

Also, it allowed the remains of the Venom symbiote to fuse with Brock's white blood cells, causing him to become Anti-Venom during a conflict with Mac Gargan, the current Venom. A touch from him caused his cancerous cells to completely disappear. Mister Negative eventually came across Eddie Brock and gave him a job at his soup kitchen. Mister Negative later recruited Hammerhead and offered to put his brain in a new robotic adamantium skeleton after having been shot point blank in the head by Underworld. It also caused him to become the target of a smear campaign by Dexter Bennett, editor of the DB! and supporter of Randall Crowne. Martin Li later entered into politics when he endorsed Bill Hollister for mayor of New York City, putting him against Randall Crowne, who added him to a list of opponents (many of whom became targets of the villain Menace, who was actually Hollister's daughter, Lily).

Mister Negative first came into conflict with Spider-Man when he made a power play toward taking control of New York's criminal underworld by attempting to wipe out all existing members of the Karnelli and Maggia crime families using a DNA specific bio-weapon called the "Devil's Breath". Project displayed healing powers for people of various illnesses, although the cause of this healing was unknown. Despite being a crime lord, Li was a seemingly kind and generous man. (where May Parker volunteered) while he was also the Chinatown crime boss, Mister Negative. Martin Li was a seemingly good willed philanthropist who ran a volunteer soup kitchen called F.E.A.S.T. In the first steps of his rise, he took control of the White Dragons gang, and seemingly erased the Snakeheads gang from the Fujian to New York (but instead had them absorbed into his organization), and along the way saved Martin's wife, Yana, from them (she was abducted in order to pay for Martin's travel, thought he hadn't survived). It appears that The Hood has never shared this information and the public is unaware of Martin Li or Mister Negative's true origin. Negative told his true origin as a Snakehead to The Hood during a battle in an attempt to explain the need for both good and evil. Using his fortune to bribe the two principal political parties, he was not bothered about his illegal immigrant status. Li was the only survivor and spent the following years building a large fortune and dedicating himself to helping those less fortunate. During a storm, the ship's crew evacuated, leaving the captives alone to make a break for the New York shores. However, his mode of transportation, the Golden Mountain, was a slave ship operated by the Snakehead gang as a way to sell Fujian captives as overseas slaves. In China, he ran a factory, but because of his lack of resources to bribe the Communist Party, he could not develop his business and grew tired of his country. The public knows that the person known as Martin Li was an illegal Chinese immigrant from the Fujian province who attempted to travel to America to be with his wife. In order to survive and accomplish his goals, the former smuggler used Martin Li's identity and built himself a new existence.

The Mister Negative side dedicated himself to becoming Chinatown's Kingpin of Crime, intending to erase the Maggia for what it had done to him. The drug also created two distinct identities within the one man: the kind-hearted Martin Li persona and the villainous Mister Negative persona. Thanks to the drug and their unique biology, all three developed super-powers related to Darkforce and the Lightforce transforming Tyrone and Tandy into Cloak and Dagger and "Li" into Mister Negative. Miraculously three kidnapped victims, Tyrone Johnson, Tandy Bowen, and "Martin Li", survived the experimentation and escaped. Marshall was developing a new synthetic designer drug called " D-Lite" for the Maggia, testing it on runaway teens and illegal immigrants, often with fatal results, in order to create a cash crop for the crime family.

"Martin Li" came to his Snakehead gang in Flushing only to discover them dead, and was himself eventually captured by the Maggia crime family member, Silvermane, who forcibly delivered "Martin Li" to the criminal chemist Simon Marshall. When the ship nearly crashed onto the New York City shores, he stole the identity of one of the deceased Fujian slaves, Martin Li, who was heading to America to join his wife. He smuggled Chinese immigrants into the United States as a crew member of the Golden Mountain. He was pushed into a life of crime by the crime boss known as Silver Fang. The man who would become Mister Negative was a member of the Snakeheads gang in China, which was involved in human trafficking operations.
