Even Andrew was baffled by this world. It was as normal as normal could be. No matter where he looked, he could find no sign of anything outlandish.
After all, Andrew had not spent this time waiting around doing nothing. He had been observing the entire world through Alice, and it was no different from a normal Marvel Universe. The major characters behaved perfectly reasonably, with no signs of going mad.
Andrew shook his head, put the matter aside for the moment, and teleported to Hell's Kitchen in New York.
Yes, Andrew could teleport now. That was only natural. He had used Datafication on some of the Space Stone's energy, making teleportation child's play.
It was 2008, and New York's Hell's Kitchen was as chaotic as ever. Under normal circumstances, a refined-looking Asian man like Andrew would have been robbed within three minutes of arriving in a place like this.
Strangely, however, everyone acted as though Andrew did not exist. He walked safely all the way to a flour factory, where everyone inside was blind.
This was the Hand's flour factory, run by Madame Gao. Anyone who could no longer survive in Hell's Kitchen could receive a sum of money and a job from her, provided they were willing to surrender their eyes—a job involving flour.
Employing blind people minimized the risk of information leaking and also kept undercover agents out. No undercover agent would blind themselves just to conduct an investigation.
It sounded unbelievable. How could anyone trade their sight for a job? Yet Madame Gao's flour factory never lacked workers, and those workers were quite loyal.
There was no helping it. This was Hell's Kitchen, after all. Surviving here was terribly, terribly difficult. It gave a whole new meaning to tyranny being fiercer than a tiger.
In the