Chapter 562: 562
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"After that, the first person who found me was my teacher . It was 5 am, and I was resting in the breakroom with my jacket wrapped around me . I heard the door open, but I was too drowsy to care .
"When I opened my eyes at noon, I saw my teacher sitting at the table inside the room . He was reading Menninger's Man Against Himself, a book with a focus on suicide psychology .
"Sun filtered into the room . At the time, I had no idea what happened outside—I just thought that my teacher was acting strangely . He was the most experienced counsellor at our office . He was the one who taught me everything, so even though I was no longer under his tutelage, I still referred to him as my teacher . "
From the man's voice, Chen Ge realized that he respected his teacher a lot .
"Your teacher told you everything? What were his thoughts?" Chen Ge was curious . He even wanted to become friends with the Red Specter, and for that, he needed to understand his personality and his wishes . Only then would the man willingly work for him .
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"He didn't tell me anything related to the news—he only asked me one question . " The man looked at the darkened night . "If one day, he was standing at the edge of the building, what would I do to talk him off the ledge?"
"I'd never considered that question before . In my eyes, my teacher was a very powerful person in terms of his faith . This scenario would never happen in my mind, but I still shared my real thoughts with him . If that day really did happen, I would use everything that he had taught me on him and try my best to save him . If I failed, then I would choose to respect his decision .
"I had never thought how saintly my job was; I just knew how important it was . It was no different from the doctors in an emergency room . I give it my all to save the patients, but similarly, I would respect their wishes . "
As the man spoke, his voice lowered .
"After he heard me say that, he smiled satisfactorily . Just like an old friend, he sat next to me and told me one thing .
"He said that I was a good student, the student he was most proud of in fact, but I was not a qualified suicide prevention hotline operator .
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"My teacher saw the imbalance in my emotions, so he told me to go for a walk to clear my mind . A suicide prevention hotline operator is a very unique job . Aside from the prank calls, everyone would receive around twenty mildly-dangerous calls and one to five emergency calls every night . With the continuous calls, the operator themselves would be affected . They would cry on the phone with the callers . Whenever that happened, you had to tell yourself to calm down and try to detach yourself from the situation and help them from an outsider's perspective .
"A person's body is like a balloon filled with water . Good and bad emotions fill up the balloon . If one can't make the adjustments, when the balloon bursts, that is when a person faces a mental breakdown .
"As a suicide prevention hotline operator, the brain is soaked in tears and pain every night . Most leave the job after a certain period of time, so initially, I didn't get what my teacher was trying to say .
"When I tried to ask for clarification, my teacher patted my shoulders and left, but he left behind the book that he was reading . Later, after I found out that my phone conversation had been released online and became the first operator that convinced my caller to kill themselves, many people came at me with horrible words . However, at the time, I was very calm . No matter what others said, it had nothing to do with me—I only cared about right or wrong .
"From a certain perspective, I was a very dumb person . I would cry due to the callers' stories and would talk to these strangers until dawn . I would cry with them and even laugh with them . I understood their pain . I never saw myself as a savior; I merely treated them as my friends . "
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The man's eyes were clouded when he said those things, but soon, they were replaced by red, and blood leaked out from his skin . "Before that ended, something else happened .
"When you stop a person hellbent on dying, even if you're successful one time, they might use a more drastic method next time .
"To prevent that from happening, we occasionally allow them to try it within an acceptable range . For example, if there was an ambulance, safety cushion, and a relatively-small building, we would not forcibly pull one away from the edge .
"I know this might be hard to stomach, but think of it from a different perspective—empathy is a hard to practice effort . Even biological parents have a hard time doing that . Prevention that is too harsh will only need to a negative effect—that is something that shows that you do not understand the person's pain .
"Allowing them to try is a type of respect, a respect that they can feel for real . "
Hearing that, Chen Ge had a bad feeling . "Have you really done that before?"
"During one of our missions, I did something similar . Actually, it is not as scary as you think . We are merely allowing it within a controlled situation . To give you another example, one of my callers wanted to die from a sleeping pills overdose . His emotions were very unstable, and we were unable to communicate . At the time, I tried to negotiate with the police and found sleeping pills with a very low dosage for him to try . After experiencing death once, he had a big change and started to love life again .
"I have many successful results, but these methods appear like it has violated our responsibility . After the recording was exposed, these methods attracted a lot of criticism . I was trying my best to save people, but people pinned me as a murderer .
"I started to think . My teacher came to talk to me, and many friends consoled me . However, the key was not me but whether it was right or wrong . "
The man did not look much older than Chen Ge, but he sounded far more worldly than Chen Ge . He looked at the dark night and was silent for a long time . The expression on his face turned ugly, but it slowly returned to normal before he smiled a faithless smile .
"Perhaps I am not a qualified suicide prevention hotline operator, but those that I once helped really did treat me as the last friend that they could trust at the end of their lives . " The man's shirt was completely dyed red, and the tattoo on his face kept changing . "This is something I understood after my death—there was so much hope that was placed on me . "