Applause rang in the office of Rodriguez College's dean, Constantine clapping and laughing. He had one hand on Bruce's shoulder, nearly doubling over in laughter. Wiping away the tears brought on by his mirth, he told Bruce, "The more you learn about the cosmos, Bruce, the more Batman puppets you'll need. Shiller, you better start preparing a warehouse."
"To compensate for my misfortune?"
"Both of your misfortunes." Zatanna shook her head saying, "Could anything in this world be more ironic? A unique master of psychology meets Bruce Wayne, uniquely inept at psychology. You might as well put him on display - the one and only Batman in all the cosmos who defaults on his homework."
"I'm certain that there are more." Bruce shook his head, not agreeing. He took a cigar from his cigar box, carefully cropped it and said, "We will eventually find another one who doesn't hand in homework, I thought it would be this one."
"You thought he would be worse than you." Shiller snorted, pressed out his first cigar which had been burned out, took the second one from Bruce's hand, then leaned in to let Bruce light his cigar. "That's why you brought him here."
"Sorry, my mistake."
"Compared to the Batman puppet, you really lack sincerity. Don't count on me to prepare a warehouse for them. They molt."
"That's impossible."
"They do."
"God, are you sure we will find the key by digging up this mountain?" Barry collapsed, panting on a small valley made of books. Little Bruce and Harley were not much better, they were exhausted after only digging halfway.
The demonic tomes are huge and cumbersome works, and those authors bewitched by the demons apparently took the length of their books as a crucial measure to the degree of their favorability by demons. They wish to put every trivial matter of their lives, from birth to death, into their complicated words. Furthermore, there are so many such people.
Which really made digging through the mountain of books harder than imagined. Barry even thought that digging up half of it might be the better option, and get him so surprised by this idea.
"Seriously, let's use just one grenade." Exhausted, Harley bent over with her hands on her knees and took a deep breath: "No matter what's going on with you guys, I've never done this much heavy work before. I'm exhausted!"
"What's the heaviest work you've ever done?" Curious, Barry asked while laughing.
"Moving bodies, four of them. Not one more."
Barry closed his mouth.
Finally, after struggling for about half an hour, the three children managed to reach the bottom of the massive mountain of books. And in the middle bottom of the book mountain, they found a key.
"You're a genius, Bruce!"
Barry cheered, Little Bruce exhaled, wiped the sweat off his forehead, glanced at Barry, and, unusually, did not ridicule him.
Once they used the key to open the door, an ordinary basement corridor appeared. Only a dim light was seen at the end of the corridor. Barry held the still-burning candlestick and led the others to a brightly lit room in the end.
The room was almost half the size of a grand hall. Barry thought of the grand hall in the Magic Academy, which could hold two thousand people.
Little Bruce and Harley walked into the hall with their heads up. There were four load-bearing pillars in the center of the hall. The pillars had exquisite-carved patterns on them, and a gorgeous blue curtain with gold accents hung from the front wall.
Most eye-catching was the circular array painted in the center of the grand hall. It was a complex array made of thousands of runes. Just one glance would make one feel dizzy.
At the very center of the array was a circle about an arm's breadth wide. It seemed something had once occupied that space, or perhaps when the array was complete, something would appear there.
Harley narrowed her eyes. She had a basic understanding from her few months of classes at the Magic Academy. After looking around the array, she said, "This is a protective array based on the divine power. But someone had broken it, and simplified it."
"Are you saying the Magic Stone has been stolen?!" Barry cried out in surprise.
"No," Little Bruce shook his head. He could also read the runes of divine power, "There's more than one guard measure for the Magic Stone. The moment the array for activating the protective shield was broken, the Magic Stone container was hidden. That's what it says in the array."
"So are we going to complete the array for the protective shield, or find the Magic Stone container again?"
Little Bruce looked around at the pillars and focused on the patterns. Suddenly, he said, "No, that's not right. These patterns are specifically instructing us on how to break the protective shield."
"If we follow the instructions and break the protective shield, the final protective measure won't be activated, the container won't be hidden, and we'll be able to successfully retrieve the Magic Stone."
Little Bruce turned around and looked once more at the area where the array was missing. After a moment of silence, he then said, "And the one who broke this array didn't use this method..."