Gotham Was Always Pathological

With a Kitty perched on his shoulder, Lynn felt that he now fit the image of the powerful, mysterious, and charismatic male lead from most literary works steeped in mystique.

All he needed was to wreck the big house a little more and speed up its transformation into a gloomy century-old castle.

"Then I'd still need a long trench coat, and maybe a sickly pale complexion or something. Like a vampire?"

Kitty was still too young. For now, it behaved like an ordinary little cat. Lynn had named it Schrodinger, but it had yet to display any abilities. Maybe that was why it wasn't afraid of him.

It hadn't been threatened, nor did it understand what ability Lynn wanted it to demonstrate, so it could only sit harmlessly on his shoulder, sleeping whenever it wasn't asleep.

"Come on. I'll buy you some cat food, fish, chicken, whatever. I've never raised a cat before, but I've heard black cats are pretty uncanny. When I was little, I saw one shoot off a rat's ear with a single shot.

Can you shoot? Want me to get you a gun?"

Lynn headed out with Kitty, traveling by bicycle. Even with the wind constantly blasting into his mouth, it didn't stop him from rambling.

Kitty only answered with a yawn.

"Speaking of guns, yesterday's lottery draw was a huge loss."

"Oddball Gun. Just listen to that name—does that sound like a gun a normal person would use? And that capsule, a disposable item for playing dead. What the hell would I need that for?"

"A white, broken-tier iron skewer. That barely even counts as a weapon. It's purely there to pollute the prize pool."

"Listen up, Schrodinger. You use the Oddball Gun, and I'll use the Infinite-Ammo Tactical Master."

"Say, would you be willing to help me try something? You sit on that broken cloud, and I'll tie a rope around your head and hang underneath. This plan could work!"

Lynn's lottery draw couldn't exactly be called a failure. At the very least, with growth-type equipment like the Light Emblem, he had made a profit no matter how he looked at it.

The other items, though, were a bit of a loss. Most of them were basically useless.

The Oddball Gun was a divine weapon that could turn the gun before and after a shot into something else, a tool for courting death. The infinite-ammo weapon wasn't a Desert Eagle but the Tactical Master, which was barely useful.

As for that cloud, Lynn had recognized it at a glance. It had once been one of the magical items he wanted most as a child.

Something like the Nimbus Cloud would always have value.

That was, if Lynn could actually sit on it and use it.

One line in its equipment description stated that only those who held kind hearts and performed kind deeds could earn its recognition.

Lynn figured that since he had already earned the Light Emblem's recognition, there was no way he would stumble here.

In one night, Lynn fell through the Nimbus Cloud more than thirty times.

He tried everything, even pointing a gun at the Nimbus Cloud to threaten it.

Failure. Constant failure.

What else could he do? He would just keep thinking of a way later. It wasn't like he could throw it away.

Aside from those things, Lynn had also drawn his only skill.

This skill was quite interesting too. Its name was: [Convince with Virtue].

Its effect was that whenever Lynn used his palm like a blade and leaped up to bring down a vertical chop on someone's head, he would gain a layer of the [Virtuous Person] buff.

Under any circumstances, it would hit the target with a one hundred percent success rate while also inflicting the skill effect of [Enlightenment Blow] on them.

Overall, it was basically enhanced physical ideological education.

He couldn't say whether it was good, but it was definitely useful.

And who knew? It might even produce miraculous results.

However, unlike Poison Ivy's ability that Lynn had obtained from the gift pack, which was a talent-type skill, [Convince with Virtue] was a learnable skill that had to be leveled up step by step.

Lynn's skill was only level one at the moment.

Its effect could only be called average. That was the conclusion Lynn reached after painfully using it on himself once.

Using himself as the target while testing a skill was perfectly normal, wasn't it?

After arriving downtown, Lynn first took Kitty to buy cat food.

There was no need to worry about transporting everything. Hadn't Lynn drawn a pocket yesterday?

That thing was a bargain-bin version of Doraemon's Spatial Pocket. Its wearing requirement was to stick it against his belly, so Lynn attached it a little below his navel.

Kitty was not a living creature in the ordinary sense, but it definitely had a physical body of flesh and blood.

Lynn had no idea what it could or could not eat, so he simply bought both human food and cat food.

Besides food for Kitty, Lynn also needed to sort out his own supplies.

That included many furniture and kitchenware issues as well.

Thus, Lynn became completely occupied, spending nearly the entire day cycling around downtown with Kitty and buying things everywhere.

However, what Lynn didn't know was that while he was shopping like mad, entering and leaving stores as if he intended to spend every last cent he owned, someone was quietly infiltrating his home.

It was one person, dressed in almost the same full-body gear Lynn wore when carrying out missions.

However, it was clearly much more advanced than Lynn's equipment, not the kind of thing one could casually buy with money.

After searching Lynn's house with a gun in hand, the person lowered his weapon, stood before the large pot Lynn had used to make a fire, shook his head, and pressed a button beside the ear of his full-face mask.

"Boss, this guy doesn't seem normal. And you never told me his ability was this outrageous."

The man didn't know who he was speaking to. At that moment, he turned to look at the forest-like thicket beyond the window.

After pausing and waiting for the other side to finish speaking, he continued, "Fine, I understand what you mean. What I mean is, you need to pay more."

"For someone like this, the price you offered is too low."

The other side seemed to fall silent for a moment, but apparently agreed to the man's demand right away.

"Okay, boss. You pay, you're the boss. Tonight, you'll hear news of this guy's death."

He ended the call cleanly, checked the time, and began surveying the terrain. One look was enough to tell that he was experienced and had done this sort of thing plenty of times before.

After a long while, the man selected a good position and connected another call.

"When will he be back... What do you mean, you don't know? Listen, rookie, I don't give a damn what Falcone said. All I know is that he paid to hire me and told you people to cooperate with all my actions."

"I can return the money, but you'll die. Understand?"

"Okay, now tell me, what is that guy doing?"

"Wait... What do you mean he's pouring cat food into his pants? He poured in twenty bags... Damn it, I don't fucking care about that!"

"What I want to know is..."

"What do you mean he stuffed four pineapples in there? Are you sure they're pine... Fuck! Damn it! If you dare mess with me, I swear your forehead will..."

"A pot?! What the hell is a generator? Is that something you can stuff into your pants..."

"A camel-hair coat really is warm. The weather's so cold now, it really should... Fuck!"

Furiously ending the call, the man reached up and rubbed his helmet.

"Gotham really is pathological..."

Then he pulled out a small notebook, flipped to a fresh page, and wrote with a short pencil stub: Target is suspected of possessing a pair of pants that eats people.

After thinking for a moment, he crossed out "eats people" and changed it to "eats everything."

"Pathological. Too fucking pathological..."

The man closed the notebook and muttered to himself.

P.S. There will only be one update today for now.