Genius on the Left, Madman on the Right (Part Two)

Schiller was called back by the principal. Even though he could manage things remotely, someone else was still needed to manage the affairs of the mental hospital. This task fell to Bruce.

Schiller confidently handed all the work over to Bruce, Bruce always felt that the professor had more confidence in him than he had in himself.

He was just a freshman in college, and he was about to take over an atypical mental hospital during his first internship. The mental hospital he was going to manage had no real mental patients, but the patients were more dangerous and troublesome than those with mental illness.

When Bruce questioned his ability to handle the job, Schiller told him, "Sometimes, you don't know you're a genius until you push yourself."

On his first day at work, Bruce encountered a major problem: he couldn't tell who was who.

Although he had memorized all the patient files, which were as thick as a book, and remembered all their names, room numbers, and corresponding medical records, this would have been more than enough for a Doctor in a regular hospital.

Unfortunately, there isn't a single mentally ill person here in the traditional sense. Behind their names and diagnoses lies an extremely complex social identity.

Who is a member of which gang? Which gangs are at odds with each other? Who were enemies with whom? Who are partners with whom? This information cannot be found in the medical records.

Bruce had overheard some of Schiller's phone conversations in the past. His extraordinary memory turned this information into a beginner's gift. He couldn't figure out everyone's social identity, but that didn't matter; he could deduce it from the existing clues.

In addition, Bruce is very good at disguising himself. Just like his disguise of his playboy identity, in this hospital, he became a wealthy man with a carefree personality, a life of luxury, but a yearning for gangster life.

The title of the world's richest man provided him with many advantages. Generally, no gang member would think that the world's richest man would deliberately try to get information out of him. Therefore, when Bruce showed interest in gangster stories, the gang leaders just thought that this young tycoon was like a rich kid who had been living a comfortable life for too long and longed for the exciting life in gangster movies.

Therefore, although they added a lot of their own fabrications when telling stories, Bruce was still able to deduce real and useful information about gang social relationships from these stories.

In a city where almost everyone has ties to gangs, figuring out these complex gang relationships is almost equivalent to figuring out the entire network of the city's underworld.

Bruce discovered that the rules of survival in this city were far more complex than he had imagined.

Starting from the lowest levels of a small gang, even a small group of only a dozen or so people, they all have their own rules for survival.

These small gangs often take on the jobs of patrolling the streets and petty theft, and they also have to pay protection money to larger gangs and be at their beck and call.

Larger gangs, numbering in the hundreds, are the mainstream in Gotham. Most of them own one or two businesses, which could be shops or factories.

They provide protection for these industries, drive away troublemakers, and remotely control their small gangs to solicit customers. When conflicts arise over customers, they may engage in small-scale shootouts, but these usually involve hiding behind cars and firing a couple of shots with a pistol, rarely involving large-scale firepower.

Above that are large gangs with hundreds of members. These gangs have reached another level, and each of them has at least one special industry on which they rely for survival. Bruce discovered that these damned gangs have even managed to specialize in specific industries.

When they reach a scale of several hundred people, they often control at least one smuggling chain or have a complete industrial chain of planting, refining and selling, or control the vast majority of industries in the Red Light District. Some of the best among them have even achieved a monopoly in a certain industry in a certain region.

At this level, the profits they can extract each day have reached an astonishing level, and thus, they also reach a point of saturation.

Above that, they can no longer be called gangs, but rather family crime syndicates. The twelve Mafia families that rule Gotham, apart from the core armed forces controlled by their leaders, do not actually have any business that they need to personally handle. What they need to do is remotely control these big gangs. Each Mafia families has dozens or even hundreds of big gangs under their command, each in charge of different businesses in different areas.

When Falcone established the Twelve Families, he divided them into twelve different industries, allowing each family to focus on a different aspect.

Falcone, sits atop the pyramid, issuing orders to all families and gangs.

In collecting and analyzing this information, Bruce discovered that Gotham's seemingly chaotic and disorderly rules were actually a fairly solid pyramid, where wealth was extracted layer by layer from the criminal industry and then redistributed and produced at the top.

In this cycle, Gotham has developed its own unique ecosystem, creating the largest concentration of crime industries in the United States.

At the same time, Bruce discovered that, contrary to his expectations, from a sociological and economic perspective, the city's industrial structure was damnably healthy. Whether it was the distribution of industrial scale at each level or the so-called division of industrial clusters, it was actually better than most cities in the United States.

As the investigation deepened, Bruce gradually began to doubt his initial intentions, because he discovered that although Gotham was evil, it was not actually poor, and the people's standard of living was not low. Apart from being very dangerous, the people here were quite wealthy.

During his travels across the United States, Bruce studied the living standards of people in major United States cities. He discovered that the living standards of the vast majority of people in Gotham, this damned city, were actually far above the passing grade.

During his visit to the hospital, Bruce met an old man from Keystone City, whom people called "Rifle".

Rifle was originally Keystone City, but his daughter married a low-level gang Gotham. This gang leader was framed, and his daughter almost suffered the same fate. Upon receiving his daughter's plea for help, Rifle grabbed an old-fashioned Rifle and rushed into Gotham, killing the gang members who wanted to frame his son-in-law with a few shots.

The Lauren family, one of the Twelve Families, took a liking to this old man's fiery temper and his excellent skills, and now he boss a restaurant in the Lauren family's West End.

Unlike other gang members, this old man was genuinely hospitalized. He suffered from chronic headaches, which appeared to be a complication of Anxiety Disorder. His son-in-law used his connections to get him admitted for treatment, and after two courses of treatment, he is much better now.

"It's the same everywhere, it's the same everywhere..."

Rifle, puffing on a cigar, leaned against the hospital bed and said to Bruce, "What do you think Keystone City would be like? Everyone lives on clean streets, every family has a car, and kids go to school in uniforms?"

He took another drag of his cigarette. The old man even had the air of a southern aristocrat, like a real Rifle.

Amidst the smoke, he slowly recalled, "When I met Mary, you know, it was decades ago... Back then, I was just a poor kid, trying to make my way in the city with nothing but my bare hands..."

"There are gangs in Keystone City, too. I work for them, but it's nothing like Gotham. I earn so little, sometimes I don't even have a penny in my pocket. I want to marry Mary, but I have no money. How can we get married?"

"So I took a gun and started working as Assassin, which made my life a little better. By the time my daughter was born, I was doing pretty well. Although I didn't have much education, I think Gotham is much better."

Bruce said, "Is Gotham better than Keystone City?"

If it weren't for the fact that the person who said this was a knowledgeable-looking old man, Bruce would have thought he had lost his mind.

"I know you respectable young men think this city is rotten, full of gangs and everyone is a criminal, but for people like us, it doesn't matter who we work for, we'll work for whoever pays us the most."

"In Gotham, if you're a full-fledged member of a gang, you can actually make a lot of money. And for someone like me, who owns a restaurant or a bar, it's no different from running a big business."

"Moreover, gang members are actually safer here. There is a set of rules here. If you don't want to declare war on a gang, it's best not to mess with its people, even if they are just the lowest-ranking thugs."

"So, those who join gangs to make a living are actually safer than in other places, because the gangs call the shots here. Once you become a member of the gang, your words carry more weight."

"I know, I know..." Rifle put down his cigarette and said, "I know very well that being Assassin will bring retribution. I will go to Hell, and Satan's judgment will be waiting for me, but I don't care. Do you know why?"

Before Bruce could answer, Rifle said to himself, "I need to fill my stomach first, earn more money, and live a better life."

"God didn't let me be born into a family as well-off as yours. My father gambled away everything, my mother ran off with someone else, and my the One possession was a not-so-good Old Gun. So I thought, what can I do if I do this?"

"After coming to Gotham, I realized that the people who built this city must be geniuses. Don't you think these gangs are planned too well? It has even achieved a perfect balance, allowing the city to run for a long time and people to live quite well."

"My son-in-law has a guy working for him. What was his name again?... Never mind, we all call him 'One Hand'. His left hand was chopped off when he was a child by his father, who was brain-damaged from drug use. But he's been working for the casino boss on their street since he was a kid, specializing in throwing dice. Last year he even bought a car, and he's getting married next month."

"The gang's business is huge, and they are short of people. As long as someone has hands and feet and can work, they will take anyone."

"If the kids don't go to school, they can learn a skill in the underworld. Those with a brain can work in restaurants and learn to cook from the boss, or learn to bartend. The most skilled ones are those who can learn skills in casinos; they are all natural-born clever kids."

"Those who are agile can become pickpockets, those with good eyesight can become lookouts, and at the very least, they can learn a few fighting skills from others. There are so many gangs, restaurants, bars, casinos, and auto repair shops, they either need employees or they need security guards, so you can make a living anywhere."

"In my opinion, the economy has been even better in the last two years. If I save up a bit more, I might even be able to buy a small detached house on the edge of the Affluent Area in the south. Oh, you should live in the center of that area, after all, they say you're a big tycoon."

"My grandson isn't as lucky as you, but he's still better off than me. At least he was born in a house that doesn't let in any drafts, and his mother takes good care of him while his father goes out to earn money. We're doing pretty well, right?"

Perhaps because his headache had improved a lot, the old man seemed quite energetic, constantly muttering about details of his life. At this moment, Bruce's thoughts drifted far away.

A single sentence from the Rifle made him start to think.

Gotham's criminal industry is so well-organized that it's almost impossible for it to have formed naturally. Gangs arise from chaos, and it's impossible for everyone to spontaneously organize these industries.

How did this city become the strange place it is today?

Could it be that someone deliberately designed it this way?

So what is his purpose? If he has the ability to plan the industry chain so perfectly, why does he have to turn this place into a crime capital? Can't he do something else?

Gotham is simply the biggest oddity among all American cities. It has been running smoothly for so long in a bizarre and twisted way, becoming one of the most prosperous cities on the East Coast by taking an unconventional approach. It has also risen to the top of the US city GDP rankings in an extremely outrageous way. People's living standards are not only adequate, but also on the verge of excellence.

Its creator must have been a genius; he wrote order from disorder, creating a new urban operating model almost out of thin air.

But he must also be a madman, using his insane creativity to personally build the world's largest city of sin.

Bruce thought that perhaps here, genius and madness are separated by only a fine line. Gotham is like a coin standing between the two, seemingly about to fall at any moment, yet it still oscillates on that line to this day.

Everyone here, like this city, has two sides: they are both geniuses with special talents and unparalleled madmen.

Genius on the left, madness on the right, and everyone in Gotham is like the traffic rules here—

I'm going straight, I'll never turn.

Today's 10,000-word update is here.

Regarding the update schedule, the update was posted late at night on the day of the release because we needed to track First Subscription. Since the release was late at night, the update was posted late at night. Normally, updates are posted during the day. Those who get up early don't need to stay up late to wait. Updates are usually posted at noon or in the afternoon.