It was no longer those simple, unempathetic negative emotions... nor the instinct of dinosaurs to eat raw flesh, or the memory of sitting in a cave and listening to prehistoric hailstones crash against the branches...
Nor was it Joker-Man's righteous yet manic, circus-like, bouncing joy, or the memory of Bane Bat training his body day after day.
It was pain.
When his hand was chopped off, the bewildered scream of the nerves in his elbow... transformed into a wail as blood gushed out.
The sensation of his powerful legs being forcibly torn apart by Death Angel, who had been injected with venom...
The full muscle groups and fibers snapping one by one, the joint head being forcibly ripped from its socket, dragging the attached tendons with it and making a soft popping sound.
His spine breaking and being stretched, life-support tubes inserted into him, waking from dreams every midnight because of the phantom pain in his limbs. The severed nerves still remaining at the wound were mistakenly reporting that they could not connect to his limbs, able only to send bewildered questions to his brain.
Batman had endured this kind of pain for thirty years. And when Chen Tao synchronized with Shattered Bat, all thirty years of that pain was poured into his mind.
Chen Tao's temples throbbed violently, but this time, he could not transform his head into the silicon-based body of a car to stop these physiological spasms.
Chen Tao felt as if he were the Little Mermaid who had transformed her fish tail into legs. Every step brought tremendous pain—although the metaphor was somewhat strange, it was undeniably fitting.
His brain, lungs, and heart were still human, but everything else... was made of dark gray nanomachines.
Phew...
Chen Tao canceled his transformation. The intense pain receded like