After Batman and Zatanna's souls returned to their bodies, neither of them paid any attention to Constantine, who hurriedly left. Batman supported the soul-power-depleted Zatanna to the Lounge and put her in a life-support pod to rest, then received a call from Schiller.
Over the phone, Schiller told him that the key to the citizens' madness and the plants' mutations might be the rain that had been falling continuously since the disaster began. Batman had reached the same conclusion.
Since the disaster began, there had only been two kinds of phenomena surrounding Gotham: fog and rain.
It was known that Zatanna had created the fog to seal off the spirit world and prevent dark mages from obtaining the Ultimate Evil Curse. That left only the inexplicable rain.
Gotham was a rainy city, but it did not rain twenty-four hours a day, all year round, without interruption. Yet ever since the disaster began, the dark clouds over Gotham had never dispersed. The rain had not paused even for a few minutes, falling for days on end.
Schiller's suggestion of dispersing the rain clouds or cutting off the rain could indeed stop the disaster as quickly as possible. Batman did have corresponding plans, but they were fundamentally based on renovating Gotham's infrastructure.
In his original plan, once Gotham had been transformed into a complete hive, everyone could live inside the city's buildings without having to go out in the rain. Ventilation and water would be handled by equipment Batman had built, which would not only be convenient but also prevent danger.
But to achieve that effect, Gotham's entire infrastructure renovation project had to be completed first. They were still a long way from that point. Simply put, it was a slow-acting medicine, while Gotham's current crisis was an acute illness.
But when