Chapter 140 - 120: Rare! The Breakdown of 15 People...

"You’re saying... you saw her?"

Xu Huo asked.

"Yes. It’s a very strange feeling, hard to describe. I couldn’t see them clearly, but I just knew I saw them. And the other two," Sun Yang said with a nod.

"What were they all doing?"

Xu Huo asked.

Sun Yang thought for a moment, then said, "Crying."

"Crying?"

"Crying."

"Hmm."

Xu Huo nodded.

’At this point, he was starting to understand how she had gotten through the police interrogation. Or rather, it wasn’t that she was dodging it... It was that *she* truly had nothing to do with the case!’

Multiple personality disorder.

It’s a mental disorder characterized by multiple consciousnesses controlling a single body.

A split personality involves two identities; multiple personality disorder involves more than two.

In the vast majority of cases, the disorder develops after an individual experiences severe physical or emotional trauma, which leads to a mental breakdown.

’It seemed Shen Miao had developed the disorder for this very reason.’

The different personalities may or may not share memories.

Sometimes, when an alter is in control, the host can still perceive what’s happening in the outside world.

As for the differences in their personalities...

That involved two other concepts.

First, there’s selective amnesia.

For example.

When a person is faced with the death of a loved one—a child, a parent—they might not feel pain immediately. They might not even be able to feel sad.

This isn’t coldness. It relates to the second concept: the biological defense mechanism.

The subconscious, believing that the overwhelming emotions would be too much for the host’s mind to bear and could even be life-threatening, seals away a portion of the related memories and feelings.

Later, as time passes, those memories and emotions begin to resurface, little by little.

Dissociative identity disorder can be understood in the same way.

When there’s a memory you can’t bear, you strip it away from yourself. That very memory might then evolve into a new personality.

And so, a personality formed from painful memories will naturally have an extreme disposition.

The reason for this is easy to figure out.

A person’s personality and way of thinking are shaped by their environment.

Your experiences determine your personality. Compare someone who’s spent their whole life working on an assembly line to someone who was born in a Maybach.

Even if they were the same person, their mindsets would be different, and their personalities would be worlds apart.

Experience is memory, and memory forges personality. Therefore, personalities that hold different sets of memories are molded into different characters.

Personalities can also merge, integrating their memories.

"Is Number Four the bad one?" Xu Huo asked.

"Yes, Number Four is awful. I just got her memories."

Sun Yang nodded, still shaken. "She killed someone!"

"What about the other two?" Xu Huo asked. "Can you let them out? I need to ask them some questions."

"Those two are cowards."

Sun Yang shook her head in disdain.

"The host, Shen Miao, is the worst. She’s the biggest coward of them all!"

"She just hides whenever she’s bullied. Number Two, Number Three, and Number Four... they all shattered not long after they were born..."

"The current Number Two... I don’t know which time it was, but she hid away while she was taking a turn suffering for us, and now she won’t come out either."

Xu Huo had a rough idea of what she meant.

’After experiencing something unbearable, the body would split off a personality for self-preservation. An alter would take control of the body to endure the suffering instead. The host might even watch their own suffering from a detached, third-person perspective—a strange vantage point where, of course, they don’t feel like it’s happening to *them*. The perspective is like watching a stranger on the street. And just as the host can break down and split off a personality to escape, that new alter can also break down—what Sun Yang called ’shattering.’ It’s even possible for a splintered personality to split again.’

’What Shen Miao went through...’

’She had shattered at least fifteen personalities.’

’In other words, fifteen "people" had broken down and died!’

’Ultimately, this process created two diametrically opposed personalities: two Sun Yangs, each managing a different type of memory—one positive, the other negative.’

’And the defense mechanism, based on her circumstances, had packaged a set of false memories and given them to the Sun Yang in front of him.’

’So, she truly believed she was Sun Yang. It wasn’t an act!’

"Then, about what Number Four did..."

Xu Huo paused, looking into her eyes.

Her eyes were bright, almost glistening.

"Can you tell me?"

’What Number Four did...’

’...is what the killer did!’

’The whole story of the case, every single detail, was hidden within the memories of this personality he had never met!’

Xu Huo waited in silence. He had been waiting a very long time for the truth behind this case.

Sun Yang thought for a long while, then smiled.

"Alright."

"But..."

"You have to promise me one thing."