It was already mid-May, yet New York's weather still carried a touch of winter's bite.
A cold wind swept past, making the leaves rustle.
The three Aurors had disappeared after bringing him here by Apparition. Only the tiny Alchemy Orb followed overhead.
Light filtered through the gaps between the leaves like scattered stars. He surveyed his surroundings. Was this a park?
He walked toward the lights and soon emerged from the small grove. Benches lined both sides of the path in neat rows.
Tall streetlamps shone overhead, casting a rather faint light.
It really was a park!
He glanced at his wristwatch. It was almost nine at night.
Well, well. The third round had barely begun, and they'd already thrown a problem at him?
Zhang Xiao pulled a face. Apart from the relatively secure wealthy neighborhoods, New York at night was nowhere near as safe as it was during the day.
Even "relatively secure" meant something quite different from what people back home understood by it.
He had specifically looked into this while watching movies in his previous life. When foreigners called an area relatively safe, they meant there were no serious violent crimes.
Being verbally abused or shoved by homeless people... none of that counted. After all, plenty of homeless people had fried their brains with drugs.
Zhang Xiao got his bearings and walked slowly toward the exit, continuing to consider his situation. Many people didn't realize that Gotham City, where Batman lived, was partly modeled on New York, not just Chicago.
Gotham had 180 gun murders a year, and Batman's butler called it a city of sin. How many did New York have? Around four hundred...
*If he remembered correctly... hadn't Giuliani, the hard-line mayor who brought New York's crime ranking down from the nation's top three to