"That can be done?" Henry asked in surprise.
Although he did not know the details, Henry knew one thing: he had no legal identity. As for where to get documents, even fake ones, he had no clue.
Now Tom said he could handle it. How could that not be surprising?
Old Tom grinned smugly. "This is Alaska. As long as you're not wanted by the federal government, anything can be arranged."
After a pause, he lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Actually, even if you are, it's not impossible to deal with. You aren't, are you?"
Henry hurriedly shook his head. "Of course not."
"That's good." Tom returned to his relaxed demeanor.
He then turned a corner and stopped in front of an office with broad floor-to-ceiling windows. The words "Old Tom Employment Agency and Consulting Company" were pasted on the glass, and a middle-aged woman inside was processing documents.
Tom led Henry in, but the person inside did not even raise her head or glance at the newcomers. She had the unmistakable air of a seasoned old-lady clerk.
There were several strange gold coins scattered across the desk. Only after Old George gave her a signal did the woman slowly sweep them into a drawer.
When Henry passed by her, he was unsurprisingly met with a gesture of fanning her nose in disgust. The woman said, "Wow, which stinking ditch did you pick this guy up from?"
"One of Old George's crew. Just got off the boat."
"Oh, all right." Clearly, the woman knew who Old George was and understood what "just got off the boat" implied.
He might stink a little, but he had money in his pockets! So no matter how bad he smelled, she had to put up with it. Don't think white people were somehow more noble, the sort who would never bend for a paycheck.
Fortunately, the woman did not suddenly change her face and come fawning over him with concern. Otherwise, Henry would have been embarrassed to death. His long-suppressed iron fist might have come down at full force.
Still, Henry had seen this sort of attitude—judging people by their appearance—often enough in his previous life, even if it was not exactly commonplace.
He was not angry. Her attitude was merely impolite, not some face-to-face ultimate attack, let alone physical harassment. Besides, the fact that he was a complete mess was undeniable. Was he supposed to forbid people from saying so?
Incidentally, this body did not actually sweat. It merely radiated normal body heat.
So the smell on him was really seawater mixed with all sorts of strange king crab juices, then steamed by his body heat and rapidly chilled by the cold outside air. That double assault had produced the odor.
Especially the salt in the seawater. With that stuff involved, the smell of anything became strange.
He took a set of clean clothes from Tom and borrowed the bathroom in his office. When he passed the large bed, he could not help making a malicious guess: was this guy hoping to impose unspoken rules on a female secretary, or entertain female clients who came knocking?
But judging by this shabby place, that big bed probably did not see much business.
There was not much to say about the shower. He simply scrubbed hard. Since he could not damage himself, he had to scrub away every bit of grime, treating it like a thorough cleaning.
The grime that did not belong to his body was easy enough to deal with, but his hair and beard were another matter.
Henry tried cutting off a lock with scissors. When he discovered they would not cut, he did not try forcing them through. If he did, he would probably just ruin the scissors.
So how was he supposed to deal with this face?
He remembered seeing in an animated Superman show that the Man of Steel used Heat Vision and a mirror's reflection to groom himself.
So could his eyes shoot beams too? Henry had never actually tried.
To avoid damaging someone else's bathroom, Henry first raised his palm in front of himself, intending to use his own body as the target.
But how was he supposed to fire Heat Vision? There was no online tutorial for this!
He strained a few times as though taking a dump and widened his eyes. Sure enough, absolutely nothing happened.
Then he silently repeated, I want to fire Heat Vision, but that was equally useless.
So Henry could only turn to an old memory. There were many works that described Superman's origins, but the most detailed was probably the long-running TV series, Smallville.
The Kryptonian boy Clark Kent, who gradually awakened all kinds of superpowers, fired Heat Vision for the first time in his life because of... sexual arousal!
When ordinary boys saw a fair-skinned, beautiful female teacher with long legs, they might have wet dreams or nosebleeds. But the future Superman's eyes lit up, and he nearly burned down his family's barn!
So... what was that supposed to imply? That he should go looking for his belated puberty?
Or recall the puberty from more than thirty years before he had transmigrated?
To cut his hair and shave, Henry could only treat a dead horse as if it were alive.
He closed his eyes, and the lovely figures of every teacher in the D-folder seemed to spin before him. Thanks to his super brain, he remembered every film he had watched clearly enough to even recite their catalog numbers.
As expected, the first reaction came from his lower body. Then a stream of heat surged upward from his tailbone, passing through his spine, neck, and the back of his head.
The change unexpectedly reminded Henry of the new Hollywood Godzilla, right before it unleashed its nuclear breath.
Could it be that he was not actually a Kryptonian, but a humanoid Godzilla?
Abruptly, one final urge before post-nut clarity surged into... his eyeballs. Henry uncontrollably opened his eyes and saw everything before him turn red. Then his right hand felt a searing pain.
The sensation came quickly and went quickly. It was exactly like a man's orgasm.
When the world returned to normal colors, the right hand he had held up as a target had not been shot through. There were merely two scorched marks on his palm.
Henry had secretly tested himself before. When he touched boiling water used for coffee, it did absolutely nothing to him. He could tell it was hot, but he felt none of the so-called pain, much less suffered an injury.
And this pain was the first sensation he had felt since leaving the underground laboratory.
Yet it also felt as though he had broken through some kind of membrane, removing a certain restriction from himself. As long as he wanted to, he could fire Heat Vision at any time, and he could even adjust its intensity and duration.
It was as though a Heat Vision switch and valve had been installed in his mind. He only needed some practice with the finer points of control.
All right, after resolving this Kryptonian-specific sexual arousal instinct, the next problem was even more troublesome.
How could he use a mirror to reflect his own Heat Vision, with enough power to melt the hair his body produced?
It felt like casually picking up a mirror and using it to bounce Godzilla's nuclear beam away.
And yet Superman had accomplished such an unbelievable thing!
So if anyone claimed that everything about Superman was based on science, and that his magic resistance was therefore weak, let that person explain how an ordinary mirror could reflect Heat Vision and shave the beard off the Steel Body.
Anyone who could come up with a reasonable physical explanation deserved a Nobel Prize.
Before you continue