"Hah... hah..."
His gasps echoed through the tangled back alleys of Gotham's East End.
The cold rain stabbed into his windpipe like blades of ice. Yang Ming felt as though his lungs were about to burst.
What he carried on his shoulder wasn't a man, but a two-hundred-pound pig. Thankfully, this pig didn't squirm.
Two hundred pounds of solid muscle, plus a tactical bulletproof vest soaked with muddy water, weighed him down so heavily that his kneecaps cracked under the strain with every running step.
At the edge of his vision, the ghostly blue numbers had long since turned a glaring scarlet.
[Time remaining: 05 minutes, 12 seconds. Target vitals: critical.]
Turn left, get over the dumpster, then through the rusty wire fence...
Yang Ming silently recited the route he knew by heart. The memories of scraping by in Gotham's slums over the past three months had become his lifeline.
His foot smashed through a puddle as he veered sharply into a dead end, its far wall piled high with foul-smelling industrial waste.
Gritting his teeth, Yang Ming held Bruce's sliding body up with one hand and roughly tore aside several sheets of scrap metal used as camouflage with the other, revealing a heavy, rust-covered iron door.
His bleeding fingers punched six digits into the keypad in rapid succession. Then he shoved the handle down.
Bang!
Yang Ming kicked the iron door open and staggered into the Underground Clinic with Bruce on his shoulder. The incandescent lights stabbed his eyes so fiercely that he could barely open them.
Before he could even catch his breath, he heaved from the waist and hurled Gotham's richest man onto the stainless steel operating table like a heavy sack.
Clang! The metallic crash was deafening in the empty clinic.
[Time remaining: 03 minutes, 05 seconds.]
There wasn't a second to waste.
Yang Ming ripped off his soaked old white coat and snatched up a pair of medical scissors.
Snip! Snip! The sharp blades skimmed Bruce's skin as Yang Ming brutally cut apart and stripped away the expensive but tattered tactical suit.
Under the lights, Bruce's bare body was a gruesome sight.
Bruises old and new covered his perfectly defined muscles.
A bloody through-and-through bullet wound marked both his right thigh and his left shoulder. Dark red blood seeped out with each feeble pulse.
But Yang Ming didn't spare the gunshot wounds a glance.
His sterile-gloved hands swiftly pressed against Bruce's abdomen. It felt like a rigid plank.
A boardlike abdomen.
"Fuck." Yang Ming swore for the second time that night.
The gunshot wounds were merely bleeding him out. The real fatal injury was internal. A heavy blunt impact had fractured his ribs, and the broken bones had most likely pierced an organ. He was hemorrhaging into his abdominal cavity, and the blood irritating his peritoneum had triggered severe muscle spasms.
Unless Yang Ming opened his abdomen and stopped the bleeding immediately, the future Dark Knight would be completely brain-dead from hemorrhagic shock in two minutes at most.
[Time remaining: 02 minutes, 15 seconds.]
Yang Ming took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again half a second later, his heart rate steadied instantly.
Absolute Rationality combined with Absolute Focus-these were a surgeon's professional skills.
"Povidone-iodine, large scalpel, abdominal retractor, suction." Yang Ming muttered to himself, his hands blurring as they swept across the instrument tray.
The blade traced Bruce's linea alba, cutting with cold precision.
Subcutaneous fat, linea alba, peritoneum. Not a moment's hesitation.
The instant he opened the peritoneum, pooled dark red blood surged out like water through a broken dam, flooding the operating table's drainage channel.
"The suction needs to be at full power!"
Yang Ming stomped on the pedal and inserted the suction tip into the abdominal cavity. It sucked up the pooled blood furiously, finally clearing his view a little.
He reached both hands into the bloody mess and, guided by his memory of the anatomy, located the bleeding site with precision.
A ruptured spleen. The tear was five centimeters long and still pumping blood out furiously.
"Found it. Now I need to stop the bleeding immediately."
Yang Ming clamped his left hand tightly around the splenic pedicle, temporarily cutting off the blood flow, and grabbed a hemostat with his right to begin the repair.
At that very moment, with life and death hanging in the balance, disaster struck!
Bruce, who had slipped into a deep coma from blood loss, suddenly convulsed violently.
The anesthetic had yet to take full effect. The excruciating pain of the abdominal incision, coupled with the hallucinations produced by his dying brain, unleashed the most desperate trauma buried deep inside the young billionaire.
Bang! Bang!
Bruce heard no clatter of surgical instruments. All he heard were the deafening gunshots in Crime Alley on that rainy night more than a decade ago.
"Pearls... pearls all over the ground..."
Bruce's eyes darted wildly beneath his closed lids, and a hoarse, beastlike roar rose from his throat.
His eyes snapped open, his pupils unfocused. In his vision, Yang Ming in surgical scrubs had become the masked robber holding a gun.
"It was you! You murdered my parents... you murderer! I won't let you get away!"
Bruce's uninjured right hand shot out like an iron clamp, driven by muscular instincts at the very limits of human capability, and locked around Yang Ming's right forearm-the one holding the hemostat!
Crack, crack, crack-
The grating sound of bones grinding together rang out.
Yang Ming's expression changed sharply, and cold sweat sprang from his skin. It felt as though a hydraulic press were crushing his right arm, the agony ripping straight up his nerves into his brain.
"Let go! Are you fucking insane? I'm saving you!" Yang Ming gritted his teeth and tried to pry Bruce's fingers open with his left hand.
They didn't budge.
Even after losing more than 1,500 cc of blood and hovering on the brink of death, Bruce Wayne's grip was still astonishingly powerful.
This was a monster's body, forged over more than a decade by hatred and obsession.
[Time remaining: 00 minutes, 58 seconds. Target heart rate spiking abnormally. Blood pressure plummeting!]
Not only was Yang Ming's arm about to break, but another thirty seconds of this struggle would tear Bruce's spleen apart completely and kill him.
"You spoiled rich brat. You just had to do this the hard way." A vicious glint flashed in Yang Ming's eyes.
Can't pry them open? Then don't.
Yang Ming stopped struggling, abruptly released Bruce's fingers with his left hand, and turned to snatch the medical defibrillator off the nearby trolley.
"Charge! Three hundred sixty joules! Shock the hell out of him!"
The machine gave a series of urgent beeps.
Yang Ming grabbed both gel-coated paddles with one hand. Disregarding every medical protocol, he pressed one firmly against the carotid sinus on the side of Bruce's neck and slapped the other onto his left chest.
"Quiet down! Stop moving!"
Yang Ming roared and slammed his thumb onto the discharge button.
Bang!
The dull sound of electricity blasting through flesh erupted in the clinic. A high-voltage, 360-joule shock tore through Bruce's massive body.
The future Batman, who would one day strike terror into every gang in Gotham, went rigid as every muscle seized. His body bounced half a meter into the air before his eyes rolled back and he crashed onto the stainless steel operating table with a heavy thud.
The iron hand locked around Yang Ming's arm finally fell limp.
"Hah..." Yang Ming panted hard, rubbing his right arm, where a ring of purple-black bruises had already appeared. The pain made him hiss through his teeth.
"Physical anesthesia. You got off easy."
He snorted coldly, glanced at the countdown in his vision-less than forty seconds remained-and grabbed the hemostat again, throwing all his attention back into the bloody abdominal surgery.
The suture needle darted beneath the surgical light.
Tie the knot, cut the thread, clean the abdominal cavity, close the abdomen layer by layer.
Yang Ming's hands were as steady as a precision industrial machine. The muscle memory honed over countless days and nights in the emergency department in his previous life was pushed to its absolute limit.
[Time remaining: 00 minutes, 10 seconds.]
"Last stitch."
Yang Ming turned his wrist, pulled the suture tight, and cut it.
"Done."
He dropped the scissors and braced both hands against the edge of the operating table, gulping for air. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose into the cold stainless steel tray.
At that very second, the scarlet countdown in his vision stopped abruptly and dissolved into brilliant blue light. Crisp mechanical notifications rang out one after another in his mind.
[Emergency mission: Life After the Dark Alley. Completed.] [Mission target's vitals are no longer critical. Current assessment: severely weakened (stable).] [Treatment completion rating: perfect.] [Distributing mission rewards...] [Reward one obtained: master-level combat muscle memory (integrating).] [Reward two obtained: Specialized Medical Recovery Potion (stored in system space).]
The instant the voice fell silent, before Yang Ming could react, an overpowering surge of heat appeared throughout his body out of nowhere.
"Ngh!"
Yang Ming grunted, his legs buckled, and he dropped to his knees beside the operating table.
This wasn't an infusion of knowledge, but the purest, most brutal physical reconstruction. He felt every muscle fiber in his body being torn apart and rebuilt.
The ruthlessness of Krav Maga, the strangling holds of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the bone-driven striking mechanics of Muay Thai... countless fighting instincts for killing and subduing opponents were forcibly engraved into his neural reflex pathways.
Cold sweat instantly soaked the scrubs he had just changed into.
A full five minutes passed before the tearing agony receded like the tide.
Yang Ming slowly stood. He rolled his neck, producing several sharp cracks.
He looked down. His body, somewhat scrawny from years of staying up late performing surgery, hadn't changed much on the outside. Yet it now held a terrifying power, ready to explode at any moment like a cheetah's.
He casually picked up a discarded scalpel and flicked his fingers.
Whoosh!
The scalpel became a streak of cold light and struck with a thunk, pinning a dead fly to the wall five meters away. It sank deep into the wall with absolute precision.
Yang Ming looked at his hands, a satisfied smile curling his lips.
In Gotham City, with its wonderfully wholesome citizens, he wouldn't live long if all he could do with a scalpel was save people. Now, at last, he had the confidence to fight back.
With a thought, a glass vial glowing faintly green appeared in his palm.
[Specialized Medical Recovery Potion: rapidly repairs damaged human cells and accelerates bone healing. Exceptionally effective against fatal injuries. Note: the process involves severe pain.]
Yang Ming glanced at Bruce Wayne, who remained unconscious on the operating table.
He had dragged the man back from death's door, but two gunshot wounds and broken ribs would normally keep him bedridden for at least three months. Gotham, however, wouldn't give Batman a three-month vacation.
"You're lucky-and hard to kill. Just remember to pay me handsomely afterward."
Yang Ming stepped forward and unceremoniously injected the green potion straight into Bruce's IV line.
Once he had finished, he went to the sink and washed the blood from his arms and face with cold water.
The clock on the wall read two in the morning. All that remained was to wait for the effects.