It was the fifth day since the clinic opened.
The number of patients at Miracle Clinic had stabilized at around ten a day.
They were all Hell's Kitchen residents—the elderly without health insurance, construction workers injured on the job, and women who had been beaten but were afraid to go to a big hospital.
Lynn examined every patient very carefully.
It wasn't because he was especially compassionate—All-Things Diagnosis activated automatically, making it nearly impossible for him not to be thorough.
As soon as a patient walked into the examination room, the System Panel automatically popped up in his field of vision, displaying a slew of data, precise down to the millimeter and milligram.
All he had to do was translate it into terms the patient could understand.
An old woman came in with lower back pain.
Lynn scanned her and, beyond the expected diagnosis of "lumbar muscle strain,"
found something she had no idea about—a 0.8-centimeter early-stage tumor at the lower pole of her left kidney.
"Ma'am, your back pain isn't serious. A medicated patch should do the trick. But there's a small growth on your left kidney. It's still very small, but you need to go to a big hospital for a thorough examination and surgery. The sooner, the better."
The old woman's daughter was terrified.
Lynn wrote up a detailed diagnostic report and included the name of a kidney surgeon he had found by searching all of New York.
"Go see this doctor. Tell him Lynn recommended you. He doesn't know me, but if you take this report with you, he'll see you."
A construction worker came in complaining of dizziness.
The results from All-Things Diagnosis made Lynn take a second look—a tiny, unruptured aneurysm, three millimeters in diameter, at the bifurcation of the left middle cerebral artery.
"Your dizziness isn't caused by anemia or low blood sugar," Lynn said.
"You've got a little bulge in one of the blood vessels in your brain. It could rupture at any moment. Go to New York-Presbyterian Hospital and make an appointment with neurosurgery. You'll need a DSA to confirm it."
The worker's face went green with fear. "Doctor, are you saying there's a... bomb in my brain?"
"More or less. But it's still small, and surgery can fix it. If you leave it alone, there's a one-in-ten chance it could suddenly go off one day."
The worker didn't hesitate. He went that very afternoon.
Word spread through the neighborhood about these astonishingly precise diagnoses, and Miracle Clinic's reputation began to grow exponentially.
"That Chinese-American doctor can look you over from head to toe and tell you exactly what's wrong with you." That became the latest legend among Hell's Kitchen residents.
Lynn had also settled on his pricing model: ordinary patients paid the going rate, while those in genuine financial difficulty could get a discount—but nobody got a free ride.
"You can pay in installments, but you can't skip the bill," he told every patient who asked for a discount. "People don't take free things seriously. Just give up a couple of doughnuts and you'll have enough."
His words were blunt, but no one thought he was stingy. He really was that good.
A doctor who could spot an aneurysm in your brain at a glance charging you two hundred dollars for a consultation wasn't expensive—it was a bargain.
During the day, he saw patients and earned enough to keep the clinic running. At night, he shut the doors and taught himself.
Super Intelligence made his learning efficiency so terrifying it defied reason.
He finished in three days what his predecessor had spent two years studying at community college.
He wasn't just skimming the material. He understood, absorbed, and retained every concept on every page.
Anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, surgery, internal medicine... He made up four years of coursework in three days.
His medical knowledge now surpassed that of the vast majority of medical school graduates.
With the help of All-Things Diagnosis, his diagnostic abilities had no equal in the entire New York medical community.
But that wasn't what he really cared about.
Ordinary patients were a source of cash flow, there to keep the clinic running.
The truly valuable patients were the ones with superpowers.
Copying Batman's S+ rank had given him a taste of what was possible, and Super Intelligence had changed the way he saw the world.
He needed more copies, more abilities, if he was going to survive in this incredibly dangerous world.
So he waited.
He waited for a special patient to come to him.
At nine o'clock on the fifth night, Lynn locked up the clinic and prepared to go upstairs and rest.
He took the shortcut through the alley behind the clinic. It connected to the fire escape of the neighboring building, which led straight up to the second floor.
He stopped on his third step into the alley.
Super Intelligence picked up three signals that shouldn't have been there in an empty alley in the dead of night.
First: fresh scratches on the wall.
Four parallel nail marks ran from a height of over two meters all the way to the ground, growing deeper as they went. Someone had fallen from above and tried to slow down by grabbing at the wall, but failed.
Second: a faint but unmistakable smell of blood in the air.
Fresh blood, less than ten minutes old.
Third: in the distance—roughly two blocks away—a faint vibration lingered in the air.
Its frequency was far too high for an ordinary person to hear, but Super Intelligence had deduced its presence from the abnormal movement of the air molecules.
Some kind of ultrahigh-frequency sonic device had been activated not long ago.
Lynn hurried around the corner of the alley.
Daredevil was curled up among a pile of garbage bags.
His red suit was in tatters, with multiple tears across his chest and arms.
He had both hands clamped tightly over his ears, dark red blood seeping between his fingers.
His nose was bleeding too.
He was hunched over on his side, his whole body twitching erratically.
"Ugh..." The sound coming from his mouth wasn't a word, just a pure groan of agony, like an animal crying out instinctively after being run over.
The System Panel exploded into view—
[Automatic Diagnosis Initiated—] [Patient: Matthew Murdock (Code Name: Daredevil)] [Injury Assessment:] [1. Bilateral auditory nerve tears caused by a sonic weapon; widespread necrosis of hair cells in the Organ of Corti in the inner ear;] [2. Vestibular system dysfunction; endolymph pressure in the semicircular canals elevated to 4.7 times the normal level;] [3. Tactile and olfactory sensory circuits overloaded and burning out; damage has reached 62%;] [4. Multiple abrasions and soft-tissue injuries (minor);] [5. Super Senses at risk of permanent destruction! Irreversible damage threshold expected to be reached in 3.5 hours!] [Overall mortality rate: 41% (if his sensory system burns out completely, his combat ability will be permanently lost)] [Estimated time until irreversible damage: 3.5 hours.]
Then came the line that made his heart race:
[Healing this target is expected to allow you to copy an A+ rank talent!]
A+ rank.
Lynn stood at the mouth of the alley, staring at the curled-up figure amid the garbage.
Daredevil's Super Senses were being burned away.
If Lynn didn't treat him within three and a half hours, the damage would become irreversible—and this man would lose forever the abilities that made him a superhero.
For Daredevil, it was a death sentence.
For Lynn, it was an opportunity to copy an A+ rank talent.
Super Senses.
If Super Intelligence was the world's most powerful processor, then Super Senses was the best information-input device.
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