Chapter 44: An Accidental Dream

Thinking of this, Roland couldn't help but feel a chill. Afterward, he had transformed into Batman and fought all sorts of freaks and ghouls around the clock, without experiencing a single bit of that playboy lifestyle.

It was only now, upon finding Bruce, that he realized he had been cheated out of his share.

"Alright, so how do we get out of here now?" Bruce asked.

Although he had a wonderful family here, Bruce could not bear to live in a lie; he had to go back.

"Only falling can end a dream, and only death can end life." Roland grabbed Bruce, scaled a high vantage point using his grapple gun, and then threw him off.

Bruce woke up inside a room of an abandoned church. Commissioner Gordon was waiting by his bed, while Roland lay next to him with a strange machine strapped to his head.

"You're awake." Commissioner Gordon's eyes lit up as he checked on Bruce's condition. "How are you? Is everything alright?"

"I'm fine."

"Of course you're fine, while I had to suffer through hell," came Roland's voice as he tossed the machine from his head onto the bed. "We were both dreaming, so why were our experiences so vastly different?"

"Perhaps you should use this machine alone." Bruce shrugged. "Anyway, I have serious business to attend to. What did you say happened to Harvey?"

"Harvey's current situation is... extremely tricky." Commissioner Gordon handed a few photographs to Bruce.

The photos showed a building destroyed by fire, along with charred human remains inside.

"Did Harvey... do this?" Bruce asked, somewhat startled.

"To be precise, Roland and Harvey did it together," Commissioner Gordon corrected.

"You too..." Bruce looked at Roland with surprise. In his impression, Roland was not someone with such a strong intent to kill.

"I was merely an accomplice," Roland offered a pale defense.

"According to Dr. Grida's diagnosis, the current Harvey is being controlled by a dark personality," Commissioner Gordon continued. "This is a terrible situation. Even she doesn't know what to do to bring Harvey back to normal."

"This is going to be trouble..." Bruce muttered.

"There's even more trouble. When I was saving you, I discovered the Scarecrow's fear toxin, and following that lead, I tracked him down," Roland said. "He bribed the director of the Wayne Chemical Plant, using your family's production lines to manufacture six thousand cubic meters of fear toxin, and we still haven't recovered most of it."

Bruce's expression darkened further. "Leave that to me to handle. As for Harvey's problem, it still needs to be resolved by a psychologist."

"Psychologists are out of ideas right now..." Roland frowned.

"Let me think about it..." Bruce sighed, walked out, got into the Batmobile, and drove toward the Wayne Chemical Plant.

Just then, Commissioner Gordon's phone rang. After answering it, his expression grew increasingly grim.

"Good thing he left in a hurry..." Commissioner Gordon sighed.

"More bad news?" Seeing Gordon's expression, Roland guessed what it was.

"Yes, truly bad news..." Commissioner Gordon took a deep breath. "The Joker and Harley Quinn have broken out of prison."

"That news is as bad as it gets."

"I need to head back to the precinct to dispatch officers for surveillance. We can't let him run wild," Gordon said, then grabbed his car keys and left.

"Everything's piling up at once..." Roland frowned. There was simply too much going on right now. He decided to... first refresh himself with the Wonderland device; handling matters would be much more efficient once his mood was relaxed.

"By the way, I need to take this back to the precinct as evidence." Commissioner Gordon returned after a moment. As soon as he stepped inside, he saw Roland grinning lewdly while lost in a dream.

"...Did you use this contraption just to have wet dreams?" Commissioner Gordon massaged his temples, deeply concerned about Roland's mental state.

The next day.

"You said you found a way to save Harvey?" Bruce received Roland's message and arrived at Dr. Grida's psychological clinic.

Harvey was currently strapped into a straitjacket; Grida had been forced to resort to this drastic measure to prevent him from escaping.

"Yeah, I used the Wonderland device all night yesterday, and it finally helped me come up with this method." Roland's face was somewhat pale and his eyes were ringed with dark circles, clearly having expended a great deal of energy in deep thought.

"You're planning to enter Harvey's dream?" Bruce thought about it and felt Roland's plan had some feasibility.

"Not me, you." Roland shook his head. "I'm afraid something weird might happen if I go in."

When he entered Bruce's dream yesterday, he had replaced the Batman part. If he ended up replacing Harvey's disfigured part this time, things would go horribly wrong.

Furthermore, when it came to talk therapy, Bruce was far better than the taciturn Roland.

"Alright." Bruce nodded; he had originally intended to go in himself anyway.

Grida administered a bowl of sleeping pills to Harvey, putting him to sleep, and then prepared monitoring equipment to attach to both Harvey and Bruce to check their physical conditions so the process could be halted immediately if anything went wrong.

Putting on the device, Bruce—who had trained himself to enter deep sleep at will and didn't need the aid of sleeping pills—quickly drifted off.

Bruce woke up lying on a sofa. Looking at the surrounding furnishings, he found them somewhat familiar.

After a moment of thought, Bruce remembered: this was Harvey's office.

Then... where was Harvey?

At that moment, Harvey's secretary pushed the door open and handed Bruce a cup of hot coffee.

"Thank you," Bruce said.

"You're welcome, Mr. Dent," the secretary said respectfully.

Bruce was momentarily stunned. He glanced at the window to his side, and the glass reflected his image, but the face looking back at him was Harvey's.

If he was Harvey, where was the real Harvey? Keeping his composure, Bruce set the coffee aside and began handling his daily routine in the guise of Harvey.

After some time, Bruce roughly figured out the situation within Harvey's dream. This was still Gotham City, except that under the governance of District Attorney Harvey, all evil had been brought to justice, and the Bruce Wayne of this world didn't need to be Batman, remaining merely a playboy.

As for the persona of Harvey, it was similar to the real one, but he was more capable, extremely wealthy, well-known, cultured, and held high prestige in Gotham City.

However, his physical condition was poor; Bruce could clearly sense that his body was sleep-deprived and suffering from neurasthenia.

After spending several days in the dream, Bruce still hadn't found the whereabouts of the real Harvey, until a brutal murder took place in Gotham City.