Genius on the Left, Madman on the Right (Part Two)

Schiller was called back by the principal. Even though he could manage things remotely, someone still needed to handle the day-to-day affairs of the psychiatric hospital, and that task fell to Bruce.

Schiller had no qualms about dumping all the work on Bruce. Bruce always felt that the professor had more faith in him than he had in himself.

He was only a freshman, yet during his first internship, he had to take over an unconventional psychiatric hospital. Although there was not a single real psychiatric patient in the place, the people he had to manage were even more dangerous and troublesome than psychiatric patients.

When Bruce questioned whether he was qualified for the job, Schiller told him, "Sometimes, unless you force yourself, you never know you’re a genius."

On his first day of work, Bruce ran into a major problem: he could not tell who was who.

Although he had memorized patient files as thick as a book, remembered every name, room number, and corresponding medical record, that would have been more than enough for an intern at an ordinary hospital.

But unfortunately, there was not a single psychiatric patient here in the traditional sense. Behind their names and diagnoses lay extraordinarily complicated social identities.

Who belonged to which gang? Which gangs were on bad terms? Who had once been enemies? Who were partners? None of that information could be found in the case files.

Bruce had picked up some of it while listening to Schiller’s phone calls. His exceptional memory turned that information into a beginner’s gift pack. If he could not figure out everyone’s social identity directly, that was fine—he could work backward from the clues he already had.

Besides, Bruce was very good at disguising himself. Just as he had played the role of a playboy, in this hospital, he became an uninhibited, pampered tycoon who was fascinated by gang life.

Being the richest man in the world came with many advantages. Gang members generally would not think that the world’s richest man had come specifically to pry information out of them. Therefore, when Bruce showed interest in gang stories, the gang bosses merely assumed that this young tycoon, like any rich young master, had grown tired of a comfortable life and yearned for the thrilling existence shown in gangster movies.

So, although they added plenty of their own embellishments while telling stories, Bruce could still infer real and useful information about the relationships within Gotham’s criminal underworld.

In a city where almost everyone had some connection to gangs, understanding those tangled gang relationships meant understanding nearly every vein running through the city’s underclass.

Bruce discovered that the rules of survival in this city were far more complicated than he had imagined.

Starting with the smallest street gangs, even a little crew of barely a dozen people had its own rules for survival.

These small gangs often handled street patrols and petty theft. They also had to pay protection money to larger gangs and obey their orders.

Then came the somewhat larger gangs, with over a hundred members. These were Gotham’s mainstream gangs. Most of them owned one or two businesses, perhaps shops or factories.

They protected those businesses, drove away troublemakers, directed the smaller crews beneath them to bring in customers, and occasionally clashed over customers. But those conflicts were usually minor shootouts, with people hiding behind cars and firing a few pistol shots. Large-scale firepower was rarely used.

Above them were the major gangs with several hundred members. These gangs had reached another level. Every one of them had at least one specialized industry it depended on to survive. Bruce discovered that these damned gangs had even achieved industrial specialization.

At that scale, they usually controlled at least one smuggling route, or possessed a complete chain of cultivation, refinement, and sales. Others controlled most of the businesses along an entire Red Light District. Some of the best among them had even achieved monopolies in a certain industry within a particular area.

Once they reached that level, the profits they could rake in every day were already astonishing—and the market had become saturated as well.

Anything above that could no longer be called a gang. They were family crime syndicates. The Twelve Families that ruled Gotham, aside from the core armed forces controlled by their leaders, had no businesses they needed to handle personally. All they did was remotely direct the major gangs. Every Mafia family had dozens or even hundreds of major gangs under its command, overseeing different businesses in different districts.

When Falcone established the Twelve Families, he used twelve different industries to give each of them its own focus.

Falcone himself sat at the pinnacle of the pyramid, issuing orders to every family and gang.

As he gathered and analyzed this information, Bruce realized that Gotham’s seemingly chaotic and disorderly system was actually an exceptionally solid pyramid. Wealth was extracted layer by layer from criminal industries, then redistributed and reproduced by those at the very top.

Within that cycle, Gotham developed its own unique ecosystem and became the largest concentration of criminal industries in the United States.

At the same time, Bruce discovered that, contrary to his expectations, from sociological and economic perspectives, this city’s industrial structure was damned healthy. Whether it was the distribution of industries across different levels or the division of industrial clusters, it was actually better organized than in most cities across the United States.

As his investigation went deeper, Bruce gradually began to doubt his original intentions. Gotham was evil, but it was not actually poor. The people’s standard of living was not low either. Apart from being extremely dangerous, the people here were fairly wealthy.

While traveling across the United States, Bruce had studied the living standards in major American cities. He found that the standard of living for most people in this damned city of Gotham was far above the passing line.

During his visits around the hospital, Bruce met an old man from Keystone City. People called him "Rifle."

Rifle had originally been from Keystone City, but his daughter had married into Gotham, to a minor gang leader. That gang leader had been maliciously framed, and his daughter had nearly suffered misfortune as well. After receiving his daughter’s plea for help, Rifle grabbed an old-fashioned rifle and charged into Gotham, taking out the gang members who had tried to frame his son-in-law with a few shots.

The Lauren family, one of the Twelve Families, took a liking to the old man’s fiery temper and impressive skills. He was now the boss of a restaurant in the Lauren family’s West End territory.

Unlike the other gang members, this old man had genuinely come to be hospitalized. He suffered from chronic headaches, apparently a complication of Anxiety Disorder, so his son-in-law used his connections to have him admitted for treatment. After two courses of treatment, he was already much better.

"It’s all the same everywhere, all the same…"

Rifle puffed on a cigar and leaned against his hospital bed as he said to Bruce, "You think Keystone City is any better? Everyone lives on clean streets, every family has a car, and children all wear uniforms to school?"

He took another puff. The old man even carried himself with the bearing of a Southern aristocrat, like a true rifle.

Amid the smoke, he slowly recalled, "When I met Mary, you know, that was decades ago… Back then, I was just a poor kid, struggling through the city with my bare hands…"

"Keystone City had gangs too. Where doesn’t? I worked for them, but it couldn’t compare to Gotham. I earned too little. Sometimes I did not even have a cent in my pocket. I wanted to marry Mary, but I had no money. How were we supposed to get married?"

"So I picked up a gun and became an Assassin. That was when life started getting better. By the time my daughter was born, I was doing pretty well. I never had much schooling, but if you ask me, Gotham is still a lot better."

"Gotham is better than Keystone City?"

If someone who looked so knowledgeable had not said it, Bruce would have thought the old man had lost his mind.

"I know. You rich young masters with respectable identities think this city is rotten to the core. Gangs everywhere, criminals everywhere. But for people like us, working for anyone means risking our lives. Whoever pays more, that’s who we follow."

"In Gotham, as long as you’re an official gang member, you actually earn quite a bit. And someone like me, with a restaurant or a bar in his hands, is no different from running a major business."

"Besides, gang members are actually safer here. There’s a system of order here. If you don’t want to declare war on a gang, then you’d better not touch its people, even if it’s just the lowest little thug."

"So those who join gangs to support their families are actually safer than they would be elsewhere. Because gangs call the shots here. Once you become part of a gang, your words naturally carry more weight."

"I know, I know…" Rifle put down his cigar and said, "I know perfectly well that becoming an Assassin brings retribution. I’ll go to Hell, and Satan’s judgment will be waiting for me. But I don’t care. Do you know why?"

Before Bruce could answer, Rifle said it himself. "I had to fill my stomach first, make more money, and live a better life."

"God didn’t let me be born into a family as carefree as yours. My father gambled everything away, my mother ran off with another man, and my only possession was an old gun that didn’t work very well. So I thought, I’d do it. What else could I do?"

"Only after I came to Gotham did I realize that whoever built this city must have been a genius. Don’t you think these gangs have been organized too well? They’ve even reached a nearly perfect balance, allowing this city to keep running for a long, long time while people live fairly well."

"My son-in-law has a guy under him, what was his name?… Forget it, we all call him One Hand. His father, whose brain was fried from drugs, chopped off his left hand when he was little. But he had worked for the owner of the gambling house on his street since childhood, specializing in throwing dice. Last year, he even bought a car, and he’s getting married next month."

"The gang business is huge, and they’re short on people. As long as you have hands and feet and can work, they’ll take anyone."

"Kids who don’t go to school can still learn a trade in gangs. Those with some brains can work in restaurants and learn to cook from the boss, or learn bartending in bars. The most impressive are those who can learn skills in casinos—they’re all naturally clever little devils."

"Those who are quick on their feet become pickpockets. Those with sharp eyes keep watch and stand lookout. Even the worst of them can learn a few fighting moves from others. There are so many gangs, restaurants, bars, casinos, auto repair shops. They either need employees or security guards. You can scrape together a living anywhere."

"If you ask me, the economy has been even better these past two years. If I save up a little more, I might even be able to buy a detached little house on the edge of the Affluent Area in the south. Oh, you probably live in the center of it, right? After all, they say you’re a tycoon."

"My grandson isn’t as lucky as you, but it’s enough. He’s much better off than I was. At least he was born in a house that doesn’t let in the wind, with his mother taking good care of him and his father earning money outside. We’re doing pretty well, aren’t we?"

Perhaps because his headaches had improved so much, the old man seemed full of energy. He kept chattering about the details of his life, while Bruce’s thoughts drifted far away.

Something Rifle had said made him think.

Gotham’s criminal industries had been planned far too perfectly. It was almost impossible for that to have formed naturally. Gangs arose from chaos; they could not all have spontaneously organized these industries on their own.

So how exactly had this city become the strange place it was today?

Could someone really have designed it to be this way on purpose?

What was his purpose? If he had the ability to plan industrial chains so perfectly, why did he have to turn this place into a city of crime? Couldn’t he have done something else?

Gotham was simply the biggest oddity among all the cities in the United States. It had operated steadily for so long in such a bizarre, twisted manner. By taking an unconventional path, it had become one of the most prosperous cities on the East Coast, charging into the top ranks of American cities by GDP through an utterly absurd method. Its people’s living standards had not merely passed—they could contend for excellence.

Its creator had to have been a genius. He had written order out of disorder, almost creating an entirely new model for how a city could function out of thin air.

But he also had to have been a madman, using his insane ideas to personally create the greatest city of crime in the world.

Perhaps here, genius and madness were separated by only the thinnest of lines. Gotham was like a coin balanced between them. It looked as though it might fall at any moment, yet even now, it still swayed along that line.

Everyone here was like the city itself: two-sided. They were both geniuses with special gifts and unparalleled madmen.

Genius on the left, madman on the right, and every person in Gotham followed the same rule as the traffic here—

If I’m going straight, I’ll never turn.

That’s today’s ten-thousand-word update.

As for the update schedule: the midnight update on the day it went premium was because the First Subscription count had to be calculated. Since it went premium at midnight, the update came at midnight. Normally, updates come during the day, so early risers do not need to stay up waiting. They are generally posted around noon or in the afternoon.