Bruce's arm drooped down, and he watched Shiller quietly, as if trying to discern something from him, but unfortunately, he saw only emptiness, like wind and mist, but there was nothing there, just as when he looked at these madmen.
There was nothing particularly special about this man, who didn't quite fit in with the majority of the people in the room. He looked like he belonged in the office of a university or a library rather than mingling with them at the climax of this dramatic moment.
Bruce saw that Shiller was holding a roll of film, as if it had just been removed from somewhere, and it too bore a number of images, looking like the beginning of a story.
"Where do I start..." Bruce heard Shiller mutter to himself, "If I have to start from the beginning, it would be too long."
"Please, take a seat," Shiller said, gesturing toward a chair nearby.
Bruce revealed a smile. He stood in place observing Shiller for a while, then walked over to the chair, sat down, and crossed his legs, saying, "I thought the atmosphere between us would be a bit more tense, or is it just the skin I'm in that's working its magic?"
"I'm afraid it's the opposite," Shiller also pulled a chair closer and sat down, picking up a pen from the table, and said, "If my good-for-nothing student were here, he'd have been dragged in."
Bruce cast a surreptitious glance at Joker Jack, cocking the corner of his mouth, thinking he had been discreet. Shiller turned his head to the side, and a black cat smoothly leaped onto his lap.
Shiller stroked the head of the Bat Cat, which tilted its head and squinted its eyes, and then fixed a pair of deep blue pupils steadily on Bruce.
"The story begins with a cat," Shiller said. "You discovered the existence of Dreamworld early on. The moment you first learned of its wonders, you knew it would be a perfect stage, and so you planted your foreshadowing in Cat City Gotham..."
In Bruce's azure eyes reflected the murderous gaze of the Bat Cat, yet the cats he had seen before were nothing like this vibrant one. Most were screaming and wailing, lying breathless in cages, placed on sacrificial altars as a power source for the Court of Owls to pollute the Dreams of a Thousand Cats.
The Dream God Morpheus once roamed the vast terrain of Dream space, a Divine Country under his rule, where valleys, rivers, and deserts were as tangible as in the real world, yet strangely combined.
He was followed by a huge cat which regularly pestered him about overturning the dreams of a thousand people to return the world to a feline realm.
But lurking in the shadows behind their leisurely strolls was a dark figure always spying, and it was then that he first became curious about something in the depths of his subconscious and began to explore. Gifted, he reached the Kingdom of Dreams in just one attempt.
It was lucky for him to have encountered the deities of the Kingdom of Dreams and their cat, but he was always adept at turning his luck into others' misfortune. Once he learned of the powers of the Dreams of a Thousand Cats, a plan formed in his head.
The Dreams of a Thousand Cats is a collective of all feline dreams, and if enough cats have nightmares, it will inevitably be affected. Once polluted, Dreamworld would have its vulnerabilities.
However, Dream God Morpheus would not tolerate those who dared to tamper in his realm, in the face of this powerful lord, not even Lucifer would provoke lightly, any resistance would seem too futile. He couldn't afford another enemy of that stature.
So he placed an egg inside a cat's belly, a poor stray in Gotham, filled with untold resentment and rage from its destitution and cold, until the offspring it birthed were bagged by a man and thrown into a lake—that was his first trip to the realm of the Dream God, in search of the Cat of Dreams.
There he learned that cats were the original rulers of this world, overturned only when a thousand humans had the same dream, using the Dream of a Thousand to overthrow the felines' reign.
From then on, he traveled lakes, canyons, and graveyards, seeking a thousand cats to share one dream and bring the world back to an era ruled by cats—that was the origin of the Dreams of a Thousand Cats.
In that bag initially thrown into the lake by the man, ordinary kitten young naturally drowned, but that which was not born of the mother cat—rather it was birthed by an egg acting as a surrogate—did not die so easily.
It survived and became the most special one in the Dreams of a Thousand Cats, for inherently, that egg was Batman.
Wherever Batman is, there is Gotham, even if this Batman was a cat. Hence, even if everything took on the appearance as seen by cat eyes, Gotham remained characteristically dark and bizarre.
In Dreamworld, nothing is particularly stable and may vanish completely with the shattering of a single dream, but that Cat City Gotham borne from Bat Cat's dream remained consistent as ever—a dark nail deeply embedded in the soil of the Kingdom of Dreams, and it was then that the pollution began.
With a stable foundation, it became possible to continually introduce pollution into the Kingdom of Dreams, and what followed was simple: convincing the steadfast Owls, who believed in a certain divinity, that sacrificing the souls of suffering cats would grant them greater power was no difficult task.
After all, cats are so much weaker than humans. Whether trapping or buying, they gathered enough cats, tormenting and abusing them, forcing them to spend one terrible dream after another on the brink of death.
And so, the Dreamworld of a thousand cats developed a fissure undetected by both itself and the Dream God, causing a trembling of authority within the Dreamworld from that moment forward.
The key to maintaining Cat City Gotham, Bat Cat, was actually just the feline form of his own hatched counterpart, and although Bat Cat itself did not know this, its mere existence allowed it to siphon off a portion of the Dreamworld's authority. It conducted minor tampering at the fissure, constructing a new Dreamworld within the confines of Cat City Gotham.
Shiller had discussed the origins of Bat Cat with him long ago, but Bat Cat neither knew nor was interested in this. It was after Little Kryptonite arrived and persisted in fighting crime in the Dreamworld every day that one day, he came across a cat whose scent was somewhat similar to Bat Cat's.
Little Kryptonite insisted on taking Bat Cat to see this Siamese Cat, whose scent felt familiar. When Bat Cat appeared before the Siamese Cat, he heard a familiar cry.
It evoked some hazy memories in Bat Cat, the screams of the mother cat as she birthed him, oversized as he was.
The Siamese Cat had found its child; it rushed forward without hesitation, vigorously rubbing against Bat Cat, licking his fur, and recounting the tale of those days. To this day, this cat mother has not given up; she still aspires to create a world ruled by cats, seeking revenge against the murderer of her children.
Bat Cat enjoyed his mother's affection for a time, but he remained Batman; he began to ponder more things, such as why he was so much larger than other kittens, why his coloration differed from all other cats, why he felt that he was Bat Cat, why he emerged conscious in a city called Gotham.
All of this clearly had traces to follow, and from that time on, Bat Cat suspected that everything about his past and present was orchestrated by the same conspirator.
So, having reclaimed his identity as Bat Cat, he also started to rule over the city as Bruce Wayne, utilizing his technology and wealth to monitor every move within the city.
Until one day, a human snuck into the city.
But his deeds were not limited to transporting another person here; he created a Dreamworld bubble beneath the city and opened a passage leading directly to a special universe related to Batman.
Bat Cat sat on the desk in front of Shiller, licking his paws, while Bruce, with his legs crossed, squinted at him and said, "So you noticed when I opened the gateway."
Bat Cat glanced at him but said nothing.
Shiller set down the film in his hand, picked up another one, and said, "Then let us see how you locked onto this special universe."
The first act of the story did not take place in the DC World but featured the rare sight of Stark, astonishingly, Stark and Shiller were fighting tooth and nail.
Stark, who was simply following Shiller downstairs to take out the trash, was deceived into the Zombie Universe. A fierce conflict erupted between them, only for Stark to discover that this Shiller was not his good Doctor but a personality trait known as gluttony.
Incidentally, Shiller had disposed of some of Nick's experimental subjects as trash into this universe. However, upon gluttony's arrival, an urgent need for food prompted Stark to discover the secrets of ghosts, which to some extent, were a type of special brainwave.
As a result, Stark deduced the Ghost Brainwave Theory and began studying the relationship between brainwaves and the soul.
But he was not the first to do so, to be precise, at the same time, he was not the furthest along this path.
Someone had already discovered the influential power of brainwaves before him. Nearly the entire human race's souls and spirits rely on this existence. If one could compile brainwaves, it would amount to controlling all intelligent life.
Naturally, this was tremendously difficult, but after some time conducting research, he began extensive experiments across various universes, aiming to achieve true brainwave compilation.
The complexity of this technology exceeded his expectations, but no matter, he had other methods. If he could distribute items carrying special viral bands near others for long periods, he could partially alter their brainwave frequencies and wavelengths to influence their minds.
His experiments were a success, multiple times, yet he had not attained the level of freely compiling brainwaves; rather, he acquired a new technology—wide-area brainwave searching and reading.
He could detect brainwaves, partially read another person's thoughts through the searching device without physical contact, and understand their state.
For a long time, this became his unstoppable weapon. Just think, without any need for contact, merely by glancing at someone from afar, he could know their thoughts and anticipate their next actions—it was indeed a skill tailored for the unseen puppet master.
After setting the stage in the Dreamworld, he knew he could use this ability to choose all the roles he desired.