Chapter 13 The Hope of Leaving Can Only Be Placed on Oneself

When the door closed, Feng Bujue was once again alone in the small ward.

He sat down on the spot and began to think.

"Although I said what I needed to say, I can't place too much hope on this doctor..." Feng Bujue thought to himself, "It's not hard to see from his attitude that he has no intention of 'curing' me... He's just thinking about completing the basic work requirements, finishing his two-month rotation, and then for the next ten months, he won't have to stay in this godforsaken place."

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

"Not just him, the other doctors probably have the same mentality...

"First of all, this mental hospital is a state institution, and the salaries they receive for their rotation here are definitely fixed; in other words... there's no extra profit to be made. Therefore, the motivation in terms of benefits... can already 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 the logic of ordinary people, being locked up here for a lifetime is already letting us off easy... Under this premise, if someone really 'recovers and is discharged' from here and re-enters society, it will inevitably attract a lot of public pressure.

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

"Well... thinking about it this way, putting my hopes 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 suspicious points in the 'knowledge reserve'.

"The reason why no one has brought it up so far is nothing more than two things—one, no one has seriously looked at that thing at all, they just treat it as a story to read casually, or just skim through it for work needs; two, some people have indeed seen some suspicious points in it, but... they didn't say anything, because they don't want to spend time and effort for a 'hopeless super-madman' like me, let alone take unnecessary and huge risks for me."

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

............

More than an hour later, it was lunchtime.

The person who came to deliver the food today didn't even say a word, just knocked on the door twice from the outside with some hard object (the orderly was equipped with an electric baton), and then directly shoved the tray in from the lower section of the door.

"Ah... is it mealtime again..." Feng Bujue said as he crawled to the door, "To be fair, the food here is still okay..."

He took the tray in front of him, surveyed it, and began to formulate a dining strategy.

Let me explain here, the so-called "dining strategy" is actually—what to eat first, what to eat last, how to make it go well with the rice, and how long it will take to finish it.

Generally speaking, children from relatively poor families, as long as they are not too stupid... they will easily develop such a habit.

Because children from poor families do not have the conditions to "eat whatever they want", nor do they have the capital to "leave leftovers" or "be picky eaters".

The moment they sit down at the dinner table, they are usually considering the question—"How can I use this half piece of old fat meat and two bites of pickled mustard tuber to finish this bowl of overnight rice, and also make my mouth and stomach have the illusion of being full and eating well?"

And this... is undoubtedly a science; it is a technique of "improving the quality of life through methods".

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

People who work hard every month and earn more than two thousand yuan are living their lives; people who have never worked but can easily take out more than twenty million at home are also living their lives; the thoughts, habits, horizons, etc... of these two types of people will naturally be very different.

Here, we will not discuss anything about nobility, baseness, good, evil, right, wrong, cause, and effect... let's just say that in terms of the knowledge of "saving costs and improving the quality of life under limited conditions", the former definitely has more mastery.

Things like renting a suit for a job interview, choosing to buy air 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 things they don't know or don't need to know.

Feng Bujue, obviously, is also someone who "has been poor", of course, he has not been so poor that he has to learn the survival skills of the homeless (there are also many routines for picking up trash and begging, I won't write about them in detail here), but a habit of the degree of "eating strategy"... he has cultivated since he was a child.

"This kind of combination..." Feng Bujue looked at the plate of food and thought to himself, "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 get a little oil; then there's the kao fu (wheat gluten)... it seems that it hasn't adopted the common sweet method, but has been made salty, which has to be said to be a failure, because this salty taste conflicts with the taste of the salted fish, and needs to be paired with seaweed and egg drop soup..."

Just when Jue Ge was pondering these broken things that even I think are just padding the word count... suddenly!

"Eh?" He discovered something... something that made him exclaim in confusion, "What is this?"

As he muttered to himself, Feng Bujue opened his mouth slightly, 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 moment was a small tuft of orange pith.

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

"Hmm... there really is some." After Feng Bujue finished saying this, he turned his eyes and thought, "But... I don't remember eating it..."

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 flavor on my fingers, which means that I not only ate oranges, but I also peeled them myself, it wasn't that someone stuffed them into my mouth when I was unconscious..." Feng Bujue then muttered, "But I have no memory of eating oranges at all, it's like..."

In that instant, a flash of inspiration appeared in his mind: "It's like... a piece of memory has been erased."