Lin Xiao lived in an apartment building in Queens that looked ready to be condemned at any moment.
Calling it an apartment building was generous. It was really an elongated box partitioned into a honeycomb. His room was at the end of the third-floor hallway. When he opened the rusty iron door, it creaked and groaned.
The light came on.
The room measured a little over ten square meters. Once the folding bed was lowered, there were only three steps between its edge and the door. A makeshift wardrobe and a coat rack-that was all.
There was an unidentified brown stain on the wall, shaped like Florida. Lin Xiao had studied it once when he moved in, without reaching any conclusions. Later, he heard the previous tenant had been an abstract artist who liked painting with "bodily fluids." Lin Xiao had not taken that discovery well.
Rent was three hundred dollars a month.
For this neighborhood, that really wasn't expensive. But every time Lin Xiao paid rent, he felt the humiliation of being robbed at knifepoint.
He tossed his keys onto the table and plopped down on the bed. The folding bed let out a groan even more wretched than the iron chair at his interview, its surface sagging two inches.
Lin Xiao's face darkened.
Before he could start cursing, a sound came from overhead.
Creak.
Creak, creak.
Creak, creak, creak-
Rhythmic, regular sounds carrying a certain primal human cadence, accompanied by muffled panting and the dull thump of bed legs hitting the floor.
Lin Xiao looked up at the ceiling. The hanging light swayed slightly, dust drifting down onto his hair.
Lin Xiao took a deep breath.
His upstairs neighbor got to work on schedule every night after midnight, without fail, more punctual than a Swiss clock. Lin Xiao had endured it for two months. He told himself that once he joined S.H.I.E.L.D. and got paid, his first order of business would be moving somewhere with good soundproofing. Preferably an upscale apartment with a meter of concrete separating each floor-
Creak, creak, creak, creak, creak, creak-
The pace picked up.
The hanging light swung as though it were at a rave.
A vein jumped on Lin Xiao's forehead. He was already seething today. It was bad enough that the beauty he had saved had run off right in front of him, but then that damned system had screwed him over too. He needed to have a word with his good neighbor upstairs about what keeping quiet meant.
Lin Xiao stood, put on his slippers, pulled open the door, and stepped into the hallway. He climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the fourth floor and stopped outside the room where the sounds were coming from.
Lin Xiao knocked.
No answer.
He knocked again, just a tiny bit harder. A layer of dust fell off the door.
The activity inside didn't stop.
Lin Xiao officially ran out of patience.
He raised a hand, placed it against the door, and pushed gently.
"Gently" was Lin Xiao's subjective assessment. Objectively, the security door's lock burst free along with three screws from the frame. The door slammed into the wall with a clang, and plaster drifted down like snowflakes.
Lin Xiao stepped inside and opened his mouth-
Then his mouth stayed open, unable to close.
There were indeed two people in the room. They were indeed on top of each other. Except they were both men, one white and one Black.
Three people, six eyes, stared at one another for roughly two seconds.
During those two seconds, a nuclear explosion went off in Lin Xiao's brain. In his twenty-odd years of life, he considered himself fairly worldly-he had transmigrated into the Marvel Universe, been bound to an idiotic system, and punched through a concrete wall-but the scene before him still wounded his soul deeply in a way he was completely unprepared for.
"Holy-fuck-" Lin Xiao couldn't help swearing. He squeezed his eyes shut, feeling a burning sting.
The white man snatched up the blanket to cover his companion and quickly pulled on his trousers. His face flushed scarlet, his expression rapidly shifting between fury and shame.
"Asshole, what the hell are you doing?"
"Sorry, sorry!" Lin Xiao hurriedly raised both hands and took a step backward, hitting the doorframe with his back. Another chip of paint fell off. "I-I'm from downstairs! All this noise you're making-"
He pointed at the ceiling, then the bed, his finger tracing a circle in midair whose meaning even he didn't understand.
"I-I mean-" Lin Xiao heard his own voice turn shrill, like a chicken being strangled. "This, uh, passion of yours, I understand. Really, I completely understand. Love knows no gender. I get that. But-"
He took a deep breath, trying to look sincere rather than terrified.
"Could you not do this every single day? I can hear everything clearly downstairs every day. Ahem... We're all young, I get it, I get it, but you should show some restraint."
The room fell silent for a second.
The Black man poked his head out from under the blanket and gave Lin Xiao a strange look.
The white man's face had gone from red to purple. His jaw clenched, and every word came through gritted teeth. "I just got back from Afghanistan today. I'm in the military."
Lin Xiao froze for a moment.
His gaze swept over the camouflage backpack by the door, then the exhaustion on the white man's face-he hadn't noticed earlier, but now he saw the bloodshot eyes and a freshly scabbed scrape on his cheekbone.
"Eleven-month deployment." The white man's voice was very low, as if he were afraid of waking someone. "My flight only landed this afternoon. My boyfriend and I-"
He glanced at the Black man on the bed.
"We haven't seen each other in eleven months."
Lin Xiao felt his stomach sink.
Eleven months. Afghanistan. Just landed.
Then what the fuck have I been hearing every night?
The white man's eyes suddenly reddened.
Silence.
A long silence.
Then Lin Xiao spoke with unprecedented sincerity. "Bro, sometimes you've got to wear a cuckold's green hat to get through life."
"I'll pay for the door! Ahem, I'll head downstairs now."
The white man said nothing.
Seeing him remain silent, Lin Xiao felt a headache coming on. His tone grew even more earnest. "My name's Lin Xiao. I'll definitely pay for this door. Tomorrow. I'll get someone to fix it tomorrow. No, I'll get someone here as soon as it's light out today. I'll be going now."
He bowed.
A muscular man standing two meters ten tall and weighing over two hundred pounds stood in someone else's bedroom doorway and bowed to a white man.
The sight could be described as "a brown bear offering New Year's greetings."
"Wait." The white man's voice changed.
The atmosphere suddenly became very delicate.
Lin Xiao began backing away. One step at a time, very carefully.
The white man looked at the Black man, his eyes rimmed red.
"Is what he said true? Every day, you... Who's that man?"
The Black man said nothing, merely lowering his head and poking his fingers together. The sight sent a chill through Lin Xiao, and his sphincter clenched.
The white man roared:
"You haven't answered my question! Who's that man? Is it that Indian guy, Quizer?"
"He's just a friend!"
"What kind of friend answers your video calls while you're showering?"
Lin Xiao slowly retreated into the hallway. He reached out and carefully pulled the now-crooked door toward him, trying to cover the enormous hole in the frame.
Through the hand-width gap, he saw the Black man jump coyly off the bed, moving no slower than the white man had earlier. The white man lunged at him, and they grappled, knocking over the nightstand. A lamp crashed to the floor.
"Eleven fucking months in Afghanistan rotted your brain, huh-"
"You've been fucking men behind my back for eleven months, huh-"
"I've been alone in this empty apartment for so long. What's wrong with getting a little action now and then?"
"Fuck, you're still lying! That guy said there's noise every day..."
Crash, bang. Thud. Clang. Something shattered.
Lin Xiao turned and rushed down the stairs, taking them two at a time. A dull crash came from behind him, as if something heavy had slammed into the wall.
He returned to 317, shut the door, locked it, then leaned back against it and slowly slid to the floor.
His heart raced.
Lin Xiao sat on the floor, staring at the hanging light still swaying slightly overhead, silent for a long time. The noise upstairs showed no sign of subsiding. Instead, it only intensified. Footsteps, curses, and the sound of things being smashed mingled together.
Lin Xiao wiped his face.
"Motherfucker."
Move. I'm moving out at daybreak. No money? I'll ask my good boss Coulson for some funds first. He's Marvel's number-one nice guy, after all.
He couldn't stay here anymore. Upstairs lived a couple-no, they might no longer be a couple-currently beating each other up. Next door was the artsy young man who always practiced the saxophone at three in the morning. Downstairs was the middle-aged man who got drunk and vomited at the foot of the stairs every Friday without fail. Two months after moving in, he had had enough.
This life was even more stifling than his life before transmigrating.
To distract himself, Lin Xiao sat on the bed and opened the system panel.
A blue screen lit up in the dim room, making his whole face look like something from Avatar. The stats were neatly arranged:
Strength: 250 Intelligence: 18 Agility: 12 Charm: 5 Mental power: 8
A normal person's average across all five stats was 10. Aside from his top-tier strength and slightly higher intelligence and speed, two of his stats were below normal. As for that charm score of 5-put it this way: combined with the scars on his face, even dogs would find him repulsive.
Lin Xiao closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and forcibly suppressed the fury surging from his lower abdomen to the crown of his head before speaking:
"Doupao."
"Ding-here."
"Do you have some kind of weird fetish? Like, are you especially keen on turning me into a walking natural disaster?"
The system went silent for an instant. The pause was very brief, but Lin Xiao caught it. After three months together, he had learned to read information from the system's reactions-that pause meant he'd hit the nail on the head.
"Ding-I do not currently understand what the host means. What is a walking natural disaster? Isn't Hulk great?"
"Isn't Hulk great?" Lin Xiao's eyebrow twitched.
"Ding-the host misheard."
Misheard? Lin Xiao sneered inwardly.
Fine. Playing dumb, huh? You want to turn me into Hulk, huh?
He had nothing right now-no money, no status, no say in anything. Falling out with a damned system bound inside his brain would do him no good whatsoever. Underhanded as this system was, he still needed it at this stage. But that was all right. He could wait. Wait until he had a firm footing in S.H.I.E.L.D., until he figured out the rules governing this shitty system, until he piled up enough strength to turn around and seize fate by the throat.
But right now, his top priority was moving. Lin Xiao shuddered at the thought of those two men, one Black and one white. He had to move out immediately, right now. I can't stay in this dump another second.