Starting from scratch, Batman crushed my dream of getting rich

Chapter 526 Passing by
"Here, have some candy."

When Ma Zhaodi approached Aquino with a kind smile and held up the curry-colored candy, Kimiko and Frankie found it hard to describe their feelings.

Kimiko was initially angry and aggrieved because Ma Zhaodi stopped her from killing Aquino. After all, she had been imprisoned and tortured for so long, and she genuinely felt that these scumbags all deserved to die.

Even though Homelander didn't kill them, she had planned to find an opportunity to kill them all—along with the smugglers who had brought her to New York.

But when she saw Ma Zhaodi smiling, speaking the most terrifying words in the calmest tone, and forcibly stuffing the candy into Aquino's mouth, her anger suddenly subsided.

"Don't look at me like that." Ma Zhaodi noticed the strange look in their eyes and quickly explained, "I was afraid he would bite his tongue and commit suicide, so I pulled out his teeth. I did it for his safety!"

Franky's lips twitched: "Then his food?"

“You can’t feed a prisoner too well, lest he regain his strength and have the possibility of escaping—although I feel bad about it, there’s nothing I can do but give him a little less food.”

"That insect powder bread and Shiwei candy."

"That's a carefully prepared nutritional meal. It doesn't require him to use his teeth to eat, but it still fully meets about half of his body's energy needs. Although it may not taste that great, it's good enough to have prison food at all. He's not here on vacation."

An impeccable answer, a reasonable approach, and sound and reliable logic—if you don't look at Aquino, who is desperately retching on the floor, tormented to the point of near death.

"Oh, right, there's one more thing."

Ma Zhaodi sighed regretfully, put on a pair of gloves, squatted down next to Aquino again, and gently pressed his mouth shut.

"Stop throwing up, stop throwing up! What if you starve to death? You need to be responsible for your health. No matter how bad the prison food is, you can't just throw up like that. Wasting food is really shameful."

Aquino's body bounced on the ground like a dying fish washed ashore by the waves, powerless to resist. He could feel stomach acid and the semi-liquid candy in his mouth surging up wildly, only to be pushed back down.

To put it nicely, the texture is like an undercooked egg yolk; to put it bluntly, it's quite unpleasant.

Three minutes later, the eating process was finally over. Ma Zhaodi released his grip, and Aquino's body collapsed to the ground.

Surprisingly, his body seemed to have been inflated, his muscles regained their vitality, and he recovered from his previous emaciated state to a healthy one, looking nothing like a tortured prisoner.

“You must feel great now,” Ma Zhaodi laughed. “You’ve regained your strength, you’re not hungry anymore, and you’re healthy again—you see, I’ve really gone to great lengths for the prisoners.”

If Aquino hadn't already been somewhat dead, he would have mustered all his strength to jump up and fight Ma Zhaodi to the death—although he still couldn't break free of the ropes binding him, at least he had grown back his teeth and could use them to bite people.

"Alright, let's do the next thing—the candy has one slight side effect: it's too effective."

In the midst of laughter and conversation, Ma Zhaodi snapped his jaw off Aquino's, then reached into the man's mouth and carefully examined his clean, healthy teeth.

"The same principle applies: to prevent you from biting your tongue to commit suicide or biting me to death, we have to pull all your teeth out again."

Upon hearing this, Aquino quickly regained his senses, and his face turned deathly pale.

“Ah, ahhhh—”

He tried to beg for mercy, but his jaw had been dislocated, and he could only make indistinct "ah ah" sounds.

Seemingly sensing his resistance, Ma Zhaodi kindly comforted him, "Don't worry too much. Your body can hold out for a long time now. The next prison meal is in three days. In other words, your next tooth extraction is also in three days."

"We don't need to have a tooth pulled every day, right? Doesn't that mean it's less painful?" "Aaaaaah—!"

With each tooth clanging to the ground, Franky and Kimiko turned their heads away, unable to bear the agonizing scene. All that could be heard were their frantic screams of pain.

"Are you still angry?" Franky asked in a low voice. "Should we punch him a couple of times to vent our anger?"

“I suddenly realized that hatred isn’t everything in life.” Kimiko typed on her phone, completing a major shift in her mindset within half an hour: “I don’t hate him as much now.”

"Ahh-!"

At that moment, the cries of pain from the side abruptly ceased.

Aquino collapsed, fainting from the pain.

"If you can't even bear the pain of getting a tooth pulled, why would you want to be a terrorist?"

Ma Zhaodi sighed and threw the handful of teeth in his hand, along with his blood-stained disposable gloves, into the trash can.

The two men turned around and looked at Aquino's miserable state, and the same thought came to their minds at the same time.

"To be honest, why don't you just kill him?"

At that moment, the figure of the Homelander suddenly streaked across the night sky through the clouds, accompanied by a loud shriek.

He was already traveling at Mach 3, and he needed to get to the Philippines as soon as possible.

call--

With a sweep of his X-ray vision, he could see the dark sea through the clouds. There was no wind or waves tonight, and the moonlight was quite dim. With nothing else to do, he watched the fish in the sea devour each other.

Oh, the ocean.
He thought to himself that after entering Water, he found that many children seemed very interested in the sea, and they talked about the same bedtime fairy tales, but he even flew across the Pacific Ocean for it.

After seeing the ocean with X-ray vision, he realized that those boring stories were just stories, things adults used to fool children.

But this made him think that no one had ever told him these things before.
"John."

He inexplicably thought of Dr. Vogbaum, the man who used to call out his own name when he was a child—though he never showed any emotion towards his experimental subjects.

If he stops thinking here, and thinks any further, he will become like a weak mortal.

Several lights suddenly appeared in front of him. Homelander glanced at them instinctively and saw that it was a flight departing from New York and bound for the Philippines.

As he passed by the passenger plane, he seemed to suddenly remember something, slowed down, and carefully scanned the interior of the flight with his X-ray vision—the passengers were all unfamiliar faces, none of them were the faces on the wanted poster.

He glanced at the luggage compartment again, but there was no one hiding there, just a strange large men's suitcase with a pink wallpaper on it—but that was just a trivial matter.

Without wasting any more time, the man from the motherland transformed into a streak of light and disappeared into the night sky.

(End of this chapter)