The Parker Tower had a total of sixty-six floors.
Unlike Oscorp Tower and Stark Tower, the sixty-fifth and sixty-sixth floors of the Parker Tower were partially merged. In addition to serving as Batman's office, they also contained exclusive fitness, medical, and rest areas.
Aside from not being as large as the Manor and lacking a garden, this place possessed every function a manor should have.
However, Batman would not enjoy more than half of these areas, such as the private bar or the private cinema.
At this moment, Batman stood before a massive floor-to-ceiling window eight meters high, his hands clasped behind his back as he overlooked New York.
Behind him, Parker Industries CEO Alice stood with her hands crossed in front of her, awaiting instructions.
"This is my encrypted communication channel. You are to contact me through it only when absolutely necessary."
Batman did not linger before the window for long. After assigning the tasks required of Parker Industries and Alice, he still had many things to do.
As he spoke, Batman handed a USB drive to Alice, who received it with both hands and solemnly tucked it away safely.
"Additionally, send all information regarding every vacant floor in this building to this email address later."
Batman wrote down an email address, which Alice also noted down.
After organizing his thoughts and confirming nothing had been overlooked, Batman left Alice to busy herself in the office, while he made several transfers, returning to the Batcave via the sewers.
With the construction of the Parker Tower completed and put into use, the Manhattan Batcave, which had begun construction at the same time, was also finished.
The Batcave had two levels. The first level contained servers, a trophy display, a Batsuit display, a storage area for the Batmobile, and a zone equipped with simple medical functions.
The concealed second level was a safe house. Additionally, it held three spare Arkham suits and a spare Batmobile.
However, since the engineering on Bat Island was not yet finished, the Batcave's second level was being used temporarily as a secure containment zone.
The unconscious Osborn father and son, along with the others, had been placed here by Batman, their physiological data monitored via hidden sensors.
He had moved them from the first level to the second because the task Batman was about to undertake required absolute certainty that no one would know about it.
He was going to bring out that old butler of Gotham, Alfred.
"I am Alfred Pennyworth. My goodness, you look just like your father."
After more than forty years, Batman still clearly remembered the tone and intonation the old butler used when he said those words upon returning to Gotham from England for the first time.
When Batman deliberately searched his memory for traces of the old butler, he could recall what Alfred had said at any point in time, under any circumstances.
In Batman's original world, Superman—Clark—was the anchor that stabilized the physical reality of the multiverse.
Yet in Batman's life, if there was anyone who served as the anchor for "Bruce Wayne," the way home after his dark crusades, and the final line of defense for his humanity...
...that person could only be Alfred, the old butler who was both a father and a friend.
Recreating Alfred was an immense engineering project, far from something that could be completed in this Batcave within a single day. Batman was merely using the workbench here to write the most fundamental code.
For ten whole hours, from day until late at night, the code on the screen before Batman cascaded like a rainstorm, without pausing for a moment.
But even so, less than one ten-thousandth of the Alfred AI's underlying code was completed.
At 11:00 PM, Batman stopped writing code. Instead, employing layers of encryption and various trust funds, he purchased a massive amount of components to build the server for the Alfred AI.
Unlike the server for the Oracle AI, which was simply constructed and cost over a hundred thousand dollars...
...the server for the Alfred AI was not merely for providing combat support. It needed to remain functional even in the event of catastrophic incidents in this world requiring the united front of the entire Justice League.
Under these premises, Batman would personally build an entire server cluster.
The funds required for this were equally astronomical—enough to buy the current Parker Industries—because one of its components involved at least thirty-six satellites in low Earth orbit.
Therefore, the components Batman purchased were merely the parts that would allow the underlying code to run initially.
After a day of high-intensity combat in New Mexico and returning to New York to handle a pile of matters, he was now expending intense mental effort.
Even Batman felt a hint of aging. He needed a rest before returning to the Batcave to consider the problem of the dormant Venom symbiote within his body.
Batman stood up, silently checked the various functions of the Arkham suit, and then drove the Batmobile out of the Batcave.
Night patrol and fighting crime were Batman's way of resting.
The moonlight was like water, adding a touch of pale white to the dazzling lights of the New York night sky.
Like Gotham, New York possessed many buildings decorated with gargoyles and grotesques. These decorations were architectural aesthetic hallmarks of the Gilded Age from the late 19th to early 20th century, concentrated mainly in the neighborhoods of Manhattan.
Among the more famous ones were the pterosaur-shaped gargoyles of Wall Street, overlooking Trinity Church and the busy Financial District.
However, Batman was not on Wall Street at this moment, but near Central Park in Manhattan, at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street.
Although it did not rain in New York as often as in Gotham, the terrifying aura radiating from Batman, who was crouching on a gargoyle statue under the moonlight, was not diminished in the slightest.
His cape wrapped around half his body, his eyes glowing white as he coldly watched a group of sneaking figures not far away.
There were five of them in total. Moving quickly and professionally, they climbed along the wall and reached a skylight of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the United States and a world-famous museum, housing various precious artifacts and artworks from Egypt, Greece, Rome, Europe, and other regions.
Batman did not immediately round up this group of obviously professional thieves. He wanted to see exactly what they intended to steal and what their objective was, so he could combine that with subsequent interrogation to determine if there was a larger organization behind them.
"For this operation, I've worked here for two full years and made ample preparations."
One of the men, masked and wearing a tight night-ops suit, lowered his voice and spoke to his accomplices.
The others nodded in succession. After the leader made a standard tactical hand signal, two of them stepped forward. Using glass-breaking tools, they silently opened the skylight, and then the five of them slipped inside one by one.