The speakers by the pool vibrated the water's surface, the low-frequency bass like an invisible hand, dragging everyone's heartbeat into the same stupid rhythm.
Bruce Wayne leaned against the open-air bar counter. The glass of whiskey in his hand had been there for forty minutes, and the liquid level had barely dropped.
The ice had long melted into water, diluting it into a murky, pale amber.
Someone nearby was laughing, a shrill sound like fingernails scratching a chalkboard.
A third-rate starlet was trying to drape herself over his arm. Her perfume was as heavy as a chemical weapon--tuberose, with a base of musk and patchouli. The top notes had already dissipated, leaving only a middle note that smelled of sickly sweet, rotting pollen.
Bruce broke down her perfume formula in his mind. It was the only way he could force himself to ignore the burning sensation in his nasal passages.
He smiled.
It was a standard Wayne smile. The corners of his mouth curved just right, and his eyes were unfocused and gentle--the look of an heir whose brain had been hollowed out by alcohol and women, leaving only a face that was still passable to look at.
No one would look seriously into the eyes of a man like that.
Across the pool, two wealthy young men were arguing about something. One of them pulled a pocket watch from his inside jacket pocket, its bezel encrusted with a ring of diamonds so blue they didn't look natural.
Heat-treated color enhancement, Bruce judged in his mind. Type IIa diamonds, subjected to high-temperature annealing to reorganize the crystal lattice, changing them from brown to blue.
The cost was probably between one million and 1.2 million dollars.
The wealthy heir spun the pocket watch around his finger and said no, it wasn't bought. He had won it last month at a Monaco casino from the bankrupt son of some Greek shipping magnate.
When he said the word "won," his tongue flicked against his teeth as if savoring a dessert.
The other heir, unwilling to be outdone, said the bathroom door handles on his yacht were inlaid with meteorite slices, meaning "you can touch outer space while washing your hands."
Meteorite slices. Iron meteorite, Widmanstätten patterns. The market price per gram was roughly between three hundred and five hundred dollars. The material used for an entire door handle was enough to feed a Gotham dock worker's family for fifteen years.
Holding his glass, Bruce politely clinked it against the glass of champagne handed over by the owner of the meteorite door handle.
His lips didn't even touch the rim.
His gaze drifted past the edge of the pool, over the terrace railing, and past the layered lights of the Upper East Side, landing in the direction of the South District docks.
"Excuse me."
Bruce Wayne set down his glass and flashed a standard, completely uninformative smile at the starlet still clinging to his arm. "There's a boring board meeting tomorrow. I need to head back and get some beauty sleep."
The starlet pouted, saying something along the lines of "you always do this."
Bruce wasn't listening.
He had already turned around and walked through the crowd, his steps light and frivolous like any playboy hollowed out by alcohol and nightlife.
A Lamborghini's engine roared at the street corner, quickly vanishing into the night.
Three minutes later, a black Batmobile emerged from a hidden exit beneath Wayne Manor. Like a silent, armored beast, it slid into the shadows of Gotham's late night.
Inside the Batcave, Bruce changed out of his custom suit twice as fast as he had put it on.
The scent of perfume still clung to his collar. Tuberose, musk, patchouli.
His action of tossing the shirt into the laundry basket carried a restrained violence. He didn't have an issue with the shirt; he had an issue with "being forced to smell chemical weapons for four hours."
At this point in time, having not debuted for very long, Batman overall still seemed like a human being. At the very least, he still possessed human emotions.
Alfred stood by the workstation.
"Master Bruce, here is the information you requested on the 'Pajama Weirdo.' By the way, your early departure tonight was forty minutes ahead of last month's average. The media tomorrow might use 'Wayne Heir's Kidney Function Suspected in Critical Condition' as a headline."
Bruce didn't reply.
This kind of dry humor was too dry to bother acknowledging.
Sitting down in front of the main screen, Bruce called up the first piece of surveillance footage. The South District docks. The timestamp showed two weeks ago, 2:14 AM.
A thin figure flipped down from a wall.
Red and blue clothing. To use the word "suit" on this outfit would be far too generous.
A handmade product patched together from old pajamas and a sports hoodie. The stitching was uneven, and the seams at the chest had burst in several places, revealing a faded gray undershirt inside.
His build was slight; his shoulder width wasn't even two-thirds of an adult male's.
He crouched on the edge of a shipping container, looking down at what was happening below: a knife-wielding mugger and a dock worker backed into a corner.
Bruce thought he would pounce.
Faced with such an asymmetrical crime, the first reaction of any normal adult with strength and a moral conscience would be to use speed and violence to end it.
That was the law of Gotham.
The strong spoke with power, the weak spoke by running away. There was no third language.
He didn't pounce.
He raised both hands and jumped down from the container, landing between the mugger and the victim.
Palms facing out, fingers splayed--a completely non-aggressive, even clumsy posture.
The dock surveillance had no audio recording function, but Bruce could lip-read.
"Don't be impulsive, bro. That knife looks pretty sharp. If you cut your hand, you'll have to get a tetanus shot. That's so expensive. Are you absolutely sure your health insurance covers it? Because mine definitely doesn't."
The mugger slashed with the knife.
Bruce subconsciously began calculating the thin figure's evasion route. He would go left; his center of gravity was biased to the right. There was a container on the left and open space on the right. The optimal solution was to use the edge of the container to execute a backflip.
A normal person would make such a move.
But this person was clearly not normal. He didn't dodge.
The "Pajama Weirdo" tilted his body. The movement was minuscule. The tip of the knife brushed past the mess of stitching on his chest, missing by less than two centimeters.
Then he grabbed the mugger's wrist, twisted, and pushed. The entire process took less than four seconds.
The mugger's knife clattered to the ground. Immediately after, the "Pajama Weirdo" released his grip on the mugger, and the mugger fled in panic.
The surveillance showed that the "Pajama Weirdo" stood in place for another two minutes, looking down at a bag of bread the mugger had dropped on the ground.
The packaging was stained with dust, and the toast inside was squished out of shape, but it was still intact and unopened.
He bent down, picked it up, and patted the dirt off the packaging. Then he looked left and right to confirm the alley was empty, stuffed the bread into his clothes, hugged the base of the wall, and quickly slipped away.
Bruce stared at that thin silhouette moving along the base of the wall. His fingers tapped twice on the keyboard, rewinding the footage to replay it.
Picking up the bread.
Looking left and right.
Stuffing it into his clothes.
Slipping away along the wall.
"He took the bread," Bruce said.
His voice was very quiet. It didn't sound like a statement, but rather like he was confirming a fact he himself found hard to believe.
Alfred stood behind him, his tray perfectly steady. "A vigilante who takes carbohydrates from a crime scene. Considering Gotham's cost of living, such behavior possesses a certain economic rationality."
Bruce still didn't reply, calling up the second piece of surveillance footage.
The entrance of an alley in the East District.
A domestic sedan was flipped on its side on the road, its undercarriage facing the street, and the fuel tank was leaking.
A homeless man was pinned beneath the edge of the car, his leg caught in the gap between the undercarriage and the ground.
The onlookers stood in a safe semi-circle, holding up their phones. No one stepped forward.
That red-and-blue thin figure crawled over from the wall.
He landed.
There was no hesitation, no assessment, not even a single pause of "can I do this."
He gripped the edge of the sedan's undercarriage with both hands, bent his knees, and braced his lower back.
Bruce pulled up the force measurement system.
The curb weight of that car was 1.3 tons.
In a flipped state, to lift one side of the undercarriage and create a gap wide enough for an adult to pull their leg out, the required instantaneous burst of force was roughly between 3.8 and 4 tons.
In the footage, that thin body was like a spring stretched to its absolute limit.
The stitching on his thoracic vertebrae section completely burst open.
He lifted the car. The undercarriage was about forty centimeters off the ground. The homeless man pulled his leg out and scrambled to a safe distance.
The "Pajama Weirdo" let the car down. The chassis slammed into the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.
Without waiting for the homeless man to turn around and thank him, he had already climbed up the wall and vanished into the shadows of the alley.
From landing to leaving, it took no more than forty seconds.
Bruce called up the third piece of surveillance.
In front of a convenience store in the West District.
A robber was threatening the clerk with a knife.
The "Pajama Weirdo" cut in from the side. He didn't throw a punch; instead, he opened his palm and pushed the robber's chest.
The man flew backward, crashing into a pile of cardboard boxes three meters away.
Bruce placed the three pieces of footage side-by-side on the main screen. On the left, lifting a car to save a man--a 4-ton peak force output.
In the middle, pushing away a criminal.
On the right, picking up bread and slipping away along the wall.
The same person.
The same pair of hands.
Bruce leaned back against his chair, his fingers tapping twice on the armrest. The rhythm was steady, each interval as precise as a metronome.
He stared at those three images, his pupils contracting slightly in the cold light of the screen.
"He's holding back. When lifting the car, he used his full strength. Because if he didn't, that man would have died.
When pushing the robber, he held back three-quarters of his strength. Because if he didn't, that man's ribs would have shattered.
He has an extremely precise awareness of his own strength. He knows exactly how much damage a single punch can inflict, and he deliberately avoids producing that effect."
He reached out and tapped the image on the right where the bread was being picked up.
The thin silhouette was frozen in the center of the screen.
"He's hungry. He needs food. He possesses the strength to lift a car with his bare hands. In Gotham, someone with this kind of power could obtain anything he wanted in countless ways. He chose the only way that wouldn't hurt anyone--picking up a bag of dusty, squished toast dropped by a robber at a crime scene."
Bruce called up the timeline for the past half month.
From the first sighting until now, his mode of transportation had consistently been climbing and jumping.
There was no record of web-shooting.
Until yesterday.
The South Bank docks.
Surveillance caught him shooting some kind of white, thread-like substance from his wrist, hooking onto a crane beam, and swinging across the width of the entire alley.
He enlarged the image, analyzing the thread's trajectory and adhesion method frame by frame.
"The nozzle is on the inside of the wrist. No mechanical devices.
The way the thread unfolds in the air isn't a pre-woven fiber; it's a liquid secretion that solidifies rapidly upon contact with the air.
Biological. It's not equipment; it's a physiological structure. Half a month ago, he could only climb walls.
Yesterday, he developed the ability to shoot webs. His body is changing. His genes themselves are gradually expressing new traits. Strength, climbing, web-shooting--one after another, like something asleep inside him is waking up in sequence.
4 tons is just the limit measured right now, not his endgame."
Batman stood up and walked to the clue wall, which wasn't yet fully covered.
The "Pajama Weirdo" only had a few sparse strings connecting him to three location tags: the South District docks, the East District alley entrance, and the West District convenience store. Right in the center, Batman pinned a screenshot--the silhouette picking up the bread, slipping away along the wall, so thin it looked like a strong gust of wind could snap him.
Then he began to speak--a detached, purely deductive statement typical of Batman when constructing a profile.
"Gotham Harbor, last month. A dock worker smashed his foreman's shoulder blade with an iron hook just because he was shorted twenty dollars in handling fees.
The East District. Three fourteen-year-old kids stabbed a peer seven times just to steal a pair of limited-edition sneakers, then stood by watching him bleed until the police arrived.
A West District convenience store, the week before last. A homeless man walked in and took a bag of bread from the shelf. The clerk pulled a shotgun from under the counter and broke two of his ribs.
This is Gotham.
A person can kill for twenty dollars, kill for a pair of sneakers, and be killed for a bag of bread.
This city teaches everyone living here the exact same thing: your needs are more important than someone else's life. The hungry rob, the strong take, and the weak die. No one puts back food they've gotten their hands on when their stomach is empty. No one chooses to starve when they possess absolute power. No one."
He paused, his finger resting on the edge of the screenshot.
"He possesses 4 tons of strength. He could walk into any convenience store in Gotham and take whatever he wants. No one could stop him. He wouldn't even need to rob anyone; he wouldn't even need to speak. He would only need to stand there and let anyone see his power, and someone would willingly hand over food.
That is the logic of power.
But he didn't.
He chose to pick up a bag of dusty, squished toast dropped by a robber at a crime scene.
He chose to leave directly by climbing a wall without accepting any thanks after saving a life. He chose to push a robber away instead of shattering his ribs. He chose to let himself starve to that extent despite possessing absolute power.
This isn't just kindness."
Bruce's finger moved away from the edge of the screenshot.
Staring at that thin silhouette, his voice dropped very low, as if forcing each word out through his teeth.
"This is something far more bizarre.
A person who, under conditions of physical extremity, still refuses to use power to secure any benefit for himself.
A person who, possessing all the conditions to commit evil and with zero cost, chose the only behavioral pattern that is most detrimental to himself and most harmless to others.
This is not normal human nature.
Human nature breaks down in the face of hunger, inflates in the face of power, and releases malice in the face of zero risk. He didn't break down, he didn't inflate, and he didn't release malice. He is like a machine programmed with absolute moral directives, displaying an abnormal, almost unsettling purity at every node where a crack in human nature should appear."
Bruce turned around to face the clue wall, but the focus of his gaze was no longer on any single screenshot.
He was looking at something more abstract.
"He is in extreme material deprivation.
His suit is pieced together from old clothes.
He has no logistical support, no partner, no base of operations.
His mask is a piece from an old T-shirt.
He is starving. His body is undergoing uncontrollable mutations, and every emergence of a new ability could be accompanied by immense physiological agony.
He doesn't know where his endgame is, nor does he know what he will become.
He lives in massive uncertainty. Yet every time he acts, he controls his strength within a non-lethal range.
Not because he is afraid of killing, but because he doesn't want to kill. A person who, while in extreme personal hardship, still chooses to expend his limited strength on protecting others rather than improving his own situation.
A person who, while starving, still chooses restraint. Gotham doesn't produce this kind of person. No city produces this kind of person."
He paused for a long time.
"A person this... shouldn't exist in the world. It's illogical. It's abnormal. It's impossible."
Alfred never interrupted him.
The old butler held the tray, standing in the shadows of the workstation, his gaze resting on Bruce's tense back.
He had seen Bruce Wayne in all states. An angry Bruce would smash things; a calculating Bruce would be silent; a tired Bruce would fall asleep right in his chair.
This state was the one he saw the least.
Bruce called it an "unwilling conclusion."
When all data and deductions pointed to an answer he couldn't accept, he would verify it repeatedly, as if waiting for some overlooked variable to suddenly pop out and overturn everything.
"Master Bruce," Alfred finally spoke, his voice gentle. "You've been looking at it for forty minutes. Would you like to watch it again?"
Bruce didn't answer. He turned off the screen and walked toward the Batmobile.
"Where to, Master Bruce?"
"To go see him."
"See what?"
Bruce gripped the steering wheel. The vibration of the engine starting traveled from the chassis into his palm.
He looked up, peering through the fissures in the Batcave's rock layers toward that eternally murky night sky above Gotham.
"To see exactly who he's lying to. Me, or himself."
The Batmobile drove out of the cave.
Bruce gripped the steering wheel.
Rather than believing such a pure, kind person existed in the world, he preferred to believe this was the mysterious preliminary condition for some ritual of a cult.