Batman's Brain Was Really Useful

The Greyhound bus left Gotham and headed south along the New Jersey Turnpike toward New York.

There were only a few passengers on the bus at five in the morning.

Lynn sat by the window in the last row, his backpack at his feet. Outside lay a bleak stretch of industrial scenery.

He did not close his eyes to rest.

From the moment he boarded, his mind had shifted into full-speed operation.

Using Leo's phone—he had swiped one of Leo's spare phones before leaving—Lynn connected to the bus's free Wi-Fi and began his first systematic information search since arriving in this world.

First: a medical license.

A license was the most basic requirement for practicing medicine legally in New York.

Lynn spent forty minutes reading through all of the New York State Medical Board's legal provisions, licensing application procedures, and approval cases from the past three years.

Super Intelligence made the process terrifyingly fast—legal documents that would take an ordinary person a week to work through.

His brain was like a high-speed scanner. Each page held his attention for less than two seconds before its contents were fully absorbed and understood.

He found three loopholes.

They were not illegal loopholes, but legal fast-track channels within the process.

By combining all three routes, he could qualify to practice medicine legally in as little as two weeks.

Second: location.

Lynn spread a map of New York City across his mind.

From Manhattan to Brooklyn, from Queens to the Bronx, he used publicly available information on his phone to construct rough models of each area's geography, public safety, pedestrian traffic, and rental costs.

Among Super Intelligence's nineteen fields of knowledge were criminology and psychology—two disciplines that allowed him to accurately assess an area's "superhero activity index."

In the end, he settled on one place: Hell's Kitchen.

The reasons were obvious.

Hell's Kitchen lay on Manhattan's west side near Midtown, one of New York's most notorious gray areas.

Poor public safety meant low rent, and a large low-income population meant no shortage of ordinary patients.

Most importantly, it was Daredevil's territory.

Active superheroes meant a higher chance of superheroes getting injured, and injuries required doctors.

On the edge of Hell's Kitchen, there was an abandoned clinic available for rent. Its location was not particularly conspicuous, but transportation was convenient.

Lynn looked through a few blurry photos on his phone—the storefront was run-down, but the structure was sound. The first floor could serve as consulting rooms and an operating room, while the second floor could be used as living quarters.

Third: clinic design.

The bus was still swaying down the road, but Lynn had already completed the entire renovation plan in his mind.

A precise three-dimensional model took shape in his brain.

He had even calculated the cost of renovation materials—the total budget could be kept under $150,000.

The remaining million-plus would serve as the clinic's operating funds and emergency reserve.

The bus arrived at the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal at eight in the morning.

Lynn slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked out of the station.

Manhattan was already bustling in the early morning—the honking of taxis, the footsteps of pedestrians, and the cries of street vendors blended together. It was a completely different world from Gotham's gloomy oppression.

He hailed a cab and headed straight for Hell's Kitchen.

At the location, he found it even more dilapidated than in the photos.

Half the storefront sign had fallen off. The glass door was plastered with expired flyers and graffiti, and one corner of the steps out front was missing.

But after pushing the door open and taking a look around, Lynn reached his conclusion: the structure was fine, the plumbing and electrical lines were mostly usable, and there was enough space.

He called the landlord on the spot.

"Hello, I'm interested in renting the clinic on 49th Street."

"Oh, that one." The voice on the other end belonged to a middle-aged man who did not sound particularly sharp. "It's been empty for two years. The previous tenant ran off owing three months' rent. If you want it, it's forty-five hundred a month."

"Thirty-eight hundred," Lynn said.

"Don't haggle, kid. That location—"

"The western section of 49th Street is on the edge of a Class B commercial zone. Your property's assessed value dropped twelve percent last year, and this year you'll have to pay an additional sixteen hundred in property taxes. Every extra month it sits vacant raises your holding costs by roughly six hundred dollars. Two years without a tenant proves the market acceptance for forty-five hundred is very low. Thirty-eight hundred, paid annually. We sign today, and I'll transfer the money this afternoon."

The other end of the line went silent for five seconds.

"...Thirty-eight hundred it is."

It was only eleven in the morning when he finished signing the lease.

That afternoon, Lynn began contacting renovation crews.

In a place like Hell's Kitchen, renovation crews were not hard to find.

Reliable ones, however, were few and far between.

The first contractor to inspect the site was a man named Joe. He was in his fifties, with a beer belly and an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth.

He walked around the building with a young engineer, then gave Lynn a quote.

"Eighteen grand, all-inclusive. Materials and labor included."

Lynn did not bargain right away.

Pointing at a pipe in the corner, he said, "Your quote includes replacing the entire first-floor drainage system, correct?"

Joe nodded. "Yeah. The old pipes are all rusted. They need replacing."

"They don't all need replacing," Lynn said. "The main drainage pipe on the east side is galvanized steel. The corrosion on the inner wall is no deeper than 0.3 millimeters. It can last at least another five years. Only the three joints on the west side and the return pipe on the second floor need to be replaced. Replacing everything would add roughly twelve thousand dollars in material costs, but the actual result would be no different."

The cigarette in Joe's mouth nearly fell out.

He turned to glance at the engineer he had brought with him. The engineer's face was already red—because he had also estimated based on replacing everything and had not carefully inspected the pipes' actual condition.

"And," Lynn continued, "your electrical renovation plan routes the second-floor lighting circuit and the first-floor operating room equipment circuit through the same main line. The operating room equipment needs at least an eight-kilowatt power reserve at peak load. If it shares a line with the lighting, turning them on at the same time will overload the circuit and trip the breaker."

The engineer's face turned from red to white.

"You missed such a basic design flaw?" Lynn adjusted his glasses. His tone was not harsh, but every word struck exactly where it hurt.

Joe removed the cigarette from his mouth and studied Lynn for a long moment.

"Brother, are you opening a clinic or working in construction?"

"Opening a clinic," Lynn said. "But I don't want my clinic catching fire because of an overloaded circuit. Redo the quote. One hundred twenty thousand, with a reasonable plan. If you can do it, do it. If not, I'll find someone else."

"...One hundred twenty thousand. Fine."

Once the renovation began, Lynn went to the site every day to oversee the progress.

He was not the kind of client who merely barked orders—every modification he suggested had precise technical justification. Sometimes, he even understood the load-bearing structure of the walls and the routing of the pipes better than the engineers themselves.

The workers began whispering among themselves—"That Chinese kid opening a clinic has the blueprints for the whole building in his head."

On the third day of renovations, a minor incident occurred.