James spent three days planning before he made his first move.
Those three days were spent going to his job at Eddie's Garage, which turned out to be exactly what it sounded like.
He changed oil, rotated tires, and listened to Eddie, a heavyset man with perpetual grease stains, complain about the crime rate.
James nodded along and kept his head down. The job paid minimum wage and barely covered rent. It wasn't enough. Not even close.
But during those three days, James also made a discovery that changed everything.
He was smart. Not regular smart. Really smart.
It started when he was filling out an invoice at the garage and realized he'd calculated the tax and total in his head faster than
Eddie could punch it into the calculator.
Then he noticed he could remember every conversation he'd heard perfectly. Every detail. Every word. When he got home that night, he tested himself. He read a page from a book he'd found in the apartment and then closed his eyes and recited it back word for word.
Perfect recall.
Enhanced processing speed.
His mind worked like a computer now, connecting patterns and processing information faster than it ever had before.
James didn't know if this was part of transmigrating or if this body had always been like this, but it didn't matter.
What mattered was that he had an edge.
And he was going to use it.
On day four, James called in sick to work and took the bus to Atlantic City.
The trip took two hours. James spent the entire ride reviewing everything he could remember about sports from the early nineties.
Baseball.
Basketball.
Football.
Boxing.
His enhanced memory pulled up games he'd barely paid attention to when he'd been a casual fan.
Now he could recall scores, key players, upset victories. He had a database in his head, and that database was worth a fortune.
Atlantic City was exactly what he expected. Casinos lined the boardwalk, flashing lights and promises of easy money.
James walked past them all. Casinos were monitored too closely. One big win and they'd flag him. Multiple big wins and they'd ban him. He needed something different.
He found it in a sports bar three blocks from the main strip.
The place was called Maloney's. It was the kind of establishment where the floor was sticky and everyone knew everyone.
James walked in at two in the afternoon when the lunch crowd had cleared out. There were maybe a dozen people scattered around, watching a game on the televisions mounted above the bar.
James took a seat at the bar and ordered a beer he had no intention of drinking. The bartender was an older man with a scar across his left cheek.
He set the beer down and went back to watching the game.
"You take bets here?" James asked casually.
The bartender didn't look at him. "Depends who's asking."
"Someone with cash."
That got the bartender's attention. He glanced at James, taking in his cheap clothes and worn-out shoes.
"How much cash?"
"Enough." James pulled out forty dollars and set it on the bar. "I want to put this on the Knicks game tonight."
The bartender raised an eyebrow. "Knicks are playing the Bulls. Jordan's Bulls. You want to bet on the Knicks?"
"I want to bet on the Knicks covering the spread," James said. He'd already checked.
The Bulls were favored by eight points. But James remembered this game. He'd watched highlights of it years ago. The Knicks would lose, but only by five. They'd cover the spread.
The bartender shrugged. "Your funeral." He took the forty dollars and wrote something on a notepad.
"Come back after the game."
James did. The Knicks lost by five points. James collected his winnings, eighty-five dollars after the house took their cut, and left.
He repeated the process over the next two weeks. Not at Maloney's, that would be too obvious. He spread his bets across six different establishments in Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and Newark.
He kept the bets small enough to avoid attention. Twenty here, fifty there. He focused on games where he knew the outcomes with certainty. Upsets. Specific scores. Overtime finishes.
His enhanced memory was perfect for this. He could recall not just who won, but by how much. He could remember key plays, injuries that affected games, weather conditions that changed outcomes.
Every bet was calculated. Every win was planned.
By the end of two weeks, James had turned sixty-three dollars into eight thousand.
By the end of four weeks, he had thirty-two thousand.
By week six, he had fifty-three thousand dollars in cash hidden in his apartment.
He stopped then.
Any more and he'd start attracting attention. Bookies would start asking questions. People would start remembering his face. James had what he needed. Now came the hard part.
He quit his job at Eddie's Garage. Eddie was annoyed but not surprised. "Yeah, figured you wouldn't stick around," Eddie said, not looking up from the engine he was working on. "Good luck, kid."
James thanked him and left. He never went back.
The next day, James joined a gym on the north side of Gotham. It wasn't a nice gym. The equipment was old and the weights were mismatched.
But it was cheap, it was open twenty-four hours, and nobody asked questions. James started going every morning at five a.m. when it was empty.
He'd never been athletic before. In his old life, he'd been the guy who took the elevator to go up one floor.
But now he had a goal and goals required work. He started with basic cardio. Running on the treadmill until his lungs burned.
Then weights. His body was weak but his mind was sharp. He researched proper form online at the library. He studied muscle groups and recovery periods.
He approached exercise like it was a science problem, because to his enhanced brain, it was.
The progress was slow. Painfully slow. After two weeks, he could run three miles without stopping.
After four weeks, he could do fifty push-ups. It wasn't impressive. But it was progress.
While he trained his body, James also trained his mind.
He spent hours at the Gotham Public Library, studying everything he could about the city. He read old newspaper archives.
He learned the gang territories. He memorized which neighborhoods were controlled by which crime families.
He studied the patterns of police patrols. He built a mental map of Gotham's underworld.
And then he started researching martial arts schools.