He did not return to the hotel.
He walked into an old public telephone booth and put the cold receiver to his ear.
After putting in a few coins and dialing the hotel's phone number, he told the front desk in the most concise and concise tone that he needed to check out early due to urgent matters and that all personal belongings left in the room could be thrown away.
The crisp sound of the phone hanging up was his farewell to the brief and comfortable past. Without looking back, he walked straight to the other end of the city, towards an unknown hiding place.
He needs a new the Nest, a place that is more inconspicuous and harder to find.
This time, temporary accommodation like a hotel is obviously not considered.
He flipped through the densely packed rental advertisements in the newspaper, and finally set his sights on an old industrial area in the city with a mixture of people and great mobility of people.
There, he found an apartment ready for rent. The landlord who received him was a middle-aged man with a beer belly and a shiny face. His eyes only had the desire for money, and he paid no attention to the origin and background of the tenant. This was exactly what Chu Hang needed.
Chu Hang revealed his new identity - "Anthony·Chen". He signed a one-year lease under this name and paid half a year's rent in cash in one go.
This generous payment method, which was almost showing off, made the greasy landlord laugh so hard that his face wrinkled. He stuffed the key into his hand on the spot, without even unnecessary questioning, for fear that the fat sheep that had been delivered to his door would fly away.
The apartment is not big, with a standard one-bedroom and one living room. The furniture is so old that it looks like a relic from a previous era. The wallpaper is also peeling off a little, revealing the mottled spots underneath, but fortunately everything is still clean.
The first thing to do when settling down is to spend money. The money "borrowed" from the casino must be laundered as soon as possible and turned into tools that are useful to him.
He went to a large electronics store and used his new credit card to buy himself a top-notch personal computer and a printer in the 1990s.
When he returned to the apartment, he closed the curtains to block out all prying eyes from the outside world.
In this brand new, absolutely safe the Nest, he started his first real plan in this era.
Open a securities account.
In the 1990s, online securities companies were still a new thing that had just sprouted, and most people had never heard of it. Chu Hang relied on decades of advanced financial knowledge to easily find an online securities company on the Internet that was just starting out but was destined to become an industry giant in the future.
He used all the legal information of "Anthony·Chen" and meticulously filled out those tedious and troublesome application forms online.
Three days later, a letter with the logo of a securities company lay quietly in his new mailbox. When he opened the envelope, he found a notification that the account had been successfully opened.
Chu Hang did not hesitate for a moment, and immediately transferred all the remaining funds of more than 50,000 US dollars in the bank account to the newly opened securities account. When the message that the transfer was successful was displayed on the screen, he breathed a long sigh of relief, and his tense body relaxed.
Money has completed its metamorphosis. It has changed from a pile of easily traceable cash to a bank deposit, and from a bank deposit to a string of numbers jumping in a securities account. After these two key conversions, the difficulty of tracing has increased exponentially. Even if S.H.I.E.L.D. has great powers, it is almost an impossible task to connect this money with the mysteriously missing Asian young man from the "Queen of Spades" casino.
At the same time, a Chevrolet car named Black Noir was driving smoothly on the city streets.
Phil·Coulson handed a document to Nick Fury in the back seat, with unconcealable frustration in his tone. "Sir, we have lost track. The Asian who made trouble in 'Queen of Spades' seems to have disappeared from the world. We checked all the nearby surveillance videos and found no trace of him."
Fury did not speak immediately, but just took the document and carefully read page by page with his intact single eye as sharp as an eagle. The air in the car seemed a little solemn because of his silence.
"Where's the bank?" he asked in a deep voice, with no emotion in his voice.
"Checked." Coulson replied immediately, "There was indeed only a large cash deposit of US$55,300 that day. The depositor's name was Anthony Chen. We obtained all his information."
Coulson paused for a moment, seemed to be organizing his words, and then continued to report, "The identity background is extremely clean. A Chinese orphan, born in San Francisco, has a complete social security record and credit report. Graduated from community college, without any Criminal record. In order to ensure nothing goes wrong, we even contacted California and verified his birth certificate, and everything matched. He is like the most ordinary United States citizen, so ordinary that you can never find him again if you throw him into a crowd."
"Ordinary citizens?" Fury sneered and threw the documents on the seat next to him. "An ordinary community college graduate will be alert to our surveillance across the street the moment he deposits money and walks out of the bank?"
Coulson was silent. He also felt that the whole thing was indescribably weird.
That day at the bank gate, he clearly saw through the telescope that the young man named Anthony Chen paused for a very slight moment when he walked out of the bank gate, and then immediately turned around and returned to the bank.
That kind of Beast-like reaction speed and extraordinary alertness are definitely not what ordinary people should have.
"This identity of 'Anthony·Chen' is so perfect." Fury tapped the car window rhythmically with his fingers, looking deeply at the rapidly retreating street scene outside the window, "It's so perfect that it looks like it's been carefully forged.. However, we can't find any traces of forgery. There are only two possibilities. Either we are extremely unlucky and happen to meet an ordinary person with extraordinary skills who happens to have a large amount of cash and is eager to deposit it in the bank. Or..."
He paused for a moment, and an icy cold light flashed in his one eye, as if it could pierce the night outside the car window.
"Then... what should we do now? Do we need to monitor him 24 hours a day?" Coulson asked.
"It's useless." Fury shook his head and rejected the proposal, "He is already alert, like a frightened deer. If we continue to follow, it will only scare the snake and make him hide deeper. Moreover, we have more important and difficult things to deal with now."
He turned to look at Coulson, and his tone became extremely serious. "Has the energy residue analysis report from the Project Pegasus base been released?"
Coulson immediately said seriously, "It's out. According to the analysis of the residual energy fluctuations at the site, in addition to the energy signature generated by the Lightspeed Engine explosion of Kree, we also detected a third wave Abnormal energy source. Its properties are completely homologous with the energy in the body of Chu Hang sealed in our archives, namely 'Frozen Man'. But its intensity and activity are several orders of magnitude higher than the data we recorded."
Fury's pupils shrank suddenly, the shock of this news far exceeded anything before.
"You mean, Chu Hang... was at the explosion site?"
"Not sure." Coulson shook his head cautiously, "But what is certain is that the explosion was either directly related to him, or it created another energy body like him, or even far stronger than him. Sir, we may have opened a Pandora's box unintentionally."
Aliens, mysterious energy bodies, ghosts whose details cannot be traced... This world is becoming more and more dangerous and strange at a speed that he cannot predict.
"List Anthony Chen's file as a 'potential threat', and the level is temporarily set to yellow. Suspend all active investigations and switch to passive observation mode." Fury finally issued the order with a decisive voice, "Concentrate all resources and find me the missing Kong Military pilots, Carol·Dan Vers, and the 'Frozen Man' named Chu Hang. I want to know what happened in Project Pegasus's base that day!"
"Yes, sir!"
Fury's decision inadvertently gave Chu Hang a precious breathing space.
Every morning, he would spend two hours unwaveringly browsing the latest financial news and various industry reports, analyzing the direction of the stock market and the future economic context.
The launch date of Yahoo has been announced, just like a countdown, he just needs to shoot all his bullets accurately at the most correct time.
Then, there is one hour of physical maintenance training. Although Super-Soldier Serum has pushed his physical fitness to the limit of human beings, he has not been active for too long. Long-term, targeted training will allow him to better use Control's strangely powerful body and use every ounce of strength freely.
He devoted almost all of the remaining time to Control training for the majestic and mysterious space energy in his body.
He learned to use space energy to emit powerful energy beams. This energy beam is like an invisible force that can easily penetrate objects and show amazing destructive power.
Control is becoming more and more proficient in space energy, allowing him to display more powerful strength in battle.
This Control sense of power accumulated bit by bit, making him feel more at ease than ever before.
This is his greatest capital in this dangerous world.
While waiting for the long days of Yahoo to be launched, Chu Hang began to think about longer-term issues.
He can't always be so passive and wait for the plot to happen, like a leaf drifting with the tide. He needs to take the initiative and find resources that can make him stronger.
Although the system is still dormant, he can still feel that he has the ability to copy, which means that he can still copy the abilities he dreams of.
It's just that without the system, he can't judge the risks of copying abilities. To be on the safe side, he'd better not copy too high-level abilities before the system wakes up.
However, he can find those powerful ability users in advance and make all preliminary preparations.
He turned on his computer, connected to the appallingly slow dial-up network, and began to search through the vast sea of early information on the Internet.
The keywords he searched for were very strange and had no relevance to ordinary people: "Gene mutation", "special function", "unexplainable miracle", "super healing ability"...
Most of the search results are boring urban legends, sensational liar tricks and baseless rumors.
But with the support of the super memory and analytical ability brought by Super-Soldier Serum, he is like the most efficient gold digger, accurately screening out some truly valuable Silk horse traces from the massive information garbage.
For example, a paper published in an extremely unpopular medical journal details an extremely rare case in which a girl was born with the ability to penetrate walls, but her inability to effectively control it eventually led to serious physical complications.
Shadowcat, Kitty·Pride.
He began to search again for clues related to his vague and distant memory.
"Canada", "Bar", "Fight", "Bone Claws"...
Finally, among the messy search results, he found an inconspicuous news record. It was a short message on a local news website in a remote town Canada a few years ago, and it was drowned in countless community trivial matters.
The news headline was. "Bar fight caused riot, a mysterious man overturned a truck with his bare hands."
The content of the news was very simple, and the wording was quite exaggerated. It was about a conflict between a truck driver and a local lumberjack over an argument in a bar, which then turned into a big melee. After the lumberjack was beaten by several people and even shot with a shotgun, instead of falling, he looked like he had been stabbed. The extremely enraged Beast stretched out a strange Bone Claws from his fist and smashed the entire bar to pieces. Finally, in full view of everyone, he overturned an eighteen-wheel heavy-duty truck with his bare hands, and then disappeared into the vast forest.
At the end of the news, an extremely blurry black-and-white photo was attached. In the photo, a man wearing a plaid shirt and a cigar in his mouth was looking back at the camera coldly. That chiseled face, and his unruly eyes that seemed to be the enemy of the world, Chu Hang could still be recognized at a glance even after nearly fifty years and blurry pixels.
Logan.
He found it.
Chu Hang leaned on the cold chair and quietly looked at the familiar yet unfamiliar face on the screen, with mixed feelings in his heart.
He thought of the comrade who fought side by side with him in the muddy trenches of World War II, pretending to be shot and lying dead in the hail of bullets. He thought of the bastard who always cursed, but was always behind you, silently blocking fatal bullets for you.
Go to see him?
Chu Hang's fingers tapped on the table unconsciously, making click, click, click sounds.
Go tell him that we were once comrades in arms? Tell him that he has been frozen in ice for fifty years and he has just woken up?
No. Chu Hang quickly rejected this impulsive idea. He could clearly judge from the description in the news that the current Logan has probably experienced the inhumanity of Weapon X Program and lost most of his memory. His rash appearance will not only fail to awaken his memory, but will most likely make him regard himself as another lackey sent by Stryker to come to trouble him.
But this clue must not be given up.
Chu Hang saved the URL of the news article, together with the address of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, in a multi-encrypted document. This is his future treasure map.
He turned off the computer, walked to the window, opened a crack, and let the cool air from outside flow in. He looked at the gray sky outside the window and the complex city below like an anthill.
A brand new world is slowly unfolding in front of him, its magnificent and dangerous picture. And he, Anthony Chen, will no longer be a passive Observer, a survivor hiding in the dark.
He wants to be a hunter.
A hunter who hunts "superpowers".