American comic book: Absolute Spider-Man

The top floor of the Osborne Building is always filled with a disinfectant-like silence.

He sat alone behind that oak desk, with the city of New York spread out like a giant chessboard outside the window.

He doesn't have any particular hobbies, but he likes looking down from high places.

Some things are ingrained in your bones and can't be changed.

At that time, Amberson Osborne also liked high places.

However, his fall was from his office on the 38th floor.

He will always remember the first year after his father went bankrupt—empty whiskey bottles began to appear on the parquet floors.

His mother's sleeves always covered her wrists, and Amberson always clenched his fists before speaking, as if his family owed him everything.

Old Osborne blamed the company's bankruptcy on deception around the world, and then converted all the "deception" into belts, which he then lashed at his wife and children again and again.

That same year, as a young boy, he killed the family's pet dog.

There was no anger, no struggle, no sorrow.

He simply felt that the fewer things that needed to be taken care of, the fewer weaknesses there were.

He still remembers the sudden paleness on his father's face when he heard about it.

At that moment, he understood: fear was the only thing more real than wealth.

So when he later stood in the laboratory of Imperial State University, looking at the nascent business empire that Professor Mendel Ström had built for him, he felt no gratitude.

He was just calculating.

Partners, equity, formulas—everything has its own shelf life.

Strom borrowed company funds to cover his own losses, and he seized the opportunity to personally take him to court, cleanly and efficiently.

Cooperation is always just a temporary symbiosis; when he is strong enough, he should replace the host's body.

From then on, the chemical company was completely owned by Osborn, and the New York business community quickly learned one thing: don't stand against him.

He conquered the world in this way, and he destroyed everything he loved most in the same way.

His wife, Emily, was the only one who could make him briefly let down his guard.

In those years, he even learned to laugh, a skill he had almost forgotten since childhood.

But God was never kind to him—Emily died less than a year after Harry was born.

So he sealed himself back into the ice, applying that hard and cold logic to his son exactly as it was.

Harry is the most innocent victim in the whole story.

After Emily left, he devoted all his energy to the company and paid no attention to Harry's growth.

His gaze occasionally fell on his son, but it was only as a form of scrutiny: this child was not smart enough, not tough enough, and not like him enough.

So he belittled him with contempt or berated him in a fit of rage, just as Amberson had done to him years before.

Harry desperately sought his father's approval, like a drowning man reaching for something that didn't exist, but all he saw was weakness.

Sometimes he would stand alone at the door of Harry's room, looking at his son's sleeping face, and thinking of Emily's features, a dull ache would rise in his chest.

But this pain only made him angrier—because it was the emotion of the weak, and the weak did not deserve Osborne's surname.

Ironically, the person he believed truly possessed Osborn's soul happened to have the surname Parker.

His eyes changed the first time he saw Peter Parker at Harry's birthday party.

The boy's eyes burned with a fire when he answered science questions, a fire he knew all too well—the fire that had once shone in Amberson's own eyes before his bankruptcy.

Peter Parker is intelligent, resilient, and talented—the perfect successor he longed for.

When Peter and Harry were working on a hands-on project together in a laboratory in Osborne, Harry stood there dumbfounded while Peter buried himself in his work.

He looked at Peter and felt as if he had finally had a real son.

So he planned to keep the child with Harry, so that at least Harry, this good-for-nothing, would have a brother to fight alongside him when facing the board's hyenas or other competitors in the future.

He loved Harry in a twisted, dagger-like way; he also loved Peter in a more twisted, more greedy way.

What he inherited from his father was not wealth, but a complete logic of violence.

The ruthless methods he practiced in the business world were nothing more than transforming the shadows of his childhood basement into contract terms and hostile takeovers.

He wrapped Emily's death in a cold medal in his heart, a constant reminder not to be weak again.

His feelings for the two young men—his indifference and harshness toward Harry, his favoritism and exploitation toward Peter—are like a mirror, reflecting the only truth he learned from Amberson: love is also a power, and power must be firmly held in one's hands.

The lights of Manhattan outside the window are just coming on.

He withdrew his gaze, picked up the pen, and calmly signed an acquisition agreement that would soon destroy a competitor's business.

The silence on the top floor receded again, like a giant hand slowly tightening. He never felt anything was amiss.

The acquisition agreement was a sharp weapon, helping him eliminate most of his rivals on the road ahead.

Now, facing certain enemies, he needs a blade sharper than the acquisition agreement, a blade that can physically shatter certain troubles.

Three days ago, the board of directors held a closed-door vote.

He watched as the faces he had personally promoted raised their hands one by one.

The gesture of raising the hands was very light, as if afraid of disturbing the air, but each palm fell with a strange decisiveness.

They wanted to remove him from Osborne's core decision-making power.

The reasons are compelling: his decision-making style is becoming increasingly "unstable," his long-term strategy has been described as "high-risk paranoia," and his deputy, Warren, has been patiently reorganizing the shareholding structure behind the scenes for six months, like a spider weaving its web.

He did not argue.

He walked out of the conference room with a smile, even holding the door open for the last person to leave.

But after he returned to his top-floor office, he stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window for two whole hours, until the setting sun stretched his shadow into a thin needle that pierced the entire room.

He thought about many things during those two hours.

He remembered the day Amberson Osborne was kicked out of his company—when his father came home, he didn't smash things or yell; he just sat silently in the kitchen, looking at his hands with an expression he had never seen before.

That look in your eyes is called surrender.

The belt started to fall off the next day.

He also thought of Harry, who had made some progress and dared to drag him to the bank for a loan so they could short Stark's stock together.

Therefore, he must protect everything that was originally prepared for Harry.

He also thought of Peter Parker.

He saw in Peter the person he was meant to be—the one who still believed in something before Amberson's belt fell.

That "he" is long dead.

But Peter's eyes reminded him of the warmth of a corpse.

He remembered the secretly formed experimental team and what the team's chief leader had told him.

While the serum is highly effective, the modification process is extremely painful, and those who cannot endure it will die on the spot.

The injection was very risky, and now the board of directors has given him a reason.

But that's not the only reason.

His lips moved the moment the serum was injected into his vein.

He wasn't talking about Osborn, revenge, or power.

He said, "Don't make me weak anymore."

This was said to Amberson.

It was said to the boy kneeling on the kitchen floor wiping up the whiskey his father had vomited.

It was said to the husband who swore at Emily's grave that he would never need anyone again.

It was said to the father who stood outside Harry's door but couldn't open it.

It was addressed to the monster who saw his own remains in Peter, yet still couldn't stop exploiting him.

The serum started to burn.

His spine felt as if it had been pierced by a red-hot iron rod, and every nerve was screaming and laughing wildly at the same time.

But he didn't make a sound, because pain was the language he knew best.

From childhood, he had learned not to cry when the belt fell.

Not crying is a right.

And the serum is amplifying this power a thousandfold, injecting it into every single one of his cells.

When the pain finally subsided, he stood up from the ground.

There was a green in his eyes that I had never seen before.

That's not the color of madness, that's the color of liberation.

Amberson Osborne spent twenty years compressing his son into a tightly closed fist, and the Green Goblin serum was the sound of that fist finally being thrown out.

He walked to the mirror, and the person in the mirror smiled at him. He smiled back at the person in the mirror. For the first time in his life, he made peace with his own reflection.

The phone rang. It was Warren calling, cautiously inquiring about last night's "unpleasant meeting" and testing whether he would peacefully hand over power.

He answered the phone, his voice unusually calm: "Come to my office."

He hung up the phone and turned to look out the window.

The New York skyline was awakening, and the sunlight was gradually swallowing the shadows. He gently moved his fingers and felt a surge of energy waiting at his fingertips, like an electric current.

There are two ways to use a belt, that was the first lesson Amberson taught him. And now, he was finally ready with his belt.

It's not meant to be endured.

It's for falling.

His name was Norman Osborn, and now he has another name—the Green Goblin.