San Francisco, outside the Fairmont Hotel.
Dressed in a dark red valet uniform, Shang-Chi handed a parking ticket to a wealthy businessman who reeked of alcohol, then smiled as he accepted the five-dollar tip the man casually thrust at him.
"Thank you, sir. Have a pleasant evening."
Shang-Chi slipped deftly into the businessman's convertible and stepped on the gas, driving into the underground garage.
After parking, he leaned against the cold hood and pulled a cheap smartphone with a cracked screen from his pocket.
Live news from Manhattan, New York, was playing on the screen.
Ten million dollars. The Extremis Five Super-Soldier Serum.
Those two phrases were like two doses of the most potent aphrodisiac. They had not only turned the East Coast upside down but driven San Francisco on the West Coast completely mad as well.
Before entering the hotel, that businessman had been boasting to his female companion that he had hired three former special forces soldiers and planned to go "hunting" at an abandoned pier near Chinatown that night.
"They're crazy. Every last one of them..."
Shang-Chi tugged at his collar and let out a barely audible sigh.
His name was "Sean" now.
No one knew that this valet, who bowed and scraped to guests every day for a few dollars in tips, was the young master of the Ten Rings, a thousand-year-old terrorist organization whose very name struck terror into the global underworld.
Ever since his mother Ying Li's tragic death, he had become the sharpest blade in his father Xu Wenwu's hand.
Seven full years of hellishly brutal training had forged every inch of his flesh and bone into a killing machine. Then, at fourteen, he had carried out his first assassination on his father's orders.
Looking at his target lying in a pool of