Dow and Carbon-Based Monkey Breeding Guidelines

Chapter 1009 Ligeia (Part )
As the night deepened, the air in the study became colder and damper. Chadwick's toes, curled in his wool socks, were frozen like a bunch of melting ice lumps, but his throat was still dry.

"Would you like anything to drink?" he asked, without giving any reason. "Whiskey? Beer? Or just water? I suppose you've travelled a long way to get here--"

The guest looked at him patiently. "I don't need anything, Chad. I think you've figured that out by now. It may be hard to accept, but you can't keep pretending it doesn't exist."

Chadwick stared at the glass. "I believe you are you." He said, "I heard your voice, your unique argument, and I knew it was you who was talking to me... But, Li, where is the real you now? What is sitting in front of me at this moment? Is this the 'power' you mentioned?"

“This is one of a kind.”

"Anything else?"

"The world is full of mysteries. But Chad, please don't try to figure out everything about the vast world from me. I can only tell you what I have experienced personally as confidently and responsibly as possible; and to explain this, we must go back to the beginning of the matter."

"You mean that day?"

"That day," the guest's stiff face slightly tightened towards the edge, as if to express a smile, "may be the starting point of the matter for Mr. Anthony Kent, but for me, it was just one of the more important turning points. In my eyes, the story started earlier, and I'm afraid there are many parts that seem absurd to you."

She suddenly stopped and refilled Chad's empty glass like a attentive host. Chad smiled bitterly and nodded in thanks, reaching out to hold the foamy beer glass, as if holding a piece of driftwood in the wind and waves. Then the guest's self-narration came rolling in like a tide:

"You already know a lot about my family background. Apart from the difference in cultural background, you and I have similar situations in our respective families. Coming from such a family, it is not appropriate to have too high illusions about the relationship between parents and one's own status. Compared with people of similar class and situation, the grief my father showed after my mother's death and the energy he invested in his children's education were roughly in line with the average secular standard. Therefore, when he decided to remarry, my brother and I had no special opinions about this foreign stepmother with a strange origin. At that time, we thought that this was just a behavior based on human natural needs, but when I actually met this stepmother, I was surprised to find that this was not the case. My father had an extremely fanatical obsession with her, which had surpassed a middle-aged man's desire for youthful vitality and the charm of the opposite sex; this kind of fanaticism that completely disregarded identity was usually only seen in eighteen-year-old teenagers."

Chadwick couldn't help laughing. "I wouldn't make that conclusion," he said. "The old house on fire - no offense to your father, Lee, but that's the metaphor you used to tell me."

"I know. This kind of thing is common in the world, and there is nothing new about it, but I want to declare with all my personal credibility: this matter is special. It is not just that an aging man falls in love with any young and beautiful young woman; the real point of this matter is that my stepmother is an extremely unusual person. If you are willing to think that I was different in the past, her strange charm is a hundred times better than mine. Out of caution, I am not convenient to say her real name here, we will call her 'Ophelia' in this story."

“It’s not a very good name.”

"That's exactly what I want to borrow from this allegory. Chad, you've been to Gillian's dramatic literature club. Although my intentions are not pure, I assume that you have an idea of ​​the image that is usually associated with the name 'Ophelia'. And my stepmother, although she is not really a girl, has that kind of temperament. When you see her, you will be reminded of the Ophelia in the play. And I don't mean the pure girl before she went crazy, but the scene that painters love the most - 'Ophelia in the water'. Her beauty is terrifying. Quiet, ethereal, and without the breath of life. The way she looks at you is like there is a layer of constantly flowing river water between you. Even if the water is clear, you know that she is in a dangerous position that you cannot touch."

Chadwick stared at the foam on the rim of the wine glass. "I can't imagine it," he said honestly, "I've seen a few of the paintings you mentioned, but I can't feel the horror you described. It's even harder for me to imagine a living person having that feeling. You know, Ophelia in the water is usually..."

"That's exactly what I wanted to say."

"May I take the liberty of commenting on your father's preferences?"

The guests immediately burst into laughter. "Chad," she said without complaint, even cheerfully, "our most pertinent and reliable Chad! You always try to bring us back to reality. But my father is not important in this story. I want to emphasize that this is not a story about family trauma. For me at the time, it was a difficult puzzle; and even now I must declare to you that everything I say now is not an objective fact with irrefutable evidence, but my personal feelings, and I was only five or six years old at the time. At that time, although my father was madly in love with his new wife and obeyed her completely, I could not feel 'Ophim'. "Leah has the same enthusiasm for my father. She treats him gently and kindly, in line with the attitude of a young lady who marries into a wealthy family, but every time I see her in the house where my father lives, her expression and eyes leave me with an indelible impression that she doesn't particularly care about my father, but is always paying attention to me. I don't want these words to show an overly narcissistic tendency, and young children are indeed prone to self-centeredness, but every time she appears, she always looks at me with that quiet gaze. As far as I can observe, she has never paid the same attention to my brother or father-"

Chadwick stretched out his hand to grab the wine glass. The guest grabbed his wrist in mid-air and said with a malicious smile: "Chad! Please don't be in a hurry to toast. It's far from the time for you to drink."

"That's not what I came here to hear," Chadwick said bitterly. "You all say I'm old-fashioned at heart."

"I haven't said anything outrageous or outrageous yet. Everything I said was just a statement from memory."

"But I'm familiar with that tone of yours. It's the tone Jillian uses every time she wants to tell me some 'special story'."

"I shouldn't joke too much, Chad. Meeting old friends again always makes people feel younger. Everything I just said is not fiction, but it's not the kind of plot you worry about. All the weird mysteries I describe to you now can be explained later, although it's only my personal explanation. You need to judge its rationality yourself." Chadwick reluctantly retracted his hand under the table. The guest continued, "As I have just mentioned, our 'Ophelia', although she married my father, never gave me the feeling that she was passionate about this marriage. She was neither an Oedipus who worshipped older men, nor a speculator who wanted to use her beauty to get a good life or a shortcut to career. She had her own career - she was an opera singer and a piano musician, and she was also quite accomplished in painting, although she no longer had to make a living from this after marrying my father. The impression of her creations was just like her own. Even if it was a copy of a famous artist, you could tell she was in the details. There were a few paintings in her works that did not particularly arouse my thoughts at first, but they almost drove me crazy many years later: there were a few landscape paintings with summer themes, which were definitely painted in the garden of a house owned by my father, but she did not live there normally; There is a figure painting with a terrace of a villa in the background, which depicts the silhouette of a girl. The person in the painting has a strange temperament similar to her own, but her age is undoubtedly much younger and her hair color is different; the painting that troubled me the most, and even gave me nightmares for several years, she named it "Tower". The content of the painting is exactly an abandoned tower. It is like standing at the bottom of the tower and looking up. In the heavy rain like a veil, lightning tears the dome apart, and reaches the hazy blood shadow on the top of the tower... I was deeply impressed when I first saw this painting, not to mention that after her death, she specifically mentioned in her will that this painting should be given to me. Since then, I have had dreams related to it from time to time. Chad, I dreamed that I climbed up the abandoned tower and my ears were filled with the sound of thunder. The vibration pierced from the sky to the tower, and then penetrated the earth, splitting me and the whole world into two... In the final stage of my illness, I could see this dream as long as I closed my eyes. "

"This only shows that your stepmother's paintings are very contagious. Her works and her temperament have influenced you."

"I would have thought so too if it hadn't been for what happened later. But now we come to the part about these paintings that really surprised me. A year after Ophelia married my father, she became pregnant and gave birth to my half sister. But on the same day that my sister was born, she died very suddenly."

"Difficult labor?" Chadwick said hesitantly, "Or..."

"My grandparents were not happy about my father's hasty remarriage, but I can assure you that my mother's family had nothing to do with it. What happened in the delivery room that day was so bizarre and tragic that I won't tell you in detail for the sake of the dignity of the deceased. In short, everyone in the delivery room died except my sister. My father survived because he waited outside the delivery room at Ophelia's request, but his heart was almost dead after that. He seemed to be still alive only to raise my half-sister. My sister looks very much like her mother. Even though you can see a little oriental blood in her hair color and bone structure, Ophelia's blood is still reflected to the greatest extent in her. When she grew up a little, her personality and talents gradually showed Ophelia's characteristics. Although she was still much more cheerful, the grotesque and terrible death of her biological mother has always been a shadow hanging over the family. Even if the servants were forbidden to talk about this matter openly, you can still imagine the rumors in private."

"You can't blame people for being curious about things like this."

"I'm not surprised by this," the guest clarified. "In fact, I myself can't get rid of the shadow of this incident. Chad, I remember that many years ago, at least once or twice I mentioned this half-sister to you..."

"Jillian and I never knew that she and you had the same father and mother," Chadwick reminded. He hesitated, then added, "In my impression, you only have one sister who you have a very close relationship with."

"I only have this one sister, Chad. But your impression is correct. I have a very good relationship with her, to a degree that I cannot explain myself. But again, this phenomenon only occurs to me, and my brother, who is born to the same mother, is not affected - considering that our views on many things are completely opposite, I can't say that this is unnatural. In any case, my sister regards our eldest brother as a stranger, and even the father-daughter relationship is very weak. She has inherited the characteristics of Ophelia in this regard. As she grew older, I gradually developed an anxiety without any definite basis: I already felt that she would repeat Ophelia's fate. Their similarity has gone beyond the influence of blood that we usually say, it's a replica! I know it's ridiculous to say it now, but please think about it, many of the worst mental illnesses are hereditary, and those strange stories about family curses are often born. Who knows if the bizarre tragedy on the day of Ophelia's childbirth will be repeated in her descendants? But I felt it at the time, I felt that there was something else in it, an element that I couldn't name exactly..."

Chadwick listened attentively, and was brought into a fantasy by the guest's enchanted voice, but a word suddenly jumped into his mind. "Morena." He blurted out, "It's like Morena, when the mother dies, she becomes a daughter..."

6◇9◇Book◇Bar

"Only by itself," the guest murmured, "only by itself! The only one who will never change... Chad, Morella was written in 1835, and three years later Poe published Ligeia. The two are so similar in structure and theme that you can almost conclude that there is a succession relationship. You can even regard them as sister works, but Ligeia goes further. Do you understand what I mean? Morella's rebirth depends on reproduction and bloodline, while Ligeia has achieved true spiritual immortality. She no longer relies on copying a new self from the exhausted old self, but returns to the world from any mental weakness, no longer needing to grow and reshape herself again, she has achieved the path that Morella failed to achieve, the path of ascension..."

Her soulless eyes were facing Chadwick, the deep well of Democritus! It was unfathomable, and its coldness could extinguish the fires of purgatory and hell, and then lead down to the misty underworld of the classical era, to the ethereal realm where the goddesses lived in loneliness. The burning dark red hidden in the deepest of the deep was the glory of the tripod mentioned by Mephistopheles in the past; and the goddesses whose names were unknown to mortals - the mothers praised by the devil! Their shining secret key was in the abyss-like eyes of the old friend, which made Chadwick's hair stand on end and his breath was about to die. Her tone was no longer that of the friend who was known for her wisdom, and her wooden eyes seemed to have a mad look. She continued:
"I took so many detours to find that factor! At first, I thought it was a phenomenon that could be explained by genetics or psychiatry, so I adjusted my study plan. Occasionally, I thought I had found a clue - for example, a brain medicine expert mentioned the phenomenon I was interested in in his research, but he didn't get any results in the end. He gave up the project for some reason, and I felt very sorry at the time, but now I know that all those efforts were meaningless! Do you want to know what happened in that summer before I gave up Anthony? That day, I walked into the house where my sister lived every day - for some mental and physical reasons, she rarely saw outsiders. That day, it was a sunny and bright day, and when I walked into the garden of the house, I suddenly felt that everything seemed I looked familiar, as if I had seen the same scenery somewhere before; then I unconsciously looked up at the rooftop terrace while thinking, and saw something falling down, landing on the brick and stone ground in front of me. Chad, I don’t want to torture you with the details in my memory, so I will only tell you the final conclusion: the person who fell from the roof was my sister, and she was dead the moment she landed on the ground, with no chance of rescue. From the results of my subsequent investigation, she committed suicide. Before I returned to the house, she had been standing on the rooftop terrace waiting, and then jumped down at the most precise time, as if her whole life existed only for this moment, and she was born just to give me such a puzzle. When she died, all my previous efforts were wasted. "

Her nightmarish, quiet voice suddenly stopped. Chadwick stared at her blankly. In the night outside the window, the fog was lingering and changing like a sea of ​​clouds. He suddenly had a strong feeling, and believed that his friend across the desk also had this feeling: there were more than just the two of them in this house. Gillian once said that language was magical, and the guest's chanting tone and the strong emotions contained in the tone were like a spell, summoning back the dead souls that had long since passed away in the story. Ah! It really came back, although it was invisible and left no definite evidence, the cold lament wet the air, and the imaginary form manifested in the shadows, in any place where the light could not reach - corners, outside the door, in the corner of the eye, in the deepest part of the heart - it walked into the house again with the thoughts of the living, listening to the echoes of the past with them, waiting for the final outcome. The wind knocked on the glass window, and he immediately looked out the window tremblingly, wondering if there were other ghosts wandering in the thick fog.

The study was too quiet. "Maybe..." He whispered fearfully, but the next words were absorbed by the silent air.

"Maybe it was just a coincidence," the guest said. "Maybe my sister has been suffering from some kind of intermittent mental illness, and it happened to break out on the day I returned - I also tried to convince myself with this theory. This was my last line of defense to keep myself from losing my mind before I started to deal with her belongings. Then I saw her paintings... Yes, she was also quite talented in painting, just like Ophelia. On the night of the funeral, I found several of her painting books and scattered drafts, and wanted to sort them out one by one according to the time of creation, from the later more mature works to the earliest crayon doodles. But when I really saw and understood these paintings, I was in I rushed out of the house late at night, jumped into the car and drove for hundreds of kilometers - after my father died, I made the mistake of agreeing with my brother and donated Ophelia's works to a private gallery. I went there to re-examine all her paintings, especially the ones she had intentionally let me see. Before my sister fell to the ground, there was a moment when I felt that the scene in the garden seemed familiar, because this was the summer landscape she painted that year, the color, angle, light and shadow... even the details of the flowers and plants were exactly the same. I would never remember that scene wrongly. Many years before she died, she had already painted the place where her daughter was destined to die, and the house had been renovated several times after her death. "

"I can only come to one conclusion: Ophelia has the gift of prophecy, and she passed this ability on to her daughter. I reorganized and collected all their relics, especially the many works that Ophelia participated in, and finally confirmed that their ability was only expressed through painting. But were they conscious and aware of what they were expressing when they created? Or were they just dominated by some subconscious talent? The ancient Greeks believed that poets were inspired by gods in ecstasy... Today this is considered their excessive worship of genius, but for me it has become a real question: When my sister jumped off the terrace that day, did she do it out of her own will? Did she do this out of her own will? If she didn't do it of her own will, who forced her to do it? And if this was her own idea, what motivated her to do it? My studies and explorations in genetics and psychiatry were completely overturned, and instead I went to more remote and weird places. Chad, people like you and me don't believe in the natural order described by all mainstream religions, let alone those dead beliefs; if those pagan myths were really true, they would definitely not be defeated by a man cursing a fig tree! However, with a nearly hopeless mood, my initial exploration was very blind. From spiritualism to astrology, I tried any foolish but readily available methods, and naturally found nothing. "

"I went back to the house and sorted out my sister's paintings over and over again. In the process, I vaguely saw a certain coherence in the themes of the paintings, as if she and her mother were trying to tell me a story. I compiled the paintings into a book based on the relevance of the themes as much as possible, and then looked for people in the world who were famous for their spiritual intuition or psychological analysis, and asked them to try to interpret them. This time I made some small gains: one of my people, who was born in a remote ethnic minority village in the mountains, took a copy of the album I provided to visit a highly respected local witch who did not see outsiders - they called her . "Zimu Niang", I finally got her reply, telling me that these paintings and other behaviors were warnings to me, to protect me from certain possible misfortunes; and another psychic living on a northern island, who was said to know the deceased in the tomb before his death, personally added text annotations to a certain album provided by me. Those annotations could not explain my sister's death, but more like a fairy tale written by looking at the pictures, but it caught my attention in some details. In the end, I copied the annotated album in large quantities, intending to collect possible clues on a larger scale in the future. "

"It's not that I haven't considered visiting these two people in person, but the people who were responsible for conveying messages to them all emphasized that they were very reluctant to meet me, no matter how generous the reward I offered. Especially the 'Zimu Niang', for some personal reasons, she lived alone in seclusion, farming in the mountains outside the village; the people who worked for me even refused to tell her address for fear of being cursed by her. I didn't intend to give up, but at this moment, a brand new clue suddenly appeared in front of me. It changed everything. Before this, I had commissioned several agents to issue a reward in a specific circle, hoping to find some methods to communicate with the dead. It is conceivable that this absurd practice will eventually attract many greedy scammers and bored people, but it still has results after all. One day I received an anonymous email titled 'Talking to the Dead'."

"Chad, you may be curious about why I paid special attention to this email, so I have to add some information first: at that time, several of my agents received hundreds of emails every day. They were responsible for preliminary classification and screening of them, discarding the content that was obviously fabricated or plagiarized, and only bringing me the information they thought might be meaningful. However, although this part of the information was sincere, it was of no practical help to my exploration: some kind people wanted to persuade me to turn back and not let the scammers make money for nothing because of grief and fear; some real academics more rigorously listed to me various well-documented black witchcraft behaviors and terrible death experiments in history, and finally still wanted to tell me tactfully that the theory of the underworld was too vague... However, this anonymous email was different. It appeared directly in my private mailbox and taught me the method of communicating with the dead in an extremely clear and direct way. Chad, it told me not only one method, but two methods at once."

"The first method it told me is very similar to the psychic games you can find on the Internet. It requires you to actively create a special environment isolated from others and perform all kinds of disturbing and bizarre behaviors, which are enough to make people suspicious and trance-like before they actually see any ghosts. The method described in the email is called the "sinking game" by the sender. I will never reveal the specific details to you because it is much more excessive than ordinary psychic games. It is not just a trick to scare you, but the whole process is enough to kill the participants! Instead of calling it a psychic game, you might as well regard it as a scam to induce suicide. Of course, I did not call this so-called game. I took it seriously. In fact, I thought it was a wrong option deliberately provided by the sender, trying to test whether I had enough mind and perseverance to understand the second method, rather than being a pure curiosity seeker. The second method was also extremely absurd and difficult to understand, and was thousands of times more complicated than the first one; it did not require me to perform any weird personal behavior, but used a lot of models and formulas to explain an incredible theory to me. Just to have a preliminary understanding of this theory, I had to consult experts in the field and learn several subjects that I had never planned to study from scratch... This theory, the sender named it "Introduction to Infinite Facility Engineering", aims to explain the basic concept of a machine. "

(End of this chapter)