Ian: Behold My God-Demon Indestructible Art!

Under Lady Paradox's gaze.

Ian's blood was flowing with the rainwater into the sewers.

The blood was like molten dusk amber, giving off an incongruous glimmer amid Gotham's gray, rain-drenched streetscape.

As if it possessed some low level of living activity, it followed the grain of the paving stones, slowly and resolutely flowing and seeping toward low-lying places, toward cracks, and especially toward the nearest sewer grate.

The rain washed over it.

Not only did it fail to dilute the amber-gold liquid, it seemed to become its carrier instead, sweeping up even more tiny golden particles and pouring them into the pitch-black sewer mouth.

From a higher-dimensional perspective.

Lady Paradox could clearly "see" the blood that contained Ian's essential power entering Gotham's vast, old, and riddled underground world like countless glowing jellyfish or strands of mycelium.

It flowed along rusted pipes and mixed with sewage, yet was not assimilated. Instead, it stained everything it passed with a faint golden fluorescence. Some entered the sewage treatment plants, whose outdated filtration and sedimentation tanks were helpless against it; another portion seeped directly through ruptured pipe walls into the surrounding soil and rock layers.

Even more unsettling was that this "contamination" seemed to have the property of self-replication or catalytic diffusion.

Ordinary water or matter that came into contact with the amber-gold blood did not immediately turn into the same thing, but it began to emit an extremely faint fluctuation of "presence" that was identical in essence.

They were becoming excellent media for the amber-gold blood to spread farther.

"His blood—"

Lady Paradox frowned again and pointed at the golden "map" below that was constantly expanding. "It is entering Gotham's circulation system at an astonishing speed."

"If you don't intervene, stop it, or purify it, then before long, every drop of tap water