Sherlock's Investigation

Ever since learning about Tony's sordid past, Sherlock had used it as "leverage" to stay in Tony's workshop for another three days. During those three days, Tony had been so busy that his feet barely touched the ground.

On one hand, he had to perfect the construction of his armor; on the other, he had to constantly satisfy Sherlock's various demands regarding the mechanical arm.

Fortunately, on the third day, Sherlock finally shoved that damned mechanical arm back onto his own arm.

Honestly, Tony had nearly cried when he saw it. It was the first time in his life that someone had "bullied" him this badly. The crucial part was that the person "bullying" him was his legal good eldest son.

This earned Sherlock a new nickname from Tony: unfilial son!

Of course, because of that sordid past, Tony did not dare call Sherlock that to his face. But that did not stop him from calling Sherlock an unfilial son over and over to vent after Sherlock left.

Sherlock simply did not know about it. If he had, he would have sneered and told Tony to save that title for his own armor.

After all, not everyone was capable of the grand feat of specifically building an anti-self armor.

After spending roughly another half day having Tony make some minor adjustments to his mechanical arm, Sherlock used alchemy to activate it. Only then did he drive Tony's modified Raptor out of Tony's mansion, completely satisfied.

Sherlock had promised the original owner of this body that he would investigate the truth behind his parents' deaths. Since he had promised, he would never go back on his word.

Sherlock's method of investigation was simple. After leaving Tony's villa, he informed Pepper, rented a place in Los Angeles for a short term, then used the Stark Industries offer Pepper had given him to join Stark Industries under the alias Charles.

The reason for doing this was equally simple. Sherlock had to get close to Obadiah in order to uncover the secrets Obadiah had hidden away. Before joining the company, Sherlock had also done a basic investigation into that old fox, Obadiah.

Obadiah was in charge of business operations at Stark Industries. He handled both sales and external business affairs, and as Howard Stark's partner in founding the company, Obadiah wielded enormous influence within Stark Industries.

Not only that, the sales and external business divisions he oversaw were the cash cows of Tony Stark's entire company.

Under such circumstances, getting close to Obadiah and obtaining information from him would definitely not be easy. So Sherlock decided to take an unconventional route: join the business and sales departments under Obadiah's control!

Sherlock's experience as an office drone in his previous life had taught him something. Sometimes, the little secrets leaders thought they had hidden so well were not secrets at all within their own departments.

To put it more plainly, as long as someone wanted to ask around, they were practically "open secrets."

Of course, that was only possible if one truly integrated into the group.

As for whether Pepper's offer would make Obadiah's subordinates suspicious, Sherlock was not worried about that in the slightest.

The reason was simple. Pepper issued countless offers like this every year, scattering them throughout every department of Stark Industries.

Even a colossal corporation like Stark Industries could not avoid nepotism. Do not think foreigners did not play that game; in fact, nepotism was even more serious among them. One only had to look at how recommendation letters were still popular in America to understand that.

Especially in Obadiah's business department, people with any sort of background showing up was perfectly normal and attracted no attention.

Much less a "rich second-generation heir" like Sherlock, who drove a heavily modified 6×6 Raptor pickup.

Of course, even with so-called "nepotism," joining the business department required knowing at least one foreign language. Otherwise, even connections would not get some spoiled heir through the door.

Fortunately, besides English, Sherlock also knew the language spoken on the other side of the Pacific. Interviews were effortless for him. He even "arrogantly" pointed out more than a dozen grammatical errors in the Chinese document the interviewers used for translation.

Just like that, Sherlock entered the department responsible for relations with China and import-export trade under Obadiah's business division without drawing almost any attention.

In less than three days, Sherlock successfully integrated into the department using the workplace experience he had accumulated in his previous life, money to pave the way, and the wealthy heir persona he had crafted.

But integration was one thing. The so-called "intelligence" he obtained was useless, aside from informing Sherlock that the old bastard Obadiah played even wilder in private than Tony had before going to the Middle East.

Not only that, Sherlock could not find anything suspicious in the daily operations of the entire business and sales departments. Whether it was weapons sales or the quantities of imported and exported parts, everything added up.

It could be said that, here, Obadiah was practically a saint!

Still, that was normal. If Obadiah could not maintain such a "saintly" image, he probably would not have earned such a favorable impression from Tony that Tony had never doubted him all these years.

But this was not good news for Sherlock. After work, he could only contact Pepper and ask her to cooperate with him in staging a clumsy little act where "colleagues had a conflict and their leader happened to see it."

Under the pretext of handling a dispute between coworkers, Pepper directly "demoted" Sherlock to the records management department.

For anyone in the workplace, this punishment was practically a career dead end. The so-called records management department was no different from exile for a "rich second-generation heir" like Sherlock.

At the same time, thanks to Pepper's impatient expression and faint look of disgust while dealing with Sherlock's matter, no one in the company, not even Obadiah, suspected Sherlock's identity.

After all, this sort of thing happened far too often here—so often that they had lost count.

Yet that was precisely the outcome Sherlock wanted. Once in the records department, he immediately began searching for everything related to Obadiah.

But what he found made Sherlock suck in a cold breath.