151 - DC: Gotham Under Judgment (Patreon)

Chapter 151 The Spark Will Not Die

Like a red-hot needle, the alarm instantly pierced the ancient stillness of Wayne Manor.

Alfred shut down the main house's alarm system almost immediately, but its shrill echo seemed to linger in the Batcave far below.

No one knew how Bruce Wayne reacted. But something else had set every nerve in Gotham alight.

In the East Side, the bells for morning prayer had just rung when the priest of Saint Michael's Cathedral pushed open its heavy oak doors to begin his day.

Then he looked up toward the highest point of the cathedral's dome, at the enormous cross that had watched over the place for nearly a century, and froze as though struck by lightning.

The cross that had borne the figure of the crucified Christ was gone.

In its place stood a sculpture of an enormous, vicious-looking black blade, upright in a posture of absolute dominance. Relief carvings of six wings clearly wrapped around its hilt.

It represented neither sacrifice nor redemption. It proclaimed only judgment and power.

Its cold outline appeared and disappeared in the morning mist, like the sword of Damocles hanging over the entire city.

"Blasphemy! This is an insult to the Lord!" Anger and fear distorted the priest's voice. Trembling, he seized a nearby iron rod and rushed toward the stairs at the rear of the cathedral, shouting that he would smash the evil symbol with his own hands.

Before he had taken more than a few steps, a group of people silently surrounded him.

They were the homeless people from the cathedral doors, the poor who usually lived on the scraps the church gave them.

The meekness and numbness had vanished from their eyes, replaced by an almost fanatical calm.

"Don't touch it, Father." The middle-aged homeless man at their head spoke hoarsely. "That cross stood here for a hundred years. It didn't stop the gang from dragging my daughter into an alley. But that man... he let us see the truth."

The priest's iron rod clattered to the ground.

Looking at the people before him, raggedly dressed yet resolute, he felt for the first time how hollow and powerless his faith, and the cathedral itself, had become.

At that same moment, inside the Court of Shadows' aerial fortress, Morris stood before a row of blue light screens. Only the faint glow of flowing data lit his impassive profile in the dark room.

"Sir," he said softly, "Saint Michael's Cathedral is the seventh religious site to be 'converted' this week. The faithful have not resisted. Instead, they have organized silent gatherings on their own. They have only one slogan: pay for sin with blood."

His back to Morris, Gideon stood at his private altar atop a high cliff.

Not a blade of grass grew there. There was only an altar carved from obsidian, its surface empty.

He watched the shifting haze above the distant city, his voice colder than the wind on the cliff.

"I did not light the spark. Their hearts already held dry grass waiting to burn across the plain."

At another center of the storm, deep in an abandoned old subway tunnel, Selene's sleepwalking continued.

Like a puppet controlled by an unseen hand, she furiously sketched on the damp rock with her charcoal stick, making a teeth-grating scratching sound.

Beneath her hand, a magnificent courthouse burned fiercely.

Judges in robes knelt on the floor, faces buried in their hands, their bodies shaking with remorse.

The gallery no longer held well-dressed lawyers and reporters. Instead, indistinct faces seethed with anger. Countless hands were raised, each gripping a bloodstained carving knife.

When two officers sent to patrol the area found it with their flashlights, the sight left them speechless.

The strange, powerful mural had spread along a full thirty meters of tunnel wall.

At its end, a small line in a child's hand, written in charcoal yet seeming to seep blood, was clearly legible:

"Judgment is never late, unless you pretend not to see."

Word soon reached Brise.

Avoiding every watching eye, she slipped into the tunnel alone.

As her slender fingertips brushed the rough charcoal marks, a faint yet utterly steadfast pulse of will traveled through them.

Brise's expression changed instantly.

This was not a prophecy.

It was the collective subconscious of millions of repressed souls in Gotham, gathering into a resonance through Selene, acting as a sensitive antenna.

She immediately sent Morris a highest-priority message through an encrypted channel: "The sleepwalker's wall... is becoming a new scripture. It is recording the past, but also revealing the future."

Online, the video of old Judge William Harding tearfully surrendering outside police headquarters had ignited public opinion around the world.

Like a psychic nuclear bomb, it blasted open the sturdy dam called the system.

Within twelve hours of its release, seventeen former law-enforcement officers involved in various wrongful convictions had contacted the police or media of their own accord, asking to be held to account for their crimes.

The most shocking among them was the current deputy chair of Gotham's Public Security Committee.

At a hastily called press conference, beneath countless camera flashes, he removed his badge and choked out to the cameras, "I used to believe maintaining the system's stability by any means necessary was justice... Until last night, when I dreamed I had become the father of Ricardo Fernandez (the victim). I saw how the light in his eyes had gone out."

The cracked system had begun to collapse from within.

An urgent internal UN communication was intercepted and decoded on Morris's terminal: "...In view of the collective cognitive deviation observed in Gotham City, we recommend that the Security Council immediately activate the highest-level cognitive contamination contingency plan and impose both physical and informational quarantine upon the affected area..."

After hearing the report, Gideon gave a deeply scornful smile. "They finally understand. They were never afraid of me. They are afraid that I have made those silent lambs begin to ask why they must be sacrificed."

He slowly turned and took a new, blank stone tablet from beneath the obsidian altar.

A wisp of silent black flame rose from his fingertip again, flowing slowly over the smooth stone and branding a new law into it.

The New Law: Chapter Two. All who tolerate evil share the guilt of its perpetrators.

This time, however, he did not make it public.

He carefully sealed the tablet inside a plain lead box, treating it like a fragile treasure.

That night, a blind child who begged while playing a battered violin on a street corner stumbled on the way home over a lead box that had "accidentally" rolled to his feet.

The boy did not know what was inside. He only felt that the cold box gave off a strange warmth when he held it in his arms.

He took it back to the dilapidated attic where he lived and solemnly placed it on a broken table missing a leg, as though it were the most precious relic in the world.

That night, something strange happened.

More than ten neighbors from the same building gathered in the boy's room without arranging it beforehand, as though drawn by an invisible call.

They surrounded the lead box. Some stared at it and wept; others knelt and bowed in silent reverence. An old man who could read and write even fetched paper and a pen, copied down the words he sensed, one by one, and passed them around.

Overnight, the story of the Boy with the Lead Box became a new heroic name and symbol of faith among Gotham's poor.

Late at night, the sea wind howled.

Gideon still stood on the sea cliff, looking down over the city below.

The once-isolated points of light now seemed connected by invisible fuses, beginning to resemble sparks ready to set an entire plain ablaze.

Morris appeared behind him like a ghost and quietly reported the latest developments. "Diana Prince has still not answered any outside questions. But according to inside sources, the magical barriers around Themyscira and the frequency of its border patrols have increased by three times their previous levels in the past twenty-four hours. Also... at Arkham Asylum, two serious offenders wrote the four characters 'We deserve to die' on their cell walls in their own blood, then killed themselves."

Gideon slowly closed his eyes.

Through his Sin Perception, he sensed countless energies of obsession circling above Gotham: fear, anger, remorse, and... a newborn awakening.

They intertwined into a vast, unprecedented web that trembled without cease.

"She thinks silence will suppress this storm?" His eyes snapped open. A black flame flashed in their abyssal depths. "Naive."

He extended his right hand. Pure black fire gathered silently in his palm, finally forming an intricate mark shaped like a black feather.

"Then let the fire... reach her doorstep."

As he finished speaking, he flicked a finger. Without making a sound, the mark of black flame instantly merged into the biting sea wind.

A black feather slipped quietly from his clothing. The gale carrying the mark caught it and sent it spinning, flying without hesitation toward the vast southern seas.

It crossed storms and pierced mist, heading toward the sacred waters that rejected men, seeking a secret harbor no one knew and a pair of hands that had long been waiting beneath the moonlight, their work mending fishing nets serving as a disguise.