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Chapter 72: Geniuses on the Left, Madmen on the Right (II)

Schiller was summoned back by the principal. Even though he could control things remotely, he still needed someone to oversee the affairs of the psychiatric hospital. That responsibility fell onto Bruce.

Schiller confidently delegated all the work to Bruce. Bruce couldn't help but feel that Professor Schiller had more faith in him than he had in himself.

He was just a freshman student, and he was taking over an atypical psychiatric hospital for his first internship. While this psychiatric hospital didn't have any real psychiatric patients, it was even more dangerous and troublesome than dealing with actual patients.

When Bruce questioned his ability to handle the job, Schiller told him, "Sometimes, you don't realize you're a genius until you push yourself."

On his first day of work, Bruce encountered a major problem - he couldn't distinguish one person from another.

Even though he had memorized thick patient files, including all their names, room numbers, and corresponding medical records, which would have been more than sufficient for a regular hospital, this place was different. Behind the names and diagnoses in their files lay complex social identities.

Who belonged to which gang? Which gangs had hostile relationships? Who used to be enemies, and who were now partners? None of this information was discernible from the patient files.

Listening to Schiller talk about the telephone, Bruce had picked up some clues. His extraordinary memory turned these fragments into valuable insights. Without understanding everyone's social identities and relationships, he could deduce them from these clues.

Moreover, Bruce was skilled at disguises. Just as he had concealed his playboy identity, here in the hospital, he became a billionaire who was carefree and affluent but yearned for the gang life.

The identity of the world's richest person gave him certain advantages. Gang members didn't expect the world's richest person to approach them with ulterior motives. So, when Bruce showed an interest in gang stories, the gang leaders simply thought this young billionaire, like any wealthy heir, had grown tired of a life of comfort and longed for the excitement of the gang world.

Thus, when they shared their stories, Bruce could still extract valuable information about gang society and relationships, even though he suspected they had embellished some of the tales.

In a city where almost everyone had ties to a gang, understanding the intricate web of gang relationships meant uncovering the city's underlying structure.

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

Starting with small gangs at the bottom, even a gang with just a dozen members had its own rules of survival. These small gangs often handled street patrols and petty crimes and paid protection fees to larger gangs that controlled them.

Moving up the ladder, gangs with hundreds of members, considered mainstream in Gotham, often controlled one or two industries, such as shops or factories. They provided protection for these industries, controlled their smaller gangs, and occasionally engaged in small-scale shootouts when conflicts arose over customers. However, these conflicts rarely escalated beyond a few handgun shots fired from behind cars.

Further up were the large gangs with several hundred members, each specializing in a specific industry vital for their survival. Bruce discovered that these gangs even had specialized subdivisions within their industries.

At this scale, they often controlled smuggling routes or had complete production and distribution chains for specific products. Some excelled in dominating the majority of an industry, while a few managed to achieve near-monopolies in certain regions or sectors.

At this level, their daily profits were astonishingly high, but they also faced saturation.

Moving higher up, they could no longer be called gangs but should be referred to as criminal family organizations. These twelve gang families ruled Gotham, and aside from controlling their core forces, they didn't personally engage in business. Their role was to oversee the large gangs, each with dozens or hundreds of members, managing different businesses in various regions.

When Falcone established the Twelve Families, he ensured that each family focused on a different industry.

Falcone occupied the pinnacle of the pyramid, issuing commands to all the families and gangs.

As Bruce collected and analyzed this information, he realized that despite Gotham's apparent chaos, it had a remarkably robust hierarchical structure. Wealth was extracted from criminal industries layer by layer, and then redistributed and produced at the top.

Within this cycle, Gotham had forged its unique ecosystem, creating the largest gathering place for criminal industries in the United States.

Moreover, Bruce discovered that contrary to his expectations, from the perspectives of sociology and economics, Gotham's industrial structure was surprisingly healthy. Both the allocation of industry sizes across different levels and the delineation of industry clusters were more efficient than in most other U.S. cities.

As Bruce delved deeper into his investigation, he began to question his initial intentions. He realized that, despite its malevolence, Gotham was not impoverished, and the standard of living for most of its citizens was relatively high. Apart from the inherent danger, people here were quite affluent.

During his travels across the United States, Bruce had also studied the living standards of people in various major cities. He found that the majority of people in this cursed city, Gotham, lived well above the poverty line.

During his visits to the hospital, Bruce met an elderly man who had come from a nearby city. People called him "Gunman."

Originally, Gunman had come to the city with hostile intentions, but his daughter had married a small gang leader in Gotham. This gang leader was falsely accused, and Gunman's daughter was nearly harmed. When Gunman received a distress call from his daughter, he grabbed an old-fashioned shotgun and rushed to Gotham. With a few shots, he took down the gang members who were trying to harm his son-in-law.

One of the Twelve Families, the Lauren family, saw potential in Gunman's violent temperament and skills. Now, he was the owner of a restaurant in the Lauren family's West District.

Unlike other gang members, this old man had genuinely come to the hospital. He suffered from chronic headaches, seemingly a complication of anxiety disorder. So, his son-in-law used his connections to get him admitted for treatment. After two treatment sessions, he was already feeling much better.

"It's all the same, everywhere," Gunman said, taking a drag from his cigar, leaning against the hospital bed, and addressing Bruce. "Do you think it's any better when you're storming the city? Everyone lives on clean streets, every household has a car to drive, and the kids go to school in their uniforms?"

He took another puff of his cigarette, and this old man even had a hint of Southern aristocracy about him, just like a true Gunman.

Amidst the cigarette smoke, he slowly reminisced, "I met Mary many years ago, you know, decades ago... Back then, I was just a poor kid, fighting my way through the city with nothing but my bare hands..."

"To besiege a city, you'll find gangs everywhere, won't you? I worked for them, but it couldn't compare to Gotham. I earned too little, sometimes not even a cent in my pocket. I wanted to marry Mary, but I had no money. How could we get married?"

"So, I picked up a gun and started working as a hitman. That's when life started looking up. When my daughter was born, I was doing well. Even though I never read any books, if you ask me, Gotham is far superior."

Bruce asked, "Is Gotham better than the city you wanted to besiege?"

If it weren't for the fact that this was coming from a seemingly knowledgeable old man, Bruce would have thought he was out of his mind.

"I know you gents with respectable backgrounds think this city is rotten to the core, full of gangs and criminals everywhere. But for people like us, it doesn't matter where we work; we give our all to whoever pays the most."

"In Gotham, as long as you're an official member of a gang, you actually earn quite a bit. And if you're like me, owning a restaurant or a bar, it's not much different from running a big business."

"Moreover, here, gang members are safer. There's a unique order in place, and if you don't want to declare war on a gang, it's best not to mess with their people, even if it's just a low-level thug."

"So, those who join gangs to make ends meet are actually safer here than anywhere else because the gangs rule the roost. Once you're part of a gang, your words carry more weight."

"I know, I know..." Lai Fuqiang put down his cigarette and said, "I'm well aware that being a hitman will lead to consequences. I'll go to hell, face the judgment of Satan, but I don't care. Do you know why?"

Before Bruce could respond, Lai Fuqiang continued, "I need to fill my belly first, earn more money, and have a better life."

"God didn't place me in a comfortable family like yours. My father lost everything to gambling, my mother ran away with someone else, and my only possession was this old and unreliable gun. So, I thought, why not do this? What else can I do?"

"After coming to Gotham, I realized that the people who built this city must have been geniuses. Don't you think these gangs are organized too perfectly? It's almost impossible for gangs to spontaneously organize these industries."

"So, how did this city become the way it is today? Could it be that someone intentionally designed it like this? What's their purpose? Do they have the ability to plan these industries so perfectly? Why turn it into a city of crime? Couldn't they do something else?"

"Gotham is simply the oddest among all American cities. It runs smoothly in a strange and twisted manner, carving its own path to becoming one of the most prosperous cities on the East Coast. It's achieved high GDP rankings through an absurd approach, and people not only survive here but thrive."

"Its creator must be a genius, turning chaos into order, creating a new model of city operation almost out of thin air. But at the same time, he must be a madman, using his crazy ideas to build the world's largest haven of crime."

Bruce thought, maybe here, genius and madness are separated by a thin line, and Gotham is like the coin balancing between them, ready to topple at any moment. But it continues to teeter on that line.

Everyone here, just like this city, is a double-edged sword. They are both gifted geniuses and unparalleled madmen.

Genius to the left, madness to the right, and everyone in Gotham follows the traffic rules here—

"I go straight; I never turn."