch of convoluted and irrelevant theories. "Professor Zhou, do you think this is a psychological problem?"

Yan Hao's eyes shone with anxiety and eagerness. He desperately wanted the only correct and thorough answer.

Zhou Yifeng seemed powerless. He kept giving evasive answers, then started bringing up things like libido and the Oedipus complex. Yan Hao thought: Wang Yanyan was absolutely right, he's a complete disciple of Freud!

Yan Hao was almost in despair. He prepared to interrupt Zhou Yifeng's nagging and then get up to leave.

Then Zhou Yifeng's words drifted into his ears again. "Perhaps we can put you into a deeper hypnotic state and let you find the reason yourself."

As if grasping at a straw, Yan Hao disregarded politeness and interrupted Zhou Yifeng again, asking, "Is it effective? What does 'deeper hypnotic state' mean?"

Zhou Yifeng twirled his Parker pen with three fingers as he said, “We can divide the hypnotic state into three levels. The first level is what we reached that day: your consciousness disappears and you enter the primary level of the subconscious. You can perform actions or answer questions—questions you wouldn't normally want to answer. The second level is the intermediate level of the subconscious. At this level, you will exhibit extraordinary abilities. For example, your memory, physical strength, and imitation abilities will increase exponentially, even dozens of times—I've done experiments where, at this hypnotic level, students can memorize over a hundred unfamiliar English words in an hour. Or, I can get a student who has never studied acting to imitate Zhao Benshan's actions and language!”

"Is it like developing special abilities?" Yan Hao interjected. He found hypnosis much more interesting than those psychoanalytic methods.

"You could say that! At the intermediate level, your subconscious is exposed more. Your abilities are therefore more powerful. The human brain is actually a supercomputer. We normal people only use less than five percent of its energy reserves. Even Einstein only used less than ten percent of his brain's energy. And more than ninety percent of the energy reserves are in the subconscious."

As he spoke, Zhou Yifeng pointed with his pen to an oil painting hanging on the wall to his right.

It was a silvery-white iceberg in the vast ocean. Zhou Yifeng said, "The iceberg you see is only a tiny part of its total volume. Our energy is like an iceberg—only a very small part floats on the surface and can be used and understood by us. The other 90% or more is underwater, and we may never know it in our lifetime."

Yan Hao nodded thoughtfully in agreement.

Zhou Yifeng continued, "Furthermore—at the third level of hypnosis, it can even induce certain physiological changes. For example, some spells in Tibetan Buddhism and ancient Egypt can help people reach the third level of hypnosis in a very short time—thereby controlling a person's physiology and psychology—and even causing death! A Japanese hypnotist once conducted an experiment, touching the skin of a hypnotized person with an ordinary bamboo chopstick, but telling them that they were touching a piece of hot coal. Then, burns actually appeared on the hypnotized person's skin! This is the power of the subconscious mind, which is almost omnipotent."

Zhou Yifeng became more and more excited as he spoke, while Yan Hao listened with his mouth agape, completely dumbfounded.

Finally, Yan Hao asked, "At which level can I understand the cause of my illness?"

“The second level is enough! The third level is too dangerous, and besides, I don’t have that level of skill.” Zhou Yifeng replied with a shy smile.

"I'm willing!" Yan Hao's eyes revealed urgency and longing.

As arranged by Zhou Yifeng—for safety reasons, Yan Hao had to choose a trustworthy companion. Naturally, Shen Zihan was the perfect choice.

However, Shen Zihan vehemently opposed Yan Hao's proposal. He argued that the previous hypnosis experiment had nearly resulted in death, and he couldn't risk playing with fire again with Yan Hao. Later, Yan Hao compromised by suggesting they bring Liao Guangzhi along, and Shen Zihan finally agreed—he figured Liao Guangzhi was strong enough; if one couldn't subdue Yan Hao, surely two would do the trick?

The second hypnosis experiment took place a full week after the first. On the same day, Zhou Yifeng also left a female teacher surnamed Yang as an assistant—Shen Zihan believed he was once bitten, twice shy. In total, five people participated in this experiment.

Only Yan Hao and Zhou Yifeng remained in the treatment room. The rest were asked to sit in the outer lounge. Zhou Yifeng instructed them that they absolutely must not leave! Moreover, the door to the treatment room was only ajar—not locked like last time.

Zhou Yifeng repeated the same procedure. From relaxing the muscles to the swinging of the crystal ball and the verbal cues, it only took longer than before, and Zhou Yifeng spoke more slowly. If there was any difference, it was that Zhou Yifeng placed his hand on Yan Hao's head and pressed it for a short while—like a Tantric master performing an initiation ceremony.

It was clear that the two of them had reached a level of perfect coordination. Yan Hao soon lowered his eyelids.

To outsiders, Yan Hao appeared to be asleep. However, those under hypnosis are not asleep in the ordinary sense—they are in a different kind of "awakening" state—the awakening of the subconscious and the dormancy of the conscious mind are proceeding simultaneously.

Upon being "awakened," Yan Hao heard a sound like a surging tide around him. His body was falling rapidly.

After that moment, he felt himself at the bottom of a deep pool, with no light and no other sound. He only felt that the water was not very large, and his fingers could touch the hard, concrete-like obstacles on both sides—he was a little scared, he didn't know where he was—when he reached up again, he could still touch the hard, concrete-like obstacles.

It was a pool of water—Yan Hao vaguely realized. He wanted to shout "Help!" but the water surrounding him quickly filled his mouth—a bitter and astringent taste!

Then, his consciousness experienced a brief "blank." When his subconscious was "awakened" again, he was already standing up in a long corridor—a corridor so familiar—empty and deserted, with only the echo of his footsteps. He saw someone standing at the end of the corridor, and he ran over excitedly, terrified of being alone there. He recognized the person—it was himself! Was it another Yan Hao standing there? He saw his reflection smiling.

He approached that person. That "himself." For a moment, he felt the two become one.

Finally, he saw Teacher Xia, Shen Zihan, Liao Guangzhi, and Zhou Yifeng.

He awoke from the hypnotic state.