Chapter 18

18. "Today was another beautiful day"

The comic unfolded mainly from Sherlock's perspective. Just as the preview had shown, Sherlock appeared at the scene.

Behind him, flames raged and rolled skyward.

Below, residents screamed and fled in all directions.

Sherlock glanced toward the Workhouse, then looked impassively at the young man who had just escaped death and asked him a pointed question.

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

At the same time, Sherlock's mind palace floated in the upper half of the comic. Unlike in the Sherlock TV series, it didn't contain a flood of keywords. Instead, this mind palace was more like a visual tool, replaying in reverse the entire sequence of how the young man had escaped the explosion in the nick of time.

His gaze shifted, his feet sprang into motion, and one hand tightened around the object he held. These were the actions of someone on edge, fleeing and defending himself in an emergency. Yet there had been no warning of the explosion, and the blast traveled far faster than sound. Even if he had heard something, he couldn't have reacted in time.

Within his mind palace, Sherlock simulated hundreds of possible ways to escape such a sudden explosion. The only factors that could explain the escape were "luck," "coincidence," and "prior knowledge."

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

By the time Sherlock asked him the question, he had already deduced that the young man was a student visiting Britain for the first time and that he enjoyed playing Go. Such a simple background made it all the harder to connect him to foreknowledge of the explosion.

I saw Sherlock point out in the comic that I had played Go. Even though I knew it wasn't especially easy to hide, my heart still skipped a beat, and I felt a little uncomfortable.

[I was wondering why this was different from the preview. Turns out this part was Sherlock's simulation.]

[Why did Sherlock's simulation even include him stepping on the guy's foot as if he didn't know he was there? That's hilarious. He really listed every possibility! He's taking it so seriously that it's even funnier??]

[Guys, the more I think about it, the scarier it gets. This guy just glanced at Louis and the others through the window and decided they were going to set off explosives?! That's ridiculous!]

[Could it have been an accident?]

[He could just be a random passerby.]

Watching the comments, I suddenly perked up.

Sure enough, Vladimir Lenin had not deceived me.

"The truth is often in the hands of the few"!

[If he really is a passerby, then he's got rotten luck?? Moriarty and his people have their eyes on him.]

At the moment someone understood me, I was both moved and sad.

I felt that I had never been so wronged in my life.

Then the next comment made me set those feelings toward them aside.

[Guys, I'm back from later in the story! If he's a passerby, you can use my head as a ball.]

[Just looking at his face, I can tell he's not some passerby, okay?!]

In the comic, the slender young man with a refined, handsome face did not reply directly to Sherlock.

Sherlock asked, "Would you care to explain?"

The young man showed little emotion as he replied coolly with a question of his own. "Do you know about metaphysics?"

[I'm stunned.]

[Me too.]

[Huh?]

[Do all big shots refuse to speak like normal people?]

[Is he trying to say he's an heir to socialist thought?]

I was stunned too.

The comic was machine-translated!

What I had actually said was "metaphysics," meaning mysticism, but it had been translated as "metaphysics" in the philosophical sense.

When asked such a baffling question, Sherlock showed little emotion either. "Then would metaphysics tell you that you're going to be treated as a suspect now?"

[Sherlock stays the same no matter what comes at him.]

"If you were Holmes, you wouldn't make such a foolish deduction."

At those words, Sherlock's eyebrows rose almost imperceptibly.

It was a clear sign that he was interested.

This young detective Holmes had only just begun his career and started to establish the course of his life. The gentlemanly manners instilled by his upbringing were still ingrained in him, while his abilities and experience fed his arrogance. Before he had fully become the greatest detective, he admitted that he, too, could be impatient and make mistakes.

But he certainly wasn't referring to this moment.

"If saying my name is your demonstration of metaphysics, then I'm very interested in the structure of your brain."

[Wow! Is Sherlock acknowledging what he said?]

[Think about it: there's barely any information about this guy on the surface, yet he shows such incredible powers of observation and logical deduction. Doesn't that prove that the information he presents to the outside world is exactly what he wants other people to believe?!]

[I never expected Sherlock to meet someone who was such an equal match for him before Irene Adler!]

[This person wasn't in the original at all. Could this be a Holmes world with a gender-swapped Irene Adler?]

[I'm still stuck on what he means by metaphysics. It's so hard to understand...]

Please stop wondering about that. It was just a problem caused by machine translation.

All I could say was that people's joys and sorrows were not the same.

I propped up my heavy head and continued reading the comic, only to be pleasantly surprised to find that I still had very little screen time.

The story mainly revolved around the Workhouse explosion.

The reason Sherlock happened to notice the Workhouse was that he already knew Rhodes had encountered danger in London before then. Half a year ago, Sherlock hadn't thought the incident was particularly worthy of attention. Six months later, however, he noticed that the backpacker still hadn't left and had instead stayed there.

That completed my understanding of the whole case.

The children at Audley Court were contacts of Wiggins, a member of Sherlock's Baker Street Irregulars. Not long after the Workhouse Explosion Case, Sherlock paid a separate visit to Rhodes's home to sound him out about whether he had anything to do with the bombing.

It was only from the comic that I discovered Rhodes really wasn't a professional vagrant. Otherwise, on the day of the explosion, when the community's homeless people all went to collect free food and warm clothing, Rhodes wouldn't have been unaware of it. He would have gone to the Workhouse to collect supplies as usual.

As for me, the police did initially suspect that I had prior knowledge of the bombing, but after I cleared myself, they found that I had no motive, no time to commit the crime, and no means of doing so, so I was released without charge immediately. Evident

ly, that suspicious point was not something I could explain away to Sherlock, nor could I convince the readers and viewers with their wild imaginations.

After going through the whole story, I was surprised to find that Watson's impression of me was much better than I had imagined.

I had always thought it was because Watson was kind. He felt close to a fellow alumnus younger than himself, and on top of that, he felt guilty about setting a trap for me with Sherlock, so he had a very good impression of me.

I hadn't expected his trust in me to have grown during our chase with the three criminals.

At the time, my head had been fuzzy from low blood sugar, and I couldn't remember the details at all. But I did remember that we had put some distance between ourselves and the three strong, burly criminals: one of us was physically useless, while the other was a "half-lame" army doctor who had only just returned from the front and was affected by psychosomatic symptoms.

Now, reading the comic, I finally recalled the whole sequence.

We had arranged to meet Sherlock in the Circular Square, and the residential buildings around it also formed a ring. As we fled from the alley toward the crowd, we had another disadvantage: we weren't familiar with the surrounding area.

So I suggested running perpendicular to the straight line we had originally been following.

In other words, we shouldn't rush straight into the crowd, because that would make it easy for them to catch us.

It was very easy to understand, just like an elementary school math problem.

When two parties travel in the same direction at different speeds, it is only a matter of time before they meet. But if we maintain a distance from the other party and run sideways, perpendicular to our original direction, we can deliberately lengthen the distance they have to chase us.

As Aristotle said, when the one being pursued has a head start over the pursuer, limit theory tells us that, under ideal conditions, a slower object will never be caught by a faster one.

That is the familiar "Zeno's Tortoise and Achilles."

Naturally, in reality, we couldn't expect this method of escape to produce a mathematically infinite sequence of time.

Still, there was no doubt that deliberately increasing the distance also increased the time available to escape.

The two sides in a chase were also playing a game against each other.

They wouldn't necessarily keep moving in the same direction; they could also end up moving in opposite directions.

At that point, if the pursuer and the pursued were moving in exactly opposite directions rather than the same one, the approach was to use the geometry of perpendicular symmetry and run toward the intersection of the transverse axis of symmetry between them and the spatial limit.

That was because, in this situation, the interaction between pursuer and pursued produced mirrored movements.

When fleeing, running toward the intersection as much as possible was also relatively effective.

Of course, both parties' movements changed dynamically, the axis of symmetry constantly shifted, and the intersection moved too, but the principle was the same.

You could basically discuss all of this out loud.

The mathematical result was fixed, so there was no need to worry that the result would change if the other side heard it. That made it convenient, unlike a psychological contest based on an imbalance of information.

When I told Mr. Watson about it, he didn't react much, so I naturally assumed there was nothing special about the escape strategy. Only when I read the comic did I discover that Watson had been quite surprised by what I said and had glanced at me several extra times because we had successfully opened up the distance.

Even so, I still thought our success in putting distance between us was thanks to Watson

being a trained soldier. He had overcome his psychosomatic symptoms in time and practically flown while running with me.

Probably because of Watson's reaction in the comic, the readers thought I was impressive.

But that wasn't really true.

The important thing was that Watson was impressive.

I figured that, from now on, I should praise other people's strengths promptly, so I wouldn't be mistaken for someone impressive.

All I could do now was try to make up for it by praising Watson in the comments, but most of the comments below drowned mine out.

[Did anyone else automatically tune out everything the big shot said?]

[My eyes actually read it all, but my brain wasn't working at all.]

[Isn't this the kind of time when you just say "awesome" and leave it at that?!]

[Sherlock's team of three versus Moriarty's trio sounds like it'll be exciting!]

[So why couldn't they just run straight? Why did they have to make a 90-degree turn?]

[My understanding is that it's the Pythagorean theorem. If they make a turn, the distance the bad guys have to run is the diagonal, which is longer than the original straight-line distance. But I don't know about the tortoise Lanny mentioned.]

[That's the Achilles paradox. It originated with the big-shot mathematicians Parmenides and Zeno mocking each other.]

[6]

[Type 1 if you don't understand it at all, like me.]

[Can't wait for Lanny and Moriarty to fight!]

[Anyway, this guy is here to keep Moriarty in check. I get it!]

"..."

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!

That's not it!

Because of the comments, my first read through the comic took a long time.

On my first pass, I focused on the main plot and everyone's reactions to me, checking whether I had made any outrageously wrong moves. After reading it, I found that, aside from Sherlock and Moriarty, everyone's attitude toward me was pretty good.

Maybe it was because the story's main character was Sherlock.

Neither of my two encounters with Mycroft appeared in the comic, nor did the events following my fall into the water, or what Sherlock had actually called me at the police station.

Maybe they would appear in flashbacks later?

I wasn't sure.

Overall, after reading the comic, I felt that things weren't too bad.

Perhaps because Watson thought I was smart, I couldn't help feeling a little pleased with myself, and my mood improved somewhat.

I was a strange person.

When people praised me to my face, I always felt they were just being polite and rarely took it to heart. Yet I really did like being praised, even when the thing itself was clearly insignificant.

By the time I finished reading the comic a second time, the date on my phone had just changed.

It was already the next day.

I felt a little thirsty, so I got up to pour myself some water in the kitchenette.

There were kitchenettes on both the first and second floors of the apartment, but everyone gathered to eat on the second floor, where Watson and Sherlock lived.

After washing up that night, I had forgotten my cup on the second floor.

As I tiptoed up the stairs to look for it, I saw that the light was still on in the second-floor sitting room. Wondering who was still awake, I was about to push the door open.

Then an online translator's crisp pronunciation of "He Xue" came from inside.

It wasn't loud, but it was clear in the middle of the night.

Before repeating it, the person learning the name took a sip of water, then confidently read it aloud.

"Drink blood."

The full, rounded pronunciation made me completely forget Sherlock's formerly elegant, deep, and charming English accent.

My hand stopped in midair, and I instantly lost the courage to open the door.

This would be the most unforgettable night of my time in London.

Now I finally understood that taking an English name was a way to spare each other.

The next morning, as I was making breakfast, I happened to meet Sherlock's gaze. Before he could speak, I said, "Mr. Holmes, I've given it careful thought, and while I'm in London, it would be better if I used my English name, 'Lanny.'"

Sherlock stood there like anything but a still image and remained silent for a long while before saying calmly, "Was it necessary to tell me that?" Afterward, he sat down and picked up the newspaper beside him with composure, like a big blue-eyed cat with pride, reserve, and elegance ingrained in him.

Then he added one more thing.

"Lanny, a cup of black coffee for me."