Chapter 254: Who Exactly Changed Time?
The scene of Gotham City was clearly transmitted to the Justice League hall through the surveillance screen.
Like a bizarre and tragic ukiyo-e of an uprising.
“These guys…” The Flash Barry Allen, wearing the shit-yellow kangaroo battle suit, had flickering eyes as he looked at the villains in the image who were missing arms and legs, or even grafted with animal parts, taking action. These villains were not engaging in traditional looting and arson, but rather a protest march filled with anger and resentment.
They smashed the storefront windows on the street, toppled street lamps, and rammed police cars with their strong bodies, but strangely, they did not loot goods; instead, they distributed food and medicine from some stores to the more panicked ordinary citizens—perhaps, when worse people appear, the bad guys relatively seem a bit like good people.
Of course, distributing these things was not without reason; the villains forcibly pulled the people who accepted the food and medicine into the protest march formed by themselves and others.
More and more people were hysterically denouncing Batman’s “tyranny.”
“Support Joker taking power! He at least has clear prices!”
“Down with Bat tyranny! We don’t need Batman!”
“We want to live, even if it’s a twisted life!”
……
The chants mixed with the clanging of metal prosthetics hitting the floor, as well as the strange screeches from some bizarre animal organs, forming a chaotic symphony that Gotham had never heard before.
Chilling.
What shocked Barry even more was that he saw a few people wearing cheap homemade uniforms, seemingly new local Gotham street heroes whose names he couldn’t recall—”eighteenth-tier” ones—trying to stop them.
Among them was a guy who could spray sticky foam, a big guy who seemed able to briefly harden his skin, and a girl holding a sonic speaker.
However, their resistance seemed pale and powerless in front of those seemingly dilapidated villains.
These villains, though physically maimed, far surpassed these rookies and most villains in combat experience, ruthlessness, and use of their body modifications.
Gotham doesn’t raise idle people.
The sticky foam androgynous person was cut open by crab claws.
The hardened skin man was cracked by a heavy punch from a villain’s mechanical prosthetic.
The sonic girl’s attack was preemptively dodged by Catwoman mixed in among them… After just a few exchanges, these young heroes were beaten to the ground, symbolically “tied up” with bandages and IV stands by those villains, and dumped on the roadside, as if saying “We’re only targeting Batman, we don’t kill nameless small fries.”
Of course.
Although these people weren’t causing too much destruction or killing, they were indeed setting things on fire, and the entire Gotham seemed about to be ignited.
“Where’s Robin?! Batgirl?! Nightwing?!”
The Flash Barry anxiously paced around in front of the console, the shit-yellow kangaroo figure appearing particularly restless, “Shouldn’t they step up at a time like this?!”
At this moment, Cyborg, slumped in the corner with Apokolips technology parts constantly peeling off his body, revealing more Pinduoduo flesh—even his internal organs seemed to be Pinduoduo knockoffs—weakly raised his hand.
His electronic eye flickered unsteadily: “Barry, use your brain… If, if Batman died… or completely disappeared at some earlier time point.”
“Then, the Robins he adopted and trained… perhaps… no longer exist on this timeline. Their existence is closely dependent on Bruce Wayne.”
A very reasonable analysis.
However, this speculation made Barry fall into an ice cave.
On the other side, Wonder Woman Diana finally couldn’t suppress her inexplicably voracious appetite. She somehow found a large bucket of family-sized ice cream and a whole roasted turkey, and was devouring it without any image. While chewing with puffed cheeks, she surprisingly agreed with Cyborg’s view and mumbled her opinion indistinctly.
:”Cyborg… makes sense. Bruce is the core… without the core, the branches naturally wither.” After speaking, she turned to look at Aquaman Arthur as if seeking agreement.
The new version of the chubby heroine seemed to lack a sense of recognition.
However, Aquaman Arthur completely ignored it.
He was swiftly swiping on the holographic projection shopping platform with his hand covered in iridescent scales. The screen was full of various octopus pictures—live ones, dead ones, big ones, small ones, ordinary ones, fluorescent deep-sea ones; anyway, all octopuses, each looking so upright.
“Hmm… The suckers on this tentacle aren’t strong enough… This color isn’t vibrant enough to match my scales… Oh? This fluorescent blue is nice, but the size is a bit small…” Aquaman seemed to have a special fondness for these octopuses, muttering to himself with eyes focused as if selecting a consort.
“Hiss~”
The one who gasped was Hal Jordan, who had turned from Green Lantern into Green Hat Man. He leaned over to look at Aquaman’s screen and was immediately shocked.
Green Lantern’s body was trembling. He raised his hand, pointing at one of the pictures, his tone horrified: “Arthur! You… you’re not even selecting live octopuses! But frozen ones?!”
“Not only have you started liking other species, you’re also… refining corpses??!” He fearfully touched the green hat on his head, worrying if something even more horrifying would appear on his body.
“Guys! Be normal!” Barry let out a helpless wail looking at his teammates in such weird states, feeling the league was doomed.
Cyborg struggled to adjust his system, emitting intermittent synthetic sounds: “Barry… Data shows… the influence from the past time node… is accelerating to affect our ‘present.’ Not just bodies… our personalities, memories, behavior patterns… are all undergoing irreversible rewriting.”
“You must… run! Make the timeline change’s influence… unable to catch up to your speed! Perhaps… this is the only… way to delay your influence…”
Speedsters do have this characteristic.
Cyborg was right.
However.
Barry hesitated and glanced at the still chaotic Gotham on the screen: “Then… what about Gotham?”
Wonder Woman, who was gnawing on a turkey leg, looked up with grease on her face and a somewhat dazed expression: “Gotham? Isn’t Batman ruling over there?”
“He’ll handle it.”
Her memory was clearly starting to show confusion and gaps.
“Batman disappeared long ago!!” Barry was almost going mad. He held his head, looking at his completely unreliable teammates and the deteriorating situation on the screen, struggling internally. Finally, he stomped his foot, his powerful frog legs making a shallow dent in the floor, and the whole person vanished from the spot.
“Damn it! I can’t just watch Gotham really fall!”
“Moreover, Batman has been gone who knows how long, but those people are still protesting—100% a contradictory situation caused by timeline chaos!”
“This will easily lead to the entire timeline completely collapsing!”
The next moment.
A shit-yellow lightning bolt wrapped in a blue kangaroo shadow rushed out of the Justice League hall, heading at full speed toward that city sliding into deeper madness.
With the Speed Force, Barry arrived in Gotham almost instantly. He didn’t try to persuade or negotiate—seeing the state of those villains, he knew language was clearly powerless.
Thus.
The Flash showed his ruthless and efficient side, emphasizing efficiency. He didn’t know why his efficiency in capturing these villains and sending them to detention was outrageously high.
Even his brain instantly calculated how to capture and detain everyone in the shortest time.
Suddenly.
The Flash turned into a high-speed moving whirlwind. Wherever he passed, whether men with mechanical arms or fox tails, or women bandaged or holding IV stands.
All the villains participating in the protest felt a gust of wind pass by, their bodies lightening, and the next second they found themselves locked in a place that might be familiar or not.
That place was the destination for most Gotham criminals—Arkham Asylum.
“Good thing there are enough cells, no, wards.” Barry felt this place was different from his memory, seemingly after large-scale expansion and renovation.
Throwing the last small fry into a single room.
Barry finally had a chance to stop, panting, and carefully observed this legendary “crime holy site.” However, the scene before him once again left him dumbfounded.
Where was this still an asylum?
This was clearly a palace fusing Gothic castle and futurism styles!
Or rather, it used to be a palace.
The towering dome was painted with bat totem murals, but the bats were twisted and ornate. Along the corridors stood statues of Batman in different style armors—some classical, some sci-fi, some even with religious solemnity. Display cases held various wildly imaginative bat equipment design blueprints or models.
Ollie that launches full virus carriers, batarangs with mental attacks stronger than physical ones, and a foldable bat chair that can turn into a tickle interrogation chair on the spot.
Each more abstract, filled with some… uncontrolled imagination.
In addition, because the timeline chaos was fluctuating, the drastic changes were ongoing, the entire Arkham palace building seemed alive, with walls and floors slowly twisting and changing materials; some areas began to take on the form of museum display cases and plaques.
“What’s going on…”
The unease in Barry’s heart grew stronger. As if following some mysterious guidance, he arrived at the deepest part of the palace, a hall designed like a mausoleum.
In the center of the hall was a huge coffin made of pure crystal.
There was no Batman’s body in the coffin.
Only an extremely well-made, lifelike wax figure of Bruce Wayne. The wax figure wore a fitted black suit, with a calm face, hands crossed over his chest, as if merely in deep sleep. In his pressed hands seemed to be a black-covered, seemingly aged notebook.
“Cenotaph?”
Strong curiosity drove Barry.
He took a deep breath, concentrated, mobilized the Speed Force, making his right hand vibrate at extremely high frequency, enhancing molecular penetration to the extreme.
Thus, the move Ian couldn’t use was easily pulled off by the Flash. He carefully extended his hand toward the crystal coffin, his arm passing through like water without hindrance, penetrating the hard crystal wall. Then, with very gentle movements but utmost precision, he retrieved that notebook from the crystal coffin.
This notebook looked very ordinary, with no text on the cover, only a slightly sloppy bat emblem. Barry swallowed and flipped open the first page.
This was not the diary he expected, but a… research log.
“How could it be like this!” The further he read, the paler Barry’s face became, cold sweat beading on his forehead. His eyes widened more and more, his breathing quickening.
The log’s content was not about criminal psychology or tactical analysis, but filled with deep, even mad theoretical derivations on “time structure,” “reality plasticity,” “will’s influence on the material world,” “the Speed Force’s essence is not energy but information,” and so on.
Large sections described a hypothesis: when a sufficiently powerful will deeply combines with some universe cornerstone-level power and produces “cognitive distortion” on its essence, this distortion becomes contagious like a virus, infecting others through that universe cornerstone-level power.
Written here.
Many pages were torn out, unreadable.
The latter half of the log had increasingly frantic handwriting, interspersed with many design sketches—the prototypes of those abstract equipment Barry saw outside. Some fragments seemed to describe a “purification” or “correction” plan for Gotham, with methods so extreme that it chilled Barry.
One page crazily written in red pen: “If chaos is Gotham’s cancer, then excise it with more absolute ‘order’! Even reshaping every cell! If they resist my ‘treatment,’ it means they themselves are lesions that need to be removed!”
Barry’s hand began to tremble; he could hardly hold the thin log. He finally understood why the outside villains were so “miserable” and full of resentment, and vaguely guessed why the Robins disappeared… This was not the Batman they knew! This was a… Batman tyrant whose mind had deviated!
Realizing this, the Flash suddenly seemed to understand something. He hurriedly raised his arm and activated the league’s emergency encrypted comms.
“Can you hear me?”
The Flash directly called Superman, who was in outer space trying to reverse Earth’s changes.
“Clark… Clark! Respond if you hear me!”
Barry’s voice trembled with fear, even carrying a sob.
The comm connected quickly, transmitting Clark’s clearly fatigued and anxious voice: “Barry? What’s wrong? Is the Gotham situation under control? Things here… aren’t going well.”
He was clearly monitoring Earth’s situation at every moment.
“Clark…”
Barry took a deep breath, trying to steady his voice, but the panic couldn’t be concealed: “I think, we… we might all have made a cognitive inertial mistake.”
Superman detected the extreme wrongness in Barry’s tone.
This fear even surpassed emotions during universe-level crises.
“Don’t tell me more bad news!” Superman was helpless and quickly pressed in the comm: “Mistake? What mistake? Barry, what did you find? Explain clearly!”
Hearing this, the Flash lowered his head.
His gaze fell again on the bat research log in his hand, which felt as heavy as a thousand pounds.
Looking at the frantic handwriting and shocking content, his voice became hoarse and dry, saying word by word: “The world has become weird, bizarre, countless cities heading toward absurdity.”
“At first we all thought Ian changed history, but what if the cause of all this… wasn’t Ian at all, and we… just wrongly blamed Ian?”
“The one who changed history might be someone else, and this is probably the reason for his disappearance… and his cause of death.” The Flash had already thought of some terrifying possibility.
……
