Dinner was pizza delivery from a nearby place, with a complimentary two-liter bottle of Otaku happy water.
Considering the kinds of food that were cheaply available in the United States, there was a reason so many people there became obese.
You could say shut-ins existed all over the world, not merely otaku in the two-dimensional sense. Only in the United States did so many shut-ins weigh several hundred kilograms, unable to leave their beds on their own and struggling even to walk.
But that indirectly kept industries like gyms and boxing clubs thriving. Especially wealthy people, who spent time exercising every day to maintain a good physique.
As for those fitness maniacs whose goal was to train themselves into bodies full of bodybuilding muscles, then desperately inject themselves with steroids, they were creatures from another dimension altogether.
Thinking of that movie where Thor had eaten himself into a fat guy, Henry suddenly worried whether a Kryptonian's physique had any way of stopping him from becoming obese.
But when he was hungry and food was right in front of him, there was no Reason not to eat. The feeling of being so hungry at that Russian research institute that he wanted to scrape wall dust off and eat it was still vividly etched in his mind.
People who had truly been hungry were genuinely afraid of that feeling.
No wonder the hungry ghosts alone occupied one of Buddhism's Six Realms of Reincarnation, standing alongside the hell realm and animal realm as one of the Three Evil Paths.
But after taking a bite of the pizza, Henry immediately regretted it a little.
His standards for food could be said to be both picky and not picky. Although he liked delicious things, most of the time, anything edible was fine.
In other words, Henry only divided food into three categories: delicious, edible, and inedible.
Now, he could add another category between edible and inedible: "Eating it hurts the heart, but not eating it hurts the wallet."
As someone without a habit of wasting things, he naturally could not throw edible food into the trash, nor leave it until it expired before throwing it away. For one thing, that wasted money; for another, it wronged the people who had worked hard to provide the food.
Even if he had several hundred thousand U.S. dollars as a cushion, he could not squander them carelessly. He had no other income right now and was purely living off his savings.
But some food just... did not work. Even if eating it would not make him sick, actually swallowing it made him feel as though he had wronged himself.
Especially for a Kryptonian with Super Taste, if he wanted to stop himself from tasting shit while still having to eat it, he would probably have to stuff it directly down his throat, or even into his stomach, to avoid it.
But that also explained why the soda came in a two-liter bottle. It was genuinely for rinsing the mouth and washing out the stomach!
This lesson made Henry firmly decide that any place he rented had to have a kitchen. If he got tired of eating out, he could cook for himself. That should work, right?
Google Maps did not have that function yet, or else he would have given this pizza place a one-star review no matter what.
To forget the taste lingering in his mouth, Henry picked up the Yellow Pages beneath the telephone and started searching through it again. He arranged what he needed to do tomorrow, trying to distract himself.
Unfortunately, the Yellow Pages still had no customer reviews, so he had no idea which place was better. He simply stopped comparing similar businesses and chose nearby ones instead.
Henry hypnotized himself: arriving somewhere unfamiliar while knowing nothing about it meant he needed at least some courage to make mistakes and learn.
As long as he did not get greedy and remained careful, withdrawing in time before things could lead to massive losses, he would not trap himself somewhere he could not escape.
What he feared least was someone flipping the table and resorting to violence.
He was a Kryptonian. If he went berserk, they would see who killed whom.
On the new day, Henry woke up early and stepped outside his room to bask in the morning Sun. Winter sunlight was always warm, making people instinctively chase after it, completely unlike summer, when people avoided it at all costs.
Unfortunately, the United States was an old industrial country, and Los Angeles was a major city, so the air quality was not great. Even taking a deep breath required worrying about choking himself.
After getting himself ready, he set out in the morning. He first bought a hot dog from the stall run by a Black old man nearby, squeezed on plenty of mustard, and casually filled his stomach. As for the complimentary soda, he declined it. That was practically a bacterial culture tank.
After wolfing down the hot dog, Henry found a bank first, intending to deposit all the money he had earned from the crab boat.
After all, carrying several hundred thousand dollars in cash was too conspicuous and unnecessary. He would not feel safe leaving it in a motel or in the house he planned to rent later, either. If a thief got it, all his accumulated fortune would vanish overnight. Better to put it in a bank.
The reason he had not opened an account in Alaska was that Alaskan banks did not have many branches in the continental United States, making them inconvenient to use.
As for directly cashing checks from Alaskan banks in the continental United States, the handling fees were utterly arbitrary. Every bank had its own rules. It basically depended entirely on the bank's mood, with no standardized fee or percentage.
Now that he was in Los Angeles and intended to make a living in Hollywood, there was no way he could only accept cash payments or bring checks to a bank and cash them for a steep fee. Opening a bank account was the best option.
Small banks were out. The American financial system had become a mixed bag long ago under the meddling of those Jews, with no standards whatsoever.
Unless you had someone on the inside, small banks were like a deep palace: easy to enter, difficult to leave.
They first lured people in with high interest rates. Once you deposited your money, whatever position they wanted you to assume, you had to obediently assume it. Refusal was not an option.
Big banks were not all that reliable either.
At least before his transmigration, even someone like him who did not belong to the financial sector had learned from the uproarious news about the bankruptcies of the United Kingdom's Barings Bank, the United States' Lehman Brothers, Silicon Valley Bank, and others.
He definitely needed to avoid those minefields.
People with capital might find a way to snatch chestnuts from the fire, but a small fry like him would only become harvested chives.
He had better not get so angry that he used his Kryptonian abilities to charge into a bank and "uphold justice."
Some banks primarily dealt in financial investments, with deposits, withdrawals, remittances, and transfers treated as side businesses. Such banks had entry thresholds: either you needed an introduction from an acquaintance, or they simply refused "poor people" at Henry's level.
In short, Bank of America's methods were fancy and its practices crooked. One careless move and you could fall into their trap with nowhere to seek help. Even if you took them to court, you could not beat these behemoths legally. After all, they made the laws.
The United States was founded by financial conglomerates; that was no joke.
The more he thought about it, the more Henry felt that the goal of "opening a bank account" was surrounded by too many minefields. Even a Kryptonian with Super Brain was thinking of giving up.
As he drove around aimlessly, he spotted a Citibank by the roadside.
Henry thought that although he feared big businesses bullying their customers, once a business reached a certain scale, many things instead became more standardized and transparent. That was actually a convenience for him.
He was not afraid of too many rules. He was afraid of rules that kept shifting.
So Henry found a place to park, picked up his backpack, and walked toward Citibank.
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