Nobody can stop me from drawing cards in Gotham!

Chapter 25 I need treatment!

Leslie Tompkins admits he has met quite a few strange people in his life.

After all, as Thomas Wayne's old friend, and a stubborn doctor who insisted on opening a clinic in Crime Alley despite being dissuaded by many, providing free treatment to local residents who could not afford medical expenses, her profession and experience made her have a deep connection with "weirdos".

From the eccentric patients you might occasionally see at the clinic, to the bizarre criminals you might encounter in Crime Alley...

Even the child she watched grow up, Bruce Wayne, a famous figure in Gotham's high society, is actually a vigilante who dresses up as a giant bat in a tight-fitting suit and beats people up in the middle of the night.

Leslie didn't understand, but she chose to respect Bruce's choice and faithfully kept the secret for him.

In short, Leslie has probably seen so many weirdos that the stacks could probably reach half the height of Gotham's clock tower, so she should be used to them by now...

But the neighbor who had just moved next door to the clinic was really strange.

Yes, neighbor.

That strange person moved next door to the clinic a week ago.

Next to the Tompkins Clinic is a two-story duplex apartment that looks nice but has never been seen inhabited—a miracle on par with the Tompkins Clinic in Crime Alley.

After all, homeless people are everywhere in Crime Alley, and people even dare to risk collapsing to go into abandoned buildings to find a place to sleep, let alone an intact, unattended apartment building like this.

It's not that no one has tried, but those who have tried to pick the locks and break into the apartment building have generally failed.

Either he screams and runs away as if he's seen a ghost while picking the lock, or he falls and becomes paralyzed due to some accident while trying to climb through a window and has to be rescued by Leslie next door, or he successfully gets in... and then disappears into Crime Alley without a trace.

—According to some, this is a cannibalistic apartment building.

As time went by, more and more legends about this apartment building emerged, and it gradually became one of the most talked-about stories in Crime Alley, and no one dared to enter it... until last week.

A young man arrived, knocked on the door of Tompkins Clinic, and politely asked, "Hello, ma'am, is this Tompkins Clinic?"

"Yes," Leslie asked. "Is there anything you need, young man?"

"No, no." The black-haired young man blinked. "I just came to check... I just moved next door, so I thought I'd come and say hello."

"You just moved here?" Leslie asked, a little surprised.

After all, it's rare to see young people who dare to move to Crime Alley on their own initiative.

But after Leslie watched him leave out of curiosity, she watched as the young man calmly walked into the legendary, terrifying apartment building next door... by taking out his key and opening the door.

Leslie: ?

That young man actually lives in that apartment building?!

To be honest, Leslie had a good impression of this polite young man who seemed completely out of place in Crime Alley, so much so that when he found out that the young man actually lived in that apartment, he couldn't help but worry about him.

Will that apartment building swallow the young man up like it has with previous intruders?

However, the fact that the other party had the key to the apartment building indicates that he was the owner of the apartment, not an intruder...

Leslie fell into thought.

In the following days, aside from handling some work at the clinic and occasionally visiting some patients who were not able to leave their homes with her medicine kit, Leslie's most frequent activity was to glance at the apartment building as she passed by.

The good news is that the horror stories surrounding the apartment building seem to have given way to the apartment owner who had the key, and the young man has been alive and well ever since.

The bad news is... that young man successfully replaced his apartment and became the new legend in the neighborhood near the clinic.

"Doctor, do you know how strange the residents in the apartment building next to yours are?"

Once, when Leslie was bandaging the leg of a patient who had been caught in a street fire, she heard the young man ask in a low, furtive voice.

"What?" Leslie thought of the gray-eyed young man. "What happened to him?"

"Damn it, doctor, you really know him?" the patient exclaimed in astonishment. "That guy is the weirdest of the weird!"

"What's going on?" Leslie asked. "Why do you say that?"

Since the patient had nothing better to do, he vividly recounted to Leslie the strange tales circulating about the new owner of the apartment building over the past few days.

First of all, it's amazing that the other party has managed to survive for so long in that terrifying, man-eating apartment building, and is still alive and kicking.

But the strangeness of the young people doesn't stop there.

For example, one night, a resident went out to throw away the trash and witnessed a scene he would never forget—the infamous eerie apartment building floated up in front of him.

It floated up!

Damn it, this isn't an exaggeration or any kind of rhetoric, it's the truth!

Even in Gotham, a place rife with strange occurrences, seeing a building floating up is incredibly eerie!

Even more bizarrely, the resident who was stunned at the time discovered that the door on the first floor of the apartment was kicked open with a "bang," and the young man who dared to move into the apartment walked out cursing. He seemed to have kicked the exterior wall of the apartment a few times, and as a result, the apartment that was about to float higher and higher was kicked back down to the ground.

Resident: ?

Where am I? Am I still in the real world?

If only this resident witnessed such a scene, other people in the neighborhood might just assume it was a hallucination caused by high drug levels, and someone might even secretly contact him to ask which company sold the product that was so effective.

But ironically, quite a few people have witnessed similar scenes.

Someone saw a huge, dark shadow projected onto the apartment window in the middle of the night, resembling a menacing demon.

Some people saw thick, grayish-white mist seeping from the windows and door cracks of the apartment building at the height of the midday sun—while the young man stood at the first-floor doorway looking worried, holding his phone and explaining to the fire station across the street: "No...it's a misunderstanding...my house really isn't on fire...there's really no need to send a fire truck..."

Similar bizarre sightings piled up like mountains, and in most of them, the young man was involved.

For some reason, Leslie, who lives next door to the source of the rumors, has never seen the strange scenes described by the patients or nearby residents.

...We can't keep missing her because she happens to be out on house calls, can we?

As a believer in seeing is believing, Dr. Leslie firmly believed that no matter how many similar rumors there were, or how vividly patients and nearby residents described those scenes, she would remain skeptical unless she witnessed them herself.

It seems that fate knew Leslie's thoughts and decided to give her a chance to witness it firsthand.

So, on a quiet afternoon at the clinic, Leslie, who was organizing medical records because the clinic was temporarily unattended, suddenly heard a very clear explosion coming from the apartment next door!

"boom--!"

The sound was deafening, accompanied by the clattering of shattering glass; it was on par with a gas pipe explosion in terms of sheer noise.

Leslie froze for a moment, and in the instant she realized what was happening, she hurriedly threw down the file and ran out the door.

The first thing she saw when she stepped outside was a young man lying in front of the apartment next door, covered in small, bleeding wounds and covered in dust, looking extremely disheveled.

He was still coughing and looked quite badly injured, yet he still managed to force a smile when he saw Leslie.

"Hi, doctor..." the young man said weakly, "Don't worry, I'm fine now—it was just a small problem with my experiment..."

Leslie: "..."

You call this a "minor" problem in the experiment? ...Are you developing a mercury bomb to cause such a commotion?!

"Ahem, um..." the young man was still speaking, weakly extending his hand, "Could you please do me a favor, doctor? I think I need some treatment..."