Chapter 1

1. "I do mind, thank you!"

According to statistics from the aviation data company OAG, the probability of being in a plane crash was one-third the probability of hitting the jackpot on a □□ machine.

But I hadn't hit the jackpot. Instead, I'd been in a plane crash.

Right up until I died, I panicked.

Looking back on my own performance, I figured it was because I had no experience.

When I woke up again, I was on a street surrounded by foreigners. Since I'd been on a plane to London to study abroad when the crash happened, I wasn't surprised in the least. If anything, the disaster felt more like a bizarre dream.

I was lying by the roadside like a homeless person. The daylight shining down on me was too bright for me to open my eyes. I blinked several times, and once I'd barely adjusted to the light, a passerby, presumably seeing that I was young and handsome yet reduced to living on the streets, put a five-pound note in front of me and walked away after showing me a little sympathy.

Before I even had a chance to look at it, my neighbor beside me, who had a newspaper tucked under his arm, took it away. I stared at him the whole time, but he twisted his neck every which way rather than look back at me. Given that I was his neighbor, it was hardly strange that I'd been mistaken for a homeless person too.

Normally, I would have argued my case and fought to get my money back. But right now, I felt hungover, with my body and brain each doing their own thing and refusing to obey me. I lay on the ground recovering for four or five seconds. Seeing that I seemed unable to resist, my next-door "neighbor" grew bold and started searching my pockets.

Even my angry glare couldn't stop his brazen behavior.

Then I saw him pull my phone out of my pocket. The moment I thought about the pile of browsing history and hidden apps on it that no one should see, I found strength from who knew where. I slapped a hand against the pavement, sprang up, and fought to snatch my phone back.

The homeless man was clearly a coward.

One shout from me sent him running in fright, abandoning even the brown cardboard he used for begging.

I ignored him and hurriedly started deleting my old history and apps. Thinking about how I'd been so panicked during the crash that I hadn't even deleted them, I figured that if someone had picked up my phone and opened it afterward, a dead man could have crawled out of his coffin from sheer shame.

Everything on my phone was just as it had been when I was alive.

My email still contained my university offer, student visa, and electronic passport.

There were still a few thousand yuan left in my Zfb account, but the account seemed to be frozen, and I couldn't do anything with it.

My phone's wallet held the bank card an agent had helped me arrange, but it only had five hundred pounds in it.

Just as I was wondering if I was going to starve to death in this world, I suddenly discovered that a Sherlock comic forum had automatically downloaded onto my phone at some point.

Sherlock was an outstanding BBC mystery series among the many adaptations of Holmes. When the acclaimed show, which set Holmes in the twenty-first century, came out, the Sherlock and Watson CP dominated Western fandom circles for years. The actor who played Holmes was also nicknamed "Curly Holmes" by Chinese fans because of his curly hair.

I usually watched more American shows.

Of all the British shows, Sherlock was the only one I'd seen.

I quite liked Sherlock and Watson in it, and the modern setting made the story interesting too.

I didn't know whether to call it a premonition from some unseen force or a strange twist of fate, but as I was clea

ning up my phone data and putting my own "final affairs" in order, I opened the comic forum.

The black-and-white comic that greeted me had a distinctly Japanese style. Most of the characters looked cute, and the passersby all had adorable little dot eyes, giving it a somewhat fairy-tale feel. Tower Bridge, a London landmark, appeared in the background, establishing that the scene was in London.

The comic also showed modern streets, essentially telling readers that it was the twenty-first century, in keeping with the setting of Sherlock.

Before I could process it, a flood of bullet comments began appearing, as if the comic had finished buffering.

[Ohhh, they made a chibi Sherlock comic? It's way too cute!]

[Feels like even the cases are going to be super cute??]

[Wow, the promo for this comic is so cute. When does serialization start?! Following, following, following!]

It was a motion comic, and it soon scrolled down automatically to a left-handed young man in a casual shirt, holding a phone in his left hand. The young man looked like an ordinary passerby and was still playing on his phone when a shop beside him suddenly exploded. He was caught in the blast and died in less than two seconds. Chibi Sherlock appeared by the roadside, stepped over the body of the young man who'd been blown up and was blocking his path, and quickly got to work solving the case.

[Sherlock didn't fail to notice he stepped on someone, did he?]

[In my humble opinion, he wouldn't care even if he did notice.]

[?? Sherlock in his blue scarf is drawn so cute.]

I shouldn't have been scared, but this passerby was dressed exactly like me, though the street looked a little different from where I was standing.

The automatic scrolling was too slow, so I simply scrolled to the end myself. The case seemed to have been solved without a hitch, although that part hadn't been drawn yet. But I saw my own charred corpse lying in the morgue. Sherlock picked up a riding crop and whipped it for quite a while, then calmly handed it over to the female medical examiner, Molly, beside him.

"After thirty minutes, help me record the unnatural changes to the human body caused by a corpse being beaten again after death."

Molly, the medical examiner, wore her hair in a braid over one shoulder. Accustomed to this, she agreed.

[He doesn't pass up any chance to research the dead. That's so Sherlock.]

[If this is the start of the official serialization, does that mean we're going straight into Sherlock and Watson's classic first meeting?!]

I couldn't take in the rest of the bullet comments anymore.

In less than twenty-four hours, I'd just come to terms with having died once in a plane crash.

Now I'd received a comic forum that foretold I'd be blown to death as well, and that Sherlock would whip my corpse afterward.

I wondered if I should just move closer to the fire so there'd be no intact corpse left. Dying sooner might even let me return to my own world.

But just as I was closing the comic forum, the final panels caught my eye.

One showed Watson heading toward the lab to look for a roommate.

The other showed Sherlock sitting in the lab, examining a phone.

And that phone was unmistakably mine. I'd put all those stickers on it myself. Sherlock's face was originally expressionless, but I could practically see him wearing a deeply meaningful smile.

Help!

Even after I'd deleted all my phone data, could Sherlock still see through me?

Was this Sherlock?!

If I was blown to bits and he picked up my phone, my innocence still wouldn't be safe.

My dignity and sense of shame erupted at once. No, no, no!

I had to survive. I had to protect my phone.

I also had to protect my own body after death.

Since I still didn't know whether this would happen or when, I decided to use the street scene in the preview comic as a marker. I had to avoid this area. The comic's details were quite thorough, and I could make out the street scene across from the shop that exploded almost at a glance. I even checked it carefully a couple more times.

Just as I looked for the third time, a chill called a sense of danger shot from the soles of my feet to my forehead like a nimble lizard.

Wasn't my current situation exactly the same as the scene in the comic?

Beads of cold sweat broke out on my back almost instantly.

My mind had already played out the scene of me leaping away from where I stood countless times, but my feet remained rooted to the spot. Then a faint sound came through the air. I couldn't tell what had shattered, but I knew I had to run!

In that desperate moment, my feet moved, and I jumped one step away from where I'd been standing. The next second, an explosion boomed behind me. I was caught in the blast and fell forward to the ground, unable to control myself.

Screams rang out around me, and shards of glass and great sheets of ash from the building fell behind me.

It was loud, it hurt, and the dust made me choke.

At least I'd survived.

I'd only just realized that when a pair of black leather shoes and the sharply pressed legs of a suit appeared in front of me. If I looked farther up, I should see a blue scarf around the man's neck.

According to the comic, he would walk right over me.

Should I struggle a little?

After all, I'd just managed to dodge the explosion!

I figured that with all my hesitation, he would have stepped on me and flattened me already. But the pain on my back never came. I raised my head and saw Sherlock's dark blue eyes looking down, meeting mine.

It was him in person!

But not the chibi version.

"..."

"How did you know there was going to be an explosion?"

"..."

If I could see Sherlock's mind palace right now, I felt sure it would be quite a sight.

But Sherlock's question left me speechless, and I still wanted to pretend I didn't know what he was talking about.

Sherlock seemed to know I was going to try to talk my way out of it. He promptly opened his phone and showed me a video. In it, I'd been playing on my phone when I suddenly stopped and jumped sideways. At the same moment, the explosion erupted behind me, and I lay on the ground, having miraculously avoided any vital injuries.

"Would you care to explain?"

Lying down through the conversation was hurting my neck.

I got up from the ground, looked at Sherlock, then at his phone, and struggled to put my words together. "Do you know about metaphysics? The kind of thing that can predict the future?" Going by the tropes I knew, I should be the only one who could see my comic forum.

"Then did metaphysics tell you that acting like that would make you a suspect?"

"..."

Anyone with eyes could tell my movements were unnatural: I'd been able to guess the time and place of the explosion and react instantly. Even if I wasn't the one who'd planted the bomb, I was still a suspect connected to it.

Passing the IELTS didn't mean my English vocabulary was strong enough. Any elementary schooler passing by could argue me into the ground right now. There was no way I could explain myself clearly. Was this charge really going to stick to me?

The more I thought about it, the more certain I felt that I'd be treated as a suspect and spend the night at the police station. I suppressed my panic and said to Sherlock, "If you were Holmes, you wouldn't make such a stupid deduction."

The moment I said that, I saw something shift in Sherlock's eyes as he gave me an unobtrusive once-over.

"I don't believe my reputation as a detective could have crossed oceans to reach an Asian who's only just arrived."

It was as straightforward a statement as any.

How did he know I'd just arrived in London?

Did that mean Sherlock believed in the existence of metaphysics just a tiny bit after all?

"If you don't mind, let me add one more thing. If knowing my name is also a demonstration of your metaphysics, then I'm very interested in the structure of your brain."

"..."

An image flashed through my mind: Sherlock cutting open my brain, which hadn't been opened since I was born, and making slices of it.

I did mind, thank you!!