Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters

After getting off the plane, Li Chen came out through a private passage. The Hellfire Club had already arranged for someone to pick him up.

The person was also a mutant. Upon seeing Li Chen, they immediately said respectfully, "Lord White Rook, please get in."

Li Chen had no plans to stay at a hotel. He might as well stay at the Hellfire Club.

After all, whether in terms of decor or anything else, the club was better than most hotels, comparable to a five-star one.

The car set off, and as they drove, Li Chen noticed how different New York was from Los Angeles.

Although Los Angeles was one of the largest cities in America, it didn't have many tall buildings. The residential neighborhoods in particular were made up mostly of small, single-story houses.

New York was different, though. Like Chicago, it was full of skyscrapers.

Li Chen knew what Chicago was like because Metropolis in "Superman" had actually been filmed there, not in New York.

Of course, the two cities were otherwise much the same in appearance.

New York and Los Angeles were the largest cities in America, but they also had the most homeless people.

People carrying dreams came to these two places, hoping to change their lives. Yet once their dreams were shattered, they could never leave and could only become "expendables."

Countless homeless people had ended up this way. They could only struggle near the kill line, with an average life expectancy of just three to five years before leaving this world forever.

Sadly, they wouldn't find peace even after death...

Li Chen swept his gaze over the homeless people. He couldn't do anything, and he wasn't a saint.

He had only come to enjoy life.

To put it bluntly, these were all their own choices.

Just like those who had emigrated, hadn't they known America wasn't paradise before they came?

Of course they had. They had simply chosen to deceive and numb themselves.

For people like that, Li Chen had only two words.

Serves them right.

"We're here."

The Hellfire Club in New York was located near Long Island. It was relatively quiet and, of course, very safe, since it was essentially a wealthy neighborhood.

Li Chen took his luggage and went straight in through the back door.

A shapely bunny girl was waiting for him. When she saw him, she immediately walked over on legs clad in black stockings. "Lord White Rook, let me take that."

She was a mutant too.

"Lord White Rook, this is the room the White Queen used to live in. I'm your personal maid. Whatever you need, I can satisfy you."

The bunny girl kept batting her eyes at Li Chen.

As a low-ranking attendant at the Hellfire Club, she had to curry favor with important people like these if she wanted to climb the ranks.

Without a doubt, White Rook was one of the most powerful people in the Hellfire Club.

Unfortunately, Li Chen wasn't interested in her.

At Li Chen's level, beauty alone no longer interested him. He had discovered that there were too many beautiful people in the world, and beauty was sometimes worthless.

Take Hollywood, for example. Most of those who dared come to chase their dreams had some looks. Among ordinary people, they would definitely be considered beauties.

Li Chen had grown somewhat immune to them.

Only good looks combined with other qualities, such as bearing, status, or strength, could stir some desire in Li Chen to conquer them.

So Li Chen told her to leave and looked around the room himself.

The room was several dozen square meters, with everything one could need. It was even more luxurious than a hotel room.

But when he opened the wardrobe, he found it was full of clothes the White Queen had left behind...

It was a woman's wardrobe, all right.

After resting for a while and eating lunch, Li Chen set off in a Hellfire car.

His destination was Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

Mutants had once caused some incidents, but they hadn't escalated, and then the upper echelons of humanity had signed an agreement with the mutants.

Of course, the mutants hadn't forgotten their ideals. They still wanted "autonomy."

In a sense, the X-Men and the Hellfire Club had the same goal.

The Hellfire Club was simply more radical, while the X-Men were more moderate.

Moreover, since the start of the new era, the X-Men had practically vanished from sight. They no longer went around putting out fires and appearing in the news as often as before.

It seemed they themselves had realized that no matter how many people they saved, humanity would never fully accept them.

People feared the unknown, and they feared powers beyond their control.

The more they showed, the more frightened people became. They might as well keep a low profile and let the world forget them.

There was only one way to make everyone accept them: everyone had to have mutant abilities.

But compared with the world's entire population, there were far too few mutants.

As a result, fewer and fewer people knew about Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

The mutants had kept a low profile, quietly training children with mutant abilities and seeking opportunities.

The Hellfire Club was a little more conspicuous than they were because it had taken a different path.

From the beginning, the Hellfire Club's approach had been to achieve its goals by controlling the world's elites.

The car drove all the way to Charles Manor in Westchester County. This was Professor X's private estate, which had been passed down through ten generations of the Xavier family.

Compared with the elites on Wall Street, Professor X was true "old money."

If not for his considerable personal wealth, mutants really wouldn't have had such an easy time.

It was precisely because he had capital that he could openly train mutants in New York State while maintaining good connections with the upper echelons. An ordinary person in his place would have been devoured long ago.

To this day, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters remained open.

The Hellfire Club had contacted them well in advance, so Li Chen encountered no obstacles on his way in.

Sitting in the car, Li Chen looked out the window. There were quite a few students at the X-School, at least several dozen, of all ages.

The estate was huge, even larger than Li Chen's estate in Beverly Hills. Otherwise, it couldn't have housed a school.

It took several minutes to drive from the front gate to the manor doors.

Outside were lawns and all sorts of training areas, a dazzling array of them.

"A rich man!"

Li Chen couldn't help remarking on it.

Rich people everywhere liked buying land, because everything else was an illusion. Only land was real and tangible.

Things like stocks on the stock market were castles in the air; everything could be lost at any moment.

But land was right there. No one could ever take it away.

It reminded Li Chen of a joke he had seen before: foreigners didn't like buying homes and preferred renting.

In reality, how was it that they didn't like buying? They simply couldn't afford to...

In the realm of capital, all land was privately owned. The "old money" families had long since bought up every last bit of it, so they looked down on the newly risen "new money," believing they had nothing but money.

Without a doubt, Professor X was old money. At that moment, he was sitting in his wheelchair with a smile, looking at Li Chen inside the car.