Meanwhile, at Wayne Manor.
The light inside the Batcave was dim and oppressive, with only the massive monitor screens casting a faint, eerie blue glow.
Bruce Wayne sat in front of the main screen, his striking jawline as cold and rigid as marble.
He hadn't changed out of his Batsuit yet, and his cape hung over the back of the chair like a pool of coagulated black liquid.
It was hard to understand anyone who would decorate their home in such a minimalist, sterile style.
It was equally hard to understand anyone who wouldn't take off their work uniform after getting off the clock.
Displayed before Batman was all the surveillance data from the East District slums over the past forty-eight hours.
Alfred walked over, carrying a tray.
The tray didn't hold a late-night snack, but rather a stack of aerial screenshots marked with timestamps, neatly arranged in chronological order. "Master Bruce, the playback data you requested."
Bruce didn't reach for them right away. His gaze was locked firmly onto the slender, red-and-blue figure in the center of the screen.
In the footage, the boy calling himself Spider-Man was crouching atop a rust-stained water tower.
His posture didn't look like he was executing a precise tactical maneuver; rather, he looked like an old man feeding pigeons, crouching there and scattering something out handful by handful.
One-hundred-dollar bills fluttered from his hands, swept up by Gotham's murky wind like a swarm of directionless green moths.
Bruce zoomed in on the image.
The focus of his concern wasn't "how much money he threw," but "how he threw it."
Every single throw controlled the radius of the scatter.
The bills fell onto specific locations: under the shadows of tin roofs, beneath worn-out clotheslines, behind trash cans by shack doorways, and into the deepest recesses of every alleyway.
Not a single bill landed on an open street. Not a single bill landed where gang patrol routes would pass.
Every bill landed in visual blind spots that could be seen from the air but were extremely difficult to detect from street level.
Bruce lifted his fingers from the trackpad and leaned back against his chair.
If the money were scattered in the open, the people picking it up would be seen. If they were seen, they would be targeted.
If they were targeted, they wouldn't be able to keep the money, and they wouldn't be able to keep their lives.
He scattered the money in blind spots.
Every drop point fell within the daily activity range of the residents living near that spot. They would pass it when taking out the trash, when hanging up laundry, or when crouching by their doors to chew on bread. Someone was bound to pass by eventually.
Rather than a simple act of throwing money, this looked like allocating each bill to a spot where a poor person was most likely to find it and a gang was least likely to intercept it.
Why scatter the money instead of distributing it door-to-door?
Bruce began to deduce an alternative scenario. Staying too long would mean too many witnesses, exposing the boy's movements.
Within twenty-four hours, the gangs would track his patterns and follow the trail to find everyone who received money.
Those people would be dragged out of their shacks one by one, their fingers broken as they were forced to answer, "Who else did he give it to?"
Ultimately, those bills would flow right back into the gangs' pockets, while the people who had taken the money would lie in the alleys, waiting for the garbage truck to collect them.
Scattering money.
No contact between the giver and the receiver.
No witnesses.
No leads that could be tortured out of anyone.
It wasn't about keeping his own hands clean; it was about keeping the people who got the money clean.
How much did he keep for himself?
Bruce tracked the boy's hand movements frame by frame after he finished throwing the money.
He pulled the last few bills out of the bag and stuffed them into his clothes. Then, his hand suddenly froze in mid-air.
He stopped for a full three seconds.
The line of his shoulders tightened, like a man fighting against something only he could perceive.
Three seconds later, the internal conflict ended.
He climbed down the wall, and the footage beyond that point cut off, blocked by the chaotic, disorganized layers of structures built up in the slums.
With Spider-Man's abilities, he really shouldn't just be active in the slums near the harbor. He should be operating in the city center. Once he developed spider-silk, the city center would allow him to utilize his combat effectiveness much better.
Bruce overlay all the footage onto a single screen.
The precision of the drop point selection, the single optimal method used, the anticipation of gang activity patterns, the consideration for the safety of the recipients, and the extreme minimization of his own reward.
Every detail pointed in the same direction.
He leaned against the back of his chair, staring at the slender red-and-blue figure on the screen.
A mutant with four tons of strength had robbed bank robbers. He kept only a few bills for himself.
The rest he scattered, using an incredibly complex method precise down to every single drop point, to the people in this city who needed money the most and who were also the least likely to be tracked down by gangs.
When he did this, no one was watching, no one demanded it, and there was no reward.
He didn't even know who those people were.
Bruce turned off the screen.
"Master Bruce. Your conclusion?"
Bruce didn't answer immediately. His gaze remained on the now-darkened screen, as if staring at a riddle he hadn't fully solved.
"He couldn't find any other way."
Alfred remained silent.
"He wanted to help these people. He didn't know how. The system won't help him, the law won't help him, and this city doesn't have a single ready-made path that allows him to deliver money to the people who need it without it being intercepted by gangs. So, he used the only things he had to pave a path of his own."
Bruce's voice was devoid of emotion, like he was stating a law of physics.
"This isn't calculation. Calculation is about achieving the maximum return at the minimum cost. Every choice he made increased his own cost, increased his own risk, and left all the safety to people whose names he doesn't even know.
Calculation wouldn't yield this result. Calculation wouldn't yield a solution where 'you only keep a few bills for yourself and scatter the rest to strangers.' Calculation wouldn't lead someone to crouch on top of a water tower at dawn, throwing one-hundred-dollar bills into the slums handful by handful like fish food."
Batman paused.
"This is a person, when facing a problem he cannot solve, using the only things he has to do something he knows won't change the underlying structure, yet choosing to do it anyway."
And the myth of the Jingwei bird trying to fill the sea is sung by people not because it actually leveled the ocean.
Alfred was silent for a moment.
"Do you think he is kind, sir?"
Bruce didn't turn around. His voice came from behind the raised collar of his cape, muffled, as if separated by a layer of water.
"In Gotham, that word has been used too many times. It's rotten.
I don't know if he is kind.
But when he did this, no one was watching, no one demanded it, and there was no reward. He figured it out on his own. He paved his own path.
In this city where no one tells him what he 'should' do, he chose the most exhausting, most complicated, and least profitable way for himself."
Batman turned around, his cape cutting an arc behind him.
"I don't know what to call it. But I've never seen a second person do this in Gotham."
Alfred looked at the second person doing this and didn't press further.
He looked at Bruce's back, watching him stand in that deep-sea-like blue light, his cape hanging behind him, completely motionless.
He knew that Bruce wasn't thinking about that boy. Or rather, not entirely.
Bruce walked toward the changing room. The sound of his footsteps echoed in the hollow Batcave, step by step, like something slow that refused to stop.
As he passed by Alfred, he paused.
"Alfred."
"Yes, Master Bruce?"
"He couldn't find any other way."
Bruce said nothing more. Alfred didn't reply either. But Alfred knew that Bruce had already said this phrase twice tonight. The first time, he was talking about the boy. The second time, he was also talking about the boy. But Alfred heard it a third time.
The Jingwei filling the sea.
Does it really change nothing at all?
Perhaps one day, the sea level will rise by a few invisible percentages.
Perhaps one day, just maybe, Gotham will welcome its very first night without a single violent crime.