Bad Morning, Gotham

Chen Mo was jolted awake by the burning in his stomach.

The Stark, Black Card, and Batman crouching beside him offering tissues in his dream shattered into Gotham's cold morning breeze, laced with rust and rotting seaweed.

He stared at the ceiling, thinking the dream's only flaw was that he had woken up.

Waking up meant facing reality, and reality was that he didn't have a cent.

Chen Mo rubbed his empty belly, then looked at the dried webbing on his wrist. Describing Spider-Man's webbing in detail would get flagged as sexually explicit.

Sigh.

Chen Mo's logic was clear: no money meant no protein, no protein meant no webs, and no webs meant no farming rewards. A perfect capitalist vicious cycle.

Thank you, Gotham. Thank you, system. Thank you, Old Ma, you fucking America-worshipping idiot.

Intercepting food from street thugs every day wasn't a long-term solution.

He was stronger than an ordinary adult now, and security at the docks was lax. Even someone with no papers could get in and haul cargo.

He would take it one day at a time. At least it was steady income.

Sigh.

Why did he still have to find a job after transmigrating?

He didn't want to be Failure-Man anymore. He wanted to be Batman.

Chen Mo rolled out of bed and decided to try his luck at the docks.

Gotham South Docks.

The air reeked of cheap cigarettes and diesel exhaust.

Larry sat sideways in a rickety wooden chair and spat a thick glob of phlegm, landing it precisely two centimeters from Chen Mo's feet.

That aim could win an Olympic medal.

Chen Mo had hung around the docks for most of the day before the man in charge finally showed up.

He had heard this man's name from some small-time thugs while doing good deeds earlier.

"Larry, need anyone to move cargo?"

Larry sized him up out of the corner of his eye.

Hmm... An illegal immigrant kid looking for work because he's about to starve.

Hmm???

The Asian boy really was good-looking. Even in a washed-out hoodie, his face looked as clean as if it had been cut straight out of a billboard.

In Gotham, looking like that was a form of hard currency in itself.

That wasn't praise for being handsome. It was praise for being easy to sell.

In every sense.

A fair-skinned Asian, too. Doesn't look like he's used... Fun to play with and tasty. Even better.

Larry's eyes shifted, and he held up three fingers.

"Three days. Thirty."

Chen Mo rapidly did the math in his head.

Thirty for three days. Ten a day.

New York's minimum hourly wage was sixteen fifty.

In other words, his legal pay for one full hour would cover Larry having him haul cargo for three days.

Perfect Gotham economics.

"Deal."

He's willing to pay me, at least. Fine, whatever.

Larry drew a dagger with a blood groove from his belt and drove it into the tabletop with a clink.

"But we'll have to change the rules a little. You'll get paid, but first you need to pay an 'initiation fee.' The drugstore next door has an old man behind the counter. Go rob it. We split the cash twenty-eighty, and you can walk sideways around these docks from now on. Whether you walk sideways yourself or get carried out sideways depends on your performance."

Once the kid committed a crime, kidnapping and selling him would carry even less risk.

Chen Mo stared at the dagger.

A few hundred dollars.

Protein powder.

High-strength webbing.

Looking rather innocent, Chen Mo had even started planning his escape route in his head.

The camera in the alley behind the drugstore is broken. Over two walls and there's the subway station. Perfect.

[System warning: serious criminal tendencies detected in host. Countdown to superpower degradation penalty: 3, 2-]

Chen Mo instantly straightened up, his eyes blazing with a righteousness that unnerved Larry. He changed faces so fast that Sichuan opera performers would have called him master.

"Larry, you're insulting me."

Larry froze.

"Robbery? That's illegal."

Chen Mo sounded as sincere as if he were reading a public service announcement, his voice clear enough for half the docks to hear.

"Honesty is the foundation of a person's place in society. I might be so poor I don't know where tomorrow's breakfast is coming from—seriously, all I have in my stomach right now is air and hope—but I have a heart of gold. You want me to rob someone? No, that would betray justice. I, Chen ❤, am a good man in life and will be a good dead man in death. That's so philosophical. Put that on my gravestone."

The workers hauling cargo around them stopped one after another, staring at the melodramatic teenager as though he were insane.

In Gotham, tossing around words like "honesty" and "justice" was rarer than streaking down the street.

At least public nudity could be explained by drunkenness.

And quite a few people actually did that.

Larry recovered, his aging face flushing crimson.

It was the humiliation of being lectured in public by some wet-behind-the-ears brat. In Gotham, humiliation like that had to be washed away with blood.

Or, at the very least, by selling the offender straight to the Happy House.

"Are you fucking playing me?"

Larry shot to his feet, his flab wobbling.

"You ungrateful little shit. Since you're so high and mighty, fine. You're not getting a cent. As for you-"

He looked Chen Mo's face up and down, as though appraising a pig ready for slaughter. "Those old perverts at the underground Happy House will pay plenty. That face alone will pay off my debts. Don't worry, they'll treat you very well. For the first month, at least."

Several burly men closed in.

Standard Gotham workplace culture: if negotiations failed, use fists; if fists failed, use knives; if knives failed, use shipping containers.

Oh, wait. He was the one who used the shipping container.

Chen Mo sighed. "So my orientation is a one-way ticket to the Happy House? Gotham's labor laws really cover everything."

Backing away, he furiously ranted inwardly. System, you're seeing this, right? I'm not the one looking for a fight. They want to sell me to perverts. This counts as self-defense, so no point deductions, right? Or do you want me to let them sell me and then reform the customers at the Happy House? Picture that yourself, system.

The system said nothing.

Tacit approval.

Or perhaps it had been disgusted.

Chen Mo didn't know whether the system had thoughts of its own. He thought it did, anyway.

The burly man in front threw a punch straight at Chen Mo's face.

Chen Mo's foot slipped-as though he had stumbled on an oil slick, complete with a yelp-and his entire body tilted eerily to the left.

The man had put too much force into the punch to stop, and his fist slammed straight into the crane's control lever behind Larry.

Crack.

That punch was worth at least three months of workers' compensation.

The control lever snapped.

The shipping container suspended overhead let out a teeth-grating scrape.

"Look out-though I don't know which direction you should be looking out for!"

Chen Mo casually shoved another burly man beside him.

Before the man could react, he crashed into Larry.

Larry rolled away like a meatball, coming to rest right at the edge of the falling container's shadow.

He rolled much faster than he walked.

Boom-

The container slammed into the ground.

It missed Larry, but the impact launched him into the air and sent him headfirst into a bamboo basket full of rotten fish.

Perfect. Kindred stenches.

The other burly men tried to charge, but Chen Mo had already retreated to the edge of the dock in a "panic."

"Stay back! Come any closer and I'll jump! I mean it! If I jump, you'll have one less person to sell!"

As he shouted, Chen Mo "accidentally" stepped on a rope on the ground.

The other end was tied to a cargo hook. The tug sent the hook swinging back like a meteor hammer.

Physics was just that charming.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The hook swept into the backs of three burly men's heads in succession. They collapsed in perfect unison, eyes rolling back. It was so coordinated it looked rehearsed.

Chen Mo dusted off his hands and called to Larry in the rotten-fish basket, "See, Larry? That's what happens when you're dishonest. Even God couldn't stand watching. He gave you a little shove just now. You need to reflect on yourself. Also, forget the thirty. Put it toward your medical bills."

With that, he took off running.

He had lost thirty dollars, but at least he hadn't been sold.

And he had definitely met his exercise quota for the day.

As he passed through Gotham's dark, damp streets, the hunger in his stomach had evolved into spasms of pain.

It had evolved from "a little hungry" to "my stomach is eating itself."

Chen Mo passed a restaurant with freshly baked bread in its window. The scent of wheat and butter hit him like a physical attack. In Gotham, that smell was more tempting than any crime.

Chen Mo stopped.

Plan A was a complete failure.

Time for Plan B!

Chen Mo didn't go inside to beg for food.

He stood outside the window and put his face to work: youthful, aloof, and just tired enough, staring at the bread on display.

His gaze was clear and melancholy, like a kitten left out in the rain for three days, yet carried a stubborn air of "I'm hungry, but I won't beg."

He had practiced this expression seventeen times in the mirror.

It was a finishing move he had developed from watching idol dramas in his previous life.

In theory, it should work.

Though idol-drama logic might not apply somewhere like Gotham.

This place really was blessed with such outstanding people...

Inside the restaurant, the owner was wiping down tables.

She noticed the boy outside the window: his slight figure, those eyes that screamed "I'm hungry" while he stubbornly refused to say anything, and that face. Especially that face.

She watched for three seconds.

Then she set down her cloth and walked over. Not out-over.

She pushed open the door and looked Chen Mo up and down, her gaze assessing a piece of merchandise.

A Gotham-style appraisal: first how much it was worth, then what it could be used for.

"What are you standing here for? You're blocking my business." She stared at Chen Mo's face for another two seconds. "With looks like that, wouldn't working as a rent boy at a club down south beat standing here? Or do you think their hiring standards are too high?"

"That's illegal," Chen Mo said sincerely.

The owner snorted. "That's legal."

"?"

Chen Mo really didn't know much about American law. He had assumed that selling a minor was absolutely illegal, no matter how you looked at it.

Seriously? That's actually legal?

She glanced at his face again. "Forget it. I need someone washing dishes in the back. Ten dollars a day, two meals included. Interested?"

Chen Mo blinked.

That turn had come faster than the fight at the docks.

"What are you staring at?" The owner shoved a bag of sandwiches that had just expired that day into his arms. "That's your lunch in advance. Be here at six tomorrow morning. Late means docked pay. Skip work and I call the cops. I'll tell them you stole from me."

Chen Mo looked at the bag of sandwiches in his arms, his Adam's apple bobbing. Then he smiled, bright as a sunny day Gotham would never have.

"Thanks. Wishing you booming business, a full house, and plenty of tips."

Clutching the sandwiches, he turned and walked into an alley.

The moment he entered the alley, he tore open the packaging and took a huge bite of a ham sandwich.

The bread was a little hard, but this was meat.

Protein.

The raw material for webbing.

The more he ate, the more miserable he felt about his lot in life.

He really hated the feeling of not having a single cent to his name.

Chewing, Chen Mo calculated inwardly. I knew there were still good people in this world.

Provided you were good-looking enough and willing to work twelve hours a day for just ten dollars.

Whatever. She's willing to pay me.

That's pretty good already.