The attic was dead silent, save for the faint clinking of Bruce's teeth against the rim of the bowl as he munched on his dog food.
The puppy's hind leg was still wrapped in webs. Every two bites, it would look up at him, its tail making a rustling sound against the cardboard box.
Chen Mo sat on the floor, leaning against the battered sofa, leaving the lights off. A bit of orange glow from the streetlights filtered through the window, shining right on the pile of crumpled cash in front of him.
He smoothed the bills out one by one and arranged them by denomination. His movements were very slow, like someone counting a collection of cherished new clothes they were too reluctant to wear.
"This one is for a titanium alloy patch." He placed a twenty-dollar bill on the left.
"This one is for ballistic nylon fabric." Another bill went to the left.
"This one is for the sewing machine. This one is for your dog food." He pointed at Bruce, who was lying in the cardboard box. Hearing the words "dog food," the puppy's ears twitched, and its tail wagged even faster.
"This one is for your anti-inflammatory medicine. This one is for your gauze." Two more bills, and the stack on the left grew higher and higher.
"This one is for bedsheets. This one is for a duvet cover. This one is for the shirt on my back. This one is for frozen chicken breasts."
He laid out the last few bills in sequence, then looked down at the right side.
Only a few lonely bills remained on the right, looking as thin as the last remaining leaves clinging to a branch in the autumn wind.
"One thousand four hundred and eighty-two." He gathered the stack on the right and weighed it in his hand.
Bruce Wayne spent more than this on a single meal.
Bruce tilted his head to look at him, letting out a very soft whimper from his throat. It was as if he understood, or perhaps he was just annoyed by how slowly Chen Mo was counting the money, which was delaying his dinner time.
"You're still being picky?"
Chen Mo looked down at the pup. "Do you know that a single bag of your puppy kibble cost me fifteen bucks? The compressed biscuits I eat myself only cost ten bucks a box. You eat more expensively than me, you live in a warmer place than me, and you even get someone to apply medicine to your broken leg. I have a cracked rib, and I had to apply the iodine solution myself. Who looks more like a stray here?"
Bruce rested his chin on the edge of the cardboard box.
In reality, how could they not both be considered strays?
One of them was even currently protected by the Juvenile Protection Law.
Chen Mo rolled up the cash and stuffed it into the crack of the sofa.
The movement aggravated his rib, causing him to hiss in pain. He held onto the sofa and eased himself for a few seconds.
His mind was still replaying last night's battle.
The sound of that tail slicing through the air sounded like an iron rod striking a clothesline.
The dull, radiating pain that surged from his knuckles all the way to his shoulder when his fist struck the crocodile's chest.
The torn gash on the shoulder of his suit--the titanium alloy patch was deformed, the nylon fabric was frayed and curled back, and the popped stitches looked like a burst of fireworks. It had to be patched, which meant spending money again.
How on earth did Batman, a non-mutant ordinary human, go back and forth with this thing?
Peter Parker's learning capacity was currently breaking down every single frame of the battle into data: Killer Croc's wingspan, the micro-expressions of his shoulders during his attack startup, and his usual stance of grinding his feet into the ground before a tail swipe.
The data stream surged back and forth in his mind like a faucet that couldn't be turned off.
Chen Mo shook his head, trying to shake the pile of data out. It was useless. The learning capacity wasn't something he could control; once granted, it couldn't be stopped.
This was a new system reward Chen Mo had obtained, belonging to Peter Parker's brain--an intelligence attribute boost of +10086.
Did he record it in his diary when he acquired this ability? He had kind of forgotten.
Chen Mo, who had never scored above the passing line in math since entering high school, had not completely adapted to this kind of straight-A student mindset yet.
Then again, if he hadn't been failing his academic subjects, why would he have studied art? Out of pure passion?
"Fine then," Chen Mo said to the air.
The system ignored him, and Bruce let out a few whimpers in response.
Peter Parker's learning capacity allowed him to hand-craft web-shooters, invent chemical formulas, and make Tony Stark question his life choices before even graduating high school.
He was impressed.
He had no choice but to be impressed.
An artist like him now had his brain filled with Killer Croc's skeletal structure and muscle alignment, to the point where he was breaking down Killer Croc's bite force data even in his dreams.
Chen Mo tried to stand up, but stopped halfway through the motion.
The bruise on his rib was turning from purple to yellow. The spider genes were repairing it, but repairing didn't mean it didn't hurt.
He gritted his teeth and stood up straight, scooping Bruce out of the cardboard box and tucking him into his chest.
The puppy burrowed around inside his shirt, found a comfortable spot, and poked the tip of his nose out. "Behave yourself," he said, holding the puppy down through his shirt. "I'm taking you out to see the world. In Gotham, a dog that hasn't been to the library doesn't deserve to be called Bruce."
"Yip!"
Chen Mo changed into a white shirt he had scavenged from a second-hand market. It was washed out and the collar was frayed, but it was clean.
In Gotham, clean clothes were the admission ticket to the civilized world. The way a librarian looked at a vagrant versus a regular citizen was how they would look at two entirely different species.
It was probably like the difference between seeing a goblin and a human.
When a certain group's appearance, way of behaving, and lifespan were completely not on the same level as yours, it was hard to recognize them as your own kind.
Chen Mo looked at himself in a barely reflective shard of a mirror. He was very handsome, very lean, with a small face, looking even younger than his actual age.
Although well-defined muscles were hidden beneath his clothes, Chen Mo looked slender when dressed.
Wearing this shirt made him look like a poor student receiving charity meals at a church school.
This was good. The less he looked like Spider-Man, the safer he was.
The Diamond District.
The Gotham Public Library.
Massive stone pillars supported the domed ceiling, and the air was thick with the dry scent of old paper and wood.
Chen Mo stood at the entrance for a few seconds, looking up at the two heavy oak doors.
He used to think that libraries were always free. Only now did he realize that in a place like Gotham, if the Wayne Enterprises foundation hadn't invested money, this place would actually charge him admission.
Isn't this a public library?
Chen Mo pushed the door open and walked in.
The reading room was massive. Bookshelves reached from the floor to the ceiling, with rolling ladders hanging on tracks. The aisles between the shelves were so narrow that they only allowed one person to pass sideways. Light fell from the high arched windows, cutting dust-filled pillars of light through the air.
Locating the biology section, he scanned the labels on the shelves with his head tilted back, then pulled out a copy of "Anatomical Atlas of Reptiles" that was thick enough to be used as a dumbbell.
Flipping open the title page, a line of small print was stamped on it: Funded by the Wayne Enterprises Special Foundation.
Chen Mo stared at that line of text for a moment.
Bruce stirred in his chest, and he quickly pressed him down. "Don't bark. We haven't gotten a library card yet. Strictly speaking, this is called freeloading. Your dad is an undocumented citizen, an undocumented citizen's dog is also undocumented, and undocumented citizens can't get cards."
The puppy seemed to understand, or perhaps it didn't care at all, merely burying its nose into the palm of his hand.
Chen Mo sat down in a corner seat by the window and spread the book open.
From the masseter muscle structure to the thickness of the temporal bone of crocodiles, he flipped through page by page.
Peter Parker's learning capacity began to operate. Those complex vascular distributions, skeletal structures, and muscle alignments were no longer a bunch of boring Latin terms.
They were like living architectural blueprints, automatically assembling into a three-dimensional model in his mind.
Temporal region, both sides of the skull, where the temporalis muscle attaches.
The bone structure here is relatively weak; a solid punch could cause the opponent's nervous system to crash instantly.
Foramen magnum, the pathway through which the spinal cord enters the cranial cavity.
If he used web-fluid to wrap around Killer Croc's neck and utilized gravity to yank it backward instantly... No, his current web-fluid strength wasn't enough. It could currently only support his own weight plus some extra load; yanking forcefully would cause it to snap.
Change the plan.
Temporomandibular joint--extreme bite force, but weak lateral strength.
Wrap the web-fluid around the upper jaw. Don't pull hard; yank it to the side. The pain of a dislocated joint can make any creature lose its will to attack.
Chen Mo pulled another book from the shelf, "Metabolic Research on Mutated Organisms," and flipped to the chapter on scale structures.
The armor on Killer Croc's back was too thick, making frontal assaults highly inefficient, but his belly was relatively soft.
Force him to stand upright, then attack his lower body. Or make him trip and attack the joints.
The librarian was an old lady wearing reading glasses. She scrutinized the teenager sitting in the corner from above her lenses.
He had been reading continuously for four hours without drinking water or making a sound, flipping pages at a speed that looked like he was shuffling playing cards.
In between, he had only pulled a compressed biscuit from his pocket, washed it down with a cup of free tap water from the water dispenser, and quietly finished eating. The old lady shook her head and averted her gaze.
In Gotham, there were many poor kids who wanted to change their destiny through self-study, but most of them would discover halfway through that the knowledge they learned was completely useless, and thus gave up halfway.
Furthermore, there was a high probability that these children, like their parents, would not live past the age of forty.
At least this one looked neat and clean, unlike those junkies on the streets. She hesitated for a moment, and ultimately did not walk over to disturb him.
By the time Chen Mo closed the last book, the sky outside was already turning dark. He stood up and returned the books to their original spots one by one, his movements as swift as a spider spinning silk.
Learn from this, citizens of Gotham, this is called morals and manners.
Bruce in his chest finally couldn't help but let out a bark. It was extremely soft, like a cat's hiccup.
He quickly clamped the puppy's mouth shut and walked briskly out of the library doors.
Back in the attic.
With the help of the orange streetlight glow filtering through the window, Chen Mo squatted on the floor and drew a sketch of the docks district with chalk. The container yard, cranes, abandoned warehouses--every exit was clearly marked with arrows.
He envisioned himself as a blue dot and Killer Croc as a red square.
"Set up a tension point here."
He drew an arc on the floor, his finger sliding along the arc to the side. "Use the crane's counterweight to change the tipping angle of the containers. His tail is too long, which will actually get him stuck in narrow corridors instead. If I can lure him into the gaps between containers and lock his tail down, I've won half the battle."
He tossed the chalk in his hand to the floor. This wasn't a battle; it was physics. The Spider-Man brain was turning the docks into a mechanics application problem.
Chen Mo collapsed onto the sofa, dragged the sewing machine over, and began patching the gash on the shoulder of his suit.
The stitches were crooked, looking like a centipede crawling across. He looked up and saw a black figure gliding past the top of the clock tower outside. The cape expanded in the night wind like a silent, giant bat, disappearing toward the docks.
"Oh right, this city still has a genuine vigilante."
Chen Mo lowered his head and changed the direction of the sewing machine's spool. "How about leaving this big lizard for Batman to handle? After all, he has an armored car, a grapnel gun, and a bunch of high-tech gear I can't afford. Why should a broke guy like me, who sews his own suit, join the fun? Let whoever's villain it is fight them. I'll make my move when a real Lizard Man shows up..."
A system notification chimed in his mind.
"I was just kidding!" Chen Mo said to the air. "System, why do you have zero sense of humor?"
He looked down at the patched suit in his hands. The stitches on the shoulder sat crookedly on it, high on one side and low on the other, forming a sharp contrast with the undamaged shoulder on the other side.
"..."
Actually, the stitches on the other side weren't very neat either, huh.
"If I don't punch that big crocodile myself, I'll be letting down my three hundred and sixty dollars, letting down the six hours I spent sitting in the library flipping through three crappy books, and letting down this stitch work that looks like a centipede even more."
He gently moved Bruce into the cardboard box that now had extra padding. The puppy yawned, rolled over, and continued to sleep, its tail twitching in its dreams and making a soft snapping sound against the wall of the box.
"Watch the house."
Chen Mo pulled on his suit. Before putting on the mask, he cast another glance down at the box. The webbing on that broken leg was already starting to loosen. Web-fluid would degrade; it had to be replaced.
He squatted down and spun a new layer of web, his finger movements significantly more practiced than last time.
After finishing, he gently flicked the tip of the puppy's ear. "I'll change it for you again when I get back. Don't move around blindly."
Chen Mo put on his mask, pushed open the iron grate of the ventilation shaft, and leapt out into the Gotham night.