Chapter 328: The Old Humanity

Pandora now stood at Dr. Brenner’s side.

One hand rested lightly on his shoulder, her face maintaining a composed smile, as if everything was under control.

The other hand, she naturally tucked behind her back.

As her five fingers gently closed—

In the hollow of her palm, a heart woven from illusory crimson threads suddenly materialized with a throb.

The heart was beating.

Once. Twice.

It was the manifested “heart” of the enemy bound by the Heartstrings.

The gunman’s body trembled.

He tried to struggle, but the threads sliced into the blurred contours of his form, locking him firmly in place.

His fingers had been trembling the entire time.

Under normal circumstances, he would have pulled that trigger long ago, firing the fatal bullet.

And yet...

The impossibly resilient threads had locked his finger dead, making that shot impossible to fire.

Between trigger and finger, that final, insurmountable gap forever remained.

“There now, it’s alright.”

Pandora soothed him softly.

Her voice was gentle and calm, as if coaxing a frightened child.

But deep within her eyes, an icy glint flashed.

In the next moment, as Pandora’s soft reassurance left her lips, the hand behind her back suddenly clenched tight.

Crack.

The illusory heart was crushed!

That heart woven from crimson thread disintegrated in an instant, dissolving into countless tiny motes of light that scattered into the air.

The gunman convulsed violently.

Across the surface of his blurred body, innumerable fine cutting marks appeared—as if countless invisible threads had simultaneously tightened and then released him.

Immediately after, like a building block structure robbed of its support, he collapsed from within.

He crumbled into a mess of tattered blanket fragments, mixed with scraps of some unidentifiable black fabric, strewn across the now-ruined bare floor...

For some inexplicable reason, Dr. Brenner felt himself breathe a sigh of relief.

That tension—the feeling of being watched from behind by something dreadful, staring fixedly—vanished completely in a single instant.

He was still wondering why such a sensation had suddenly washed over him.

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A moment ago, something palpably cold had pressed against the nape of his neck, making his hairs stand on end.

But now, there was nothing.

Only the faint buzz of the incandescent lamp, and the distant murmur of city noise seeping in through the window.

He shook his head, tossing aside this untimely, strange feeling, and prepared to continue dealing with the patient before him, apparently in the throes of a panic attack...

Only to discover, with astonishment, that the girl—whose face had been twisted in agony, body rigid and taut, possibly even needing a sedative injection to calm her—had suddenly stopped struggling.

Her entire being had gone still.

She sat on the treatment bed, her breathing gradually evening out. Though her complexion was still somewhat pale, the terror in her eyes had already receded by more than half, replaced by a quiet, almost docile compliance. Like a startled kitten whose fur had been soothed smooth.

Dr. Brenner studied the girl with a look of surprise. Then he noticed that the only possible cause for such a change seemed merely to be... That Ms. Pandora had just murmured a soft reassurance to her, and then taken her hand. Just that simple. Nothing more.

A thoughtful expression surfaced in Dr. Brenner’s eyes. His mind had already begun brewing how to describe this particular “reassurance therapy case” in his patient notes.

Was it some form of immediate emotional stabilization based on a trust relationship? Or a rare post-hypnotic suggestion continuation effect?

As he turned, about to say something to Pandora, his peripheral vision caught sight of the floor.

“What in the...???”

His voice shot up a full octave.

“What happened to my Persian rug?!”

The originally pristine, expensive, hand-woven Persian rug now looked as if rabid dogs had been at it—shredded beyond recognition.

The pile was torn and curled in disarray, the wool threads snapped, the warp and weft structure violently destroyed. Ragged tears and holes gaped everywhere, even exposing the mottled, old wooden floorboards beneath, stripped of their carpet covering.

That was a treasure he’d paid a small fortune to acquire from an antiques dealer!

Dr. Brenner stared at the wreckage, his eyes brimming with anguish. The expression on his face was almost more pained than when he’d faced the hypnosis crisis moments before.

Pandora shrugged, the picture of innocence.

She casually offered reassurance: “No idea. Wasn’t it like this from the moment we walked in?”

“One thing’s for sure: the two of us girls definitely don’t have the strength to do this.”

“It must have been your last patient going berserk, right? You know, people with unstable mental conditions—their destructive capacity is always astonishing.”

Her tone was light and breezy, as if this were just a perfectly ordinary little matter.

Dr. Brenner blinked, momentarily stunned.

A thought seemed to flash through his mind, as if trying to protest, but before it could even take shape, it was replaced by another, far smoother cognition.

Right... It does seem like it was like this from the moment we entered...

He didn’t respond, but Pandora’s explanation had already sunk deep into his mind, becoming his “normal understanding” of the event.

Brenner knelt on the floor, caressing the remnants of the rug. His fingertips brushed against the broken fibers, his expression caught between tears and extreme, heart-wrenching distress.

Even though his cognition, owing to matters related to the Anomaly, was already self-correcting—automatically filling in and rationalizing the unreasonable parts of this memory—the visceral pang of losing a precious object would not fade so easily.

It felt exactly like watching a carefully curated piece of porcelain shatter at someone’s careless hand. Even knowing it wasn’t intentional, even knowing it was beyond recovery, that lump of stifled frustration still sat lodged in his chest, going neither up nor down.

It took a long while for Brenner to recover from that sense of heartbreak. He stood up and finally let out a long sigh, utterly dejected.

“My apologies... That rug cost me a great deal, and I’ve barely had it for any time at all...”

“Ah, forget it, let it go. This is my problem. I shouldn’t let something like this delay your friend’s treatment...”

“Not at all. Miss K and I are both very satisfied with this session.”

Pandora replied with a smile, her tone entirely sincere.

Even though the session lacked the post-hypnosis summary a psychoanalyst would usually provide from a professional perspective, she was telling the truth.

Deceptive as it might seem, what took place under hypnosis—just a dream, really—had, in reality, consumed a full two hours of treatment. In those two hours, she had essentially learned everything she’d come to discover.

For instance, the nature of Miss Anomaly was, fundamentally, far closer to human than previously assessed—a vast distance from the inhuman Anomaly. Her performance within the dream made this point clear.

Her way of thinking, her emotional responses, her capacity for logical reasoning—these were entirely normal human traits. She complained of boredom, she’d playfully pout at a friend’s teasing, she feared horror stories, and she could find joy in good food.