A hundred thousand dollars for one lottery draw?
Put it this way.
Although Lake was currently a detective with the NYPD, his annual salary was only a little over ninety thousand dollars.
Even if he neither ate nor drank, he still couldn't afford to draw the lottery once a year?
...What a useless cheat.
...What a useless penguin.
Fortunately!
The job at the NYPD wasn't Lake's main occupation. To Lake, working for the NYPD was merely a part-time job.
Lake's main occupation was being an assassin.
The Black King, an assassin registered under the Continental Hotel.
The reason Lake had joined the NYPD was simple.
This was New York.
And the NYPD's intelligence was no worse than that of any other department.
So...
Lake needed a legitimate job, as well as an intelligence source of his own. Adding in a few other reasons, he had chosen to work part-time as a detective.
Just thinking about it felt exciting.
At a Continental Hotel gathering, one assassin said he was from the Textile Factory, another said he was from an insurance conglomerate, and Lake said, "I'm an assassin from the NYPD."
What a hilarious joke!
Unbelievable.
Actually, it was easy to understand if one thought about it carefully. This was USA territory. Lake would have to be out of his mind to help USA maintain public order.
It was all for hiding in plain sight.
After all, he was an assassin. Sometimes, he needed to kill people. If he killed someone at night and investigated the murder during the day, then if the investigation happened to lead back to him, no matter how far the case progressed, wouldn't he simply be investigating himself?
Of course.
There was another reason that gave Lake the confidence to choose to become an assassin or a detective—or even to enlist after graduating from high school.
The cheat.
When he was sixteen, right after the cheat had activated, it had given him one lottery draw.
That time, the luck of an emperor of Europe had descended upon him.
SSR Skill: Immortal Body!
Immortal Body: Skill type, SSR-class, mysterious type. No damage whatsoever can kill you. You will be injured and bleed, but you will never die!
When he drew this skill, Lake understood.
This was telling him to go wild.
But...
After that, including the three draws up to the present, Lake had drawn nothing but loneliness.
For Lake, who had drawn an SSR skill the first time, the subsequent draws had indeed yielded nothing but loneliness.
The second time, after saving up a hundred thousand dollars from his military salary and shares from certain operations, Lake hadn't even considered buying himself an apartment. He had rushed to make the draw.
He had assumed that the second draw would bring him the same emperor-of-Europe luck as the first, but the result was nothing but loneliness.
Glock 17: Item type, no grade, infinite type. It possessed unlimited ammunition and automatically supported everything reasonable. Even if you fired at yourself a hundred times, no third party would question the number of bullets you had.
Lake had nearly vomited blood while holding that unlimited-ammunition pistol.
A hundred thousand dollars!
Perhaps in the year 3030, a hundred thousand dollars could buy nothing more than a fried dough stick, but back then, it was enough to buy a studio apartment in New York—a huge sum of money.
Yet a hundred thousand dollars had bought him a pistol. Even if its ammunition was unlimited, it was still enough to make Lake vomit blood.
The third time.
Lake had used the extra money he earned while attending university, together with ten thousand dollars from a scientific experiment.
The result...
Starlight Tower Apartment: Cthulhu-style legendary item (no grade). An apartment located on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, boasting a vast five-hundred-square-meter space. Owning it might be the starting point for reaching the peak of life. (All paperwork is complete. It is your inheritance, by the way. The property tax for the first year has been paid. Please remember to pay the taxes on time.)
Lake had been fairly pleased at first. It was equivalent to spending a hundred thousand dollars on a luxury mansion worth several million. But after seeing the text in parentheses, the first thing Lake wondered was whether he should sell it.
The fourth time.
After graduating from university, Lake had joined the Continental Hotel and the NYPD, combining his salaries and scraping together a hundred thousand dollars after setting aside the property tax due that year. He made the fourth draw.
The result...
Copy: Skill type, R-class, fantasy type. As its name suggested, it could copy skills. When it encountered a copyable target, it could perform a copy. (Usable times ×3.)
As for this result.
Lake didn't know what to say. At first glance, he had felt that he had struck gold, but after actually using it, he felt that he had drawn nothing but loneliness again.
Put it this way.
After obtaining the skill yesterday, Lake had deliberately gone to 117 Brick Street and waited there for an entire day. At last, a man dressed like an ascetic appeared on the street.
Lake immediately chose to use it.
But...
"Power gap too great. Skill read failed. Copy failed."
"..."
Lake had been completely dumbfounded.
He had originally thought it was a god-tier skill, but he had never expected it to be such a useless skill. No wonder Copy wasn't an SSR-class skill, but an R-class one.
After getting over his shock, Lake carefully considered the prompt given by the cheat.
The power gap was too great.
That was the key.
The cheat had said that the power gap was too great, rather than mentioning some other level or attribute. If the gap in those other things was too great, Lake might have been helpless.
But strength could be made up for.
He couldn't copy anything supernatural for now, but he could copy ordinary abilities. If he kept copying them, wouldn't his strength gradually rise?
That was how Lake consoled himself at the time.
Manhattan.
Police Plaza.
The NYPD!
It was one of the largest police departments in the United States, perhaps even in the world, and one of the oldest.
The NYPD possessed an enormous administrative system. Even the FBI had to concede defeat before the NYPD in New York.
It had more than thirty thousand regular officers, nearly five thousand auxiliary officers, almost six thousand school security personnel, and more than fifty thousand police vehicles.
What did the FBI have to compare with that?
Could it even compare?
The NYPD had an enormous number of departments under its jurisdiction. In fact, there were even some departments Lake had never dealt with to this day.
Lake was currently the third homicide and major-crimes detective in the Major Crimes Division. Above him were two other detectives of equal rank: George Stacy of the First Major Crimes Division and Kate Beckett of the Second Major Crimes Division.
Within the NYPD's thirteen-level promotion system, Lake had already climbed to the fifth level. Above that were inspector and superintendent...
Around the tenth of last month.
An anonymous complaint letter alleging that Lake had accepted fifty thousand dollars in bribes was delivered to the Internal Affairs Division.
When the Internal Affairs Division saw it, they were delighted. They immediately began following procedure with great enthusiasm.
Lake was also suspended in accordance with regulations and temporarily placed under investigation.
But...
No matter how the Internal Affairs Division investigated Lake's finances over the past month, they couldn't connect Lake to the fifty thousand dollars mentioned in the complaint letter.
Moreover, judging from his daily expenses, although Lake owned a luxury mansion, his everyday spending was—put it this way—even a thief would shed tears after seeing Lake's bank statements.
He was too poor!
Those planning to invest, hurry up!!!
Before you continue