Laughing American comics, I am becoming more and more like a clown

Until one day, Lucien felt the person he was carrying on his back wake up.

……

"Bruce...long time no see."

Lucian had no intention of concealing his identity and almost immediately put Bruce to the ground. His distinctive green eyes locked onto his face through the tattered white cloth and he spoke in an extremely hoarse voice due to dehydration.

Bruce opened his eyes, his gaze sharp, and then recognized with surprise: "Lucian?"

"Ah, it's me." Lucian was very pleased: "You never let me down, Bruce."

Bruce didn't ask any stupid questions like "Why are you here?", "Where is this place?", or "Where are we going?" He looked around weakly, saw the same scene as before he lost consciousness, and said, "You saved me?"

"Yes."

"...Thank you." Bruce said sincerely.

Lucian blinked and looked at him, then smiled after a moment. His lips cracked and bled because of the smile, then gradually healed.

Bruce didn't look away, his eyelashes fluttering slowly as he asked, "When can we get out of here?"

"I don't know either." Lucian looked up at the setting sun. "I kept going north, which is the direction I came from... but there was a sandstorm a few days ago."

"I forgot the way back."

He looked at Bruce somewhat innocently.

……

With the bond between the Joker and Batman, Lucien has never been very good at remembering the way... Batman will find the direction, he just needs to find Batman.

Unfortunately, this effective function was temporarily taken offline in the tenth year due to the overlap of the positions of the Joker and Batman.

……

"How much supplies are left?" Bruce asked.

Lucien took out a knife and smiled, "You've been eating me for a long time, now you can... Are you hungry?"

……

As an immortal, Lucian didn't have the habit of carrying supplies with him, so hunger was often tolerable...

When he finished drinking the water, he cut his wrist and fed Bruce his blood. When he finished eating the food, he cut off his own flesh, watched it become edible under the sun, and then he minced the flesh with a stone and fed it to Bruce's mouth.

……

Bruce didn't know what to say for a moment. He originally thought that the bloody taste in his mouth was caused by dehydration.

"Thank you."

Once again, he was sincere.

"No need, dear." Lucian smiled, his lips cracked and healed again. "Like I said... this is nothing to me."

……

If Lucien had fully exerted the power of the Dionysus factor, he would not be in such a mess... Again, this is the dark multiverse, and he is cursed by Barbatos.

He cannot die multiple times in a short period of time.

So Lucian felt the feeling of dying and coming back to life again and again.

I really have to thank the Joker... He doesn't even have a fear of death.

……

But Lucien soon realized how unnecessary his "sacrifice" was.

"This is the Northern Hemisphere, and the sun's trajectory is tilted southward, so we can use the sun to identify cardinal directions." Bruce pointed to the slowly setting sun.

"Or wait until night. In the desert, you can see the North Star most of the time, and use the Big Dipper to find your way." He said helplessly, "Traveling in the desert during the day is not a good idea...it will cause you to lose water quickly."

"There are edible things here... If you can't catch small animals, you can look for plants... You should know about cacti."

Bruce didn't go into detail. He only talked about common sense that an adult should know, which made Lucien even more ashamed.

"What's that saying again... Worrying leads to confusion." He couldn't laugh anymore. Just as he was about to defend himself, he heard Bruce continue:

"Anyway...thank you."

……

The sun sets and the stars rise.

Lucian looked up and saw the Big Dipper telling him which was north with a distinct and undeniable brightness.

So he lowered his head and licked the moisture on the cactus.

……

Am I so brainless?

He couldn't help but ask himself, but when he recalled that memory, he didn't get any clues.

It was clearly something that happened not long ago, but it seemed to be shrouded in a veil... Was it because Bruce's near-death experience had such a huge impact on him?

Or are there too many deaths?

Lucien also didn't understand the logic behind feeding his own blood and flesh to Bruce.

Judging from the results alone...it's not bad, isn't it?

It's just that the purpose has been achieved.

……

As Bruce woke up, Lucian's mind gradually returned.

In the past ten years, he didn't care much about who Bruce's enemies were, nor did he care about what difficulties he encountered... Lucian found it difficult to explain why he had been following him. Maybe he wanted to see with his own eyes how Batman was born?

Therefore, he didn't know when Bruce fainted in the desert and who hurt him.

But Lucian knew... at least in 99.99% of bat stories, no one died during training.

...Maybe this time it’s because the plot has been changed.

Bruce became neither the Cruel Knight nor the Dawn Lantern.

So the universe is heading towards a direction of losing control.

Lucian pressed his palm against the green lantern ring around his neck, which he had never taken off, and felt its burning temperature.

"What are you thinking?"

Bruce walked over and sat next to him and asked.

Lucian tilted his head, his eyes meeting the unchanging green and the blue that had grown deeper with time.

"I'm thinking……"

From the nasal laughter: "Who am I? Where does the world come from?"

……

"who am I?"

"Where did the world come from?"

These two questions are the first ones raised in the book Sophie's World and they are also the questions that run through the whole book.

The most interesting thing is the content of the book.

Chapter 77: I didn’t figure out what to title it, this is a transitional chapter

It tells the story of a girl's understanding of her own existence that survives in the letters exchanged between the protagonist and his father.

In the end, the girl realized that she was a character in the story, so she planned an escape with her friends, and she successfully left the story... But the problem is that this is a book, and the girl's life after escaping is still recorded in the book.

……

Lucian's two questions can be extended to the philosophical level, but a desert filled with yellow sand is not a good place to debate philosophy.

"Thinking about the meaning of life itself is meaningless," Bruce said.

Lucian glanced at him in surprise: "I thought you would remain silent, just like before."

In the past, Lucian would say a lot of things and only get a response of less than ten words.

Bruce was also very frank: "There were many times when I didn't understand what you were saying... I was only a few years old at that time. Why did you expect an underage child to talk to you about life, ideals, and desires?"

Why look forward to it?

Because that's Batman.

Lucien doesn't see anything wrong with his stereotype: "...but you act like you understand what it means."

He recalled Bruce's reaction during the conversation and was silent for a while: "So you didn't understand anything?"

"Dadaism, The Diary of Qiu Miaojin, the collectivism of Bertolt's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Camus's famous quotes, the meaning of the blue rose..." Bruce rattled off a long list like a treasure trove:

"...covering opera, painting, philosophy, politics, society, music... niche and tricky stuff... In fact, if you talk to me about Van Gogh or Monet, you'll find that I'm often willing to communicate with you."

Now it was Lucien's turn to be silent.

Bruce smiled and patted his shoulder: "But it doesn't matter, now I know everything."

……

The desert night was extremely cold, the polar opposite of the day. Lucian supported him and walked north.

"Can you see at night?" Bruce asked.

"OK."

"Will it glow like a nocturnal animal?"

"……Won't."

"Is this a skill? Is it something you develop through practice?"

Lucian looked at Bruce's chattering through the night, wondering why this Batman was so talkative, but he still replied: "Human experiment."

How come what the Joker did isn't considered human experimentation?

But to Bruce's ears, that phrase automatically translated into "Human Experimentation at the Court of Owls."