Chapter 32

32. "It is a secret."

When I saw that the train was about to leave the station, I had no choice but to hurry off after them.

There was still half an hour before class, so I headed straight for the teaching building and claimed a good seat.

When I resumed reading, Professor Moriarty's words still echoed in my mind. My unease kept spreading as time passed.

A few students gradually took their seats around me, but the elderly professor teaching the class had yet to arrive. Light from outside the classroom streamed through the tall windows, casting a mottled pattern across the floor.

Whether I could continue living in such a peaceful, tranquil environment for the next four years depended on Professor Moriarty's wishes.

By now, I no longer believed Professor Moriarty would trust me, but at the very least, I hoped he wouldn't consider me a threat. The moment Moriarty said, "Just what I'd expect from you," came to mind, and I was already wondering how I would end up dead by the roadside without ever knowing why when he met me over the Christmas holidays.

I returned to the world of the comic.

After Lucian and the others offered to provide an alibi, Moriarty explained why he had given false testimony for the professor who was a witness. The whole process went as expected. The comic devoted plenty of attention to the suspect professor's terrified, stunned expression, and afterward, he had no choice but to confess everything in the interrogation room. The confrontation went on for more than ten pages, while I appeared in only a few brief panels.

I saw that the progress bar was nearly at the end and couldn't help worrying. Was the comic really not going to show any more of Moriarty's reaction to me?

I believed cooperation was the best way to build trust.

In the process, he could keep his thoughts to himself, and I could keep my intentions to myself. We didn't need to exchange motives. As long as we placed trust in each other during our cooperation and I let Moriarty see up close that I was a kind, warmhearted person, that would be enough.

Most importantly, when I said I thought he was a good person, the comic had clearly shown Professor Moriarty reacting relatively positively.

Even if he felt nothing at all inside, when I said that, I had also hoped to influence Professor Moriarty's behavior through "social adaptation" or "pressure from social expectations."

Judging by the mathematics salon and the friendly, approachable social persona he usually presented, he was highly sensitive to adapting to particular social roles and expectations, and willing to behave as others expected in order to avoid conflict and protect his image in their eyes.

I had deliberately said those words as a psychological suggestion.

Even if Professor Moriarty didn't care at all what I thought of him, when I called him a good person, he would still be willing to keep pretending to be one until we had completely fallen out.

That was my safety net for this operation: conveying my positive, glowing opinion of Professor Moriarty through "cooperation."

I had done everything I could.

If Professor Moriarty still thought I meant him harm, I really would get angry and go straight to Sherlock.

I wasn't someone to be pushed around, either.

No sooner had I thought of Sherlock than he appeared in the comic, standing behind the interrogation room's one-way window. With his hands in his pockets, Sherlock studied the black-haired young man on the other side with a cold gaze.

When he was waiting at Scotland Yard earlier, I had

realized he might have been there a long time. Otherwise, given his personality, he wouldn't have been willing to run back and forth doing something as pointless as picking someone up. I just hadn't expected him to come inside and see me too.

[Sherlock's involved too. This case must be almost over, right?]

[It's Professor Moriarty's home turf, after all, so it's only natural that Sherlock gets less screen time. The previous two chapters already showed how differently they operate. I think they'll clash soon.]

[I just remembered, doesn't Lanny live at 221B? I wonder what Sherlock would think if he knew his roommate was working with Professor Moriarty, the rumored Lord of Crime.]

"Lanny's doing something stupid again," Sherlock said in a rather cutting tone.

[That startled me. I just asked, and Sherlock gave almost the same answer in the very next scene.]

[What a coincidence??

Sherlock watched for quite a while before leaving through another door to the interrogation room.

As he left, Sherlock happened to meet the eyes of the blond professor passing nearby.

The light in the hallway was bright, clearly illuminating the first flashes of sharpness in their expressions. They stood there like two chess players locked in a battle of wits, or two blades silently facing each other. Although neither Sherlock's nor Moriarty's expression wavered in the slightest, an intellectual contest had already begun between them without a sound.

Before long, Professor Moriarty was the first to greet the stern-faced Sherlock with a smile.

He was about to leave when Sherlock's voice suddenly rang out. "What's your relationship with Lanny?"

Professor Moriarty paused briefly, but kept the same mild smile on his face. "Why do you ask, sir?"

"A mathematics professor at the University of London." Sherlock looked Moriarty up and down, his gaze lingering on his clothing: not a flashy tie or exaggerated attire, but an elegant, simple suit. Moriarty's style was clean and restrained, reflecting his focus and reserve as a scholar.

"You were invited here by the detective because of your connection to the case Lanny is being investigated for, so it's easy to see that you must know Lanny, the suspect."

Sherlock's tone was sharp, full of an unwavering faith in logic. His gaze shifted to the case files in Detective Lestrade's hand, then returned to Moriarty.

Sherlock paid close attention to Moriarty's fingers. The long, slender fingers did not look like those of a scholar who had worked at a desk for years. However, he noticed tiny traces of ink on Moriarty's fingertips, suggesting that he might frequently leaf through documents but did not write.

"Can you answer my question now?" Sherlock's voice was calm and deep. He fixed his gaze on Moriarty's eyes, attempting to glean more information from their depths.

As soon as he finished speaking, Moriarty looked Sherlock in the eye and smiled slightly, a sharp glint flashing in his eyes. "As you can see, Lanny is indeed a student in my class."

He raised his gaze toward Sherlock. Suddenly, his smile faded, replaced by a thoughtful expression. "You are not a police officer, yet you can freely enter and leave the interrogation room. You must be a consulting detective for Scotland Yard." Moriarty's voice was composed and faintly mocking. His gaze swept casually over Detective Lestrade before settling on Sherlock again. "The moment you met me, you demanded to know my relationship with Lanny. That shows that you

have always gone your own way and acted independently, without regard for what others think."

He paused briefly, then continued, "Besides, as a consulting detective, instead of asking about clues to the case, you questioned me about my relationship with Lanny. I would like to ask what your relationship with him is."

[They're fighting! They're fighting! It's a shura field (shocked]

[Lanny: one of Sherlock's roommates, one of Professor Moriarty's students. He's stacked all the buffs.]

[Given what I know about these two high-IQ geniuses—they're completely insulated from romance—I can picture them fighting over a toy right now. What they're fighting over isn't the toy, but the upper hand; what they're showing off is their intelligence and determination! I understand why they made Lanny a high-IQ character. If he weren't a little smart, those two would tear him to pieces.]

[Wow, I just want to see those two fight.]

The moment the two met, it was as though time had frozen. An invisible pressure filled the entire room, making the atmosphere unusually tense. Detective Lestrade looked back and forth between them, completely at a loss as to what was happening. Their expressions seemed normal, yet something unfathomable churned beneath them like shifting winds and clouds.

Sherlock's voice was calm and resolute, making it clear that he would not be taken in like the Scotland Yard detective. "Lanny wouldn't go out of his way to meddle in other people's affairs. His involvement in this must have something to do with you, doesn't it?"

At Sherlock's words, Moriarty felt a ripple of emotion. Though phrased as a question, the remark actually revealed Sherlock's suspicion that they might be cooperating. He understood that if Lestrade grasped its meaning, it would imply some kind of secret association between him and Lanny. However, he also understood that Lanny could not reveal it of his own accord, and Sherlock could produce no conclusive evidence.

"Lanny and I do indeed have a relationship that cannot be disclosed for the time being." Moriarty's voice remained composed.

The words were like an unfathomable fog, shrouding the relationship between Lanny and Moriarty and making it impossible to glimpse the truth.

[The little professor is provoking Sherlock! He can't tell anyone they're cooperating anyway, but he still had to make it sound so ambiguous.]

"It simply has nothing to do with this case. It is a secret," Professor Moriarty said with a faint smile.

Sherlock raised an eyebrow, his gaze sharp as a knife, as though he wanted to tear the smiling mask off Moriarty's face but had yet to find an opening.

Detective Lestrade, standing beside them, sensed the tension and watched their exchange, somewhat at a loss. His gaze moved back and forth between their faces, but he couldn't understand what they were talking about. To put an end to the awkward atmosphere, he tried to interrupt by bringing up the investigation they still had to conduct. "Sherlock, we still have an investigation to carry out..."

Thinking he could put an end to their conversation directly, he said, "We wanted to ask Professor Moriarty whether he'd seen Lanny anywhere besides in class today. There's still a lot to do here. Shall we go first...?"

As soon as he said that, a provocative smile appeared at the corner of Sherlock's mouth. "So you're the professor whose class Lanny wanted to skip."

The remark was like a deftly delivered punch. Moriarty's smile vanished completely, leaving his face composed.

Sherlock's expression showed no sign of relaxing either. His gaze seemed capable of piercing Moriarty's diplo

macy and reaching the true intentions hidden behind it.

[It looks so tense, but they hahaha]

[Hahahahaha, the reason they're fighting is so boring.]

[What's so satisfying about winning this argument?]

[What skipped class?]

[Lanny is so me. I want to skip class too!!]

[My painful memories of college attendance checks are attacking my brain.]

[There was no mention of Lanny skipping class earlier, was there?]

[When the police said he didn't have an alibi, didn't they mention that he usually wouldn't go to class today? And today's class is Professor Moriarty's.]

[He was so adamant earlier about trusting Professor Moriarty, yet he himself skips, cuts, and ditches his class! Wow, Lanny's mouth is full of lies!]

[I think that even if Moriarty saw Lucian and the others come to provide an alibi and provisionally believed that Lanny was simply charming without realizing it, and that everyone came to help as soon as they heard he was in trouble, now it turns out Lanny himself doesn't even like attending Professor Moriarty's class, yet still says he trusts him.]

[Oh my god, now that you put it that way, I think Lanny has an ulterior motive too.]

[You all make so much sense. Do you think Lanny noticed something strange about Professor Moriarty, and that's why he deliberately brought his computer over to see the little professor?]

[If that's true, Lanny really is walking on a knife's edge, completely fearless of death! He only discovered in the previous chapter that Moriarty was working with a group, and in this one he's already testing whether Professor Moriarty is connected to the campus ambush case. I salute his courage.]

[He's so reckless, something's bound to happen to him sooner or later.]

I thought Lucian was the one who had ruined things for me. Was my skipping class actually the root cause?

The moral of this story was: don't skip class, or we'd never know how much we'd have to pay for it.

Naturally, the case was resolved smoothly in the end. Professor Moriarty had prepared for so long, after all. Once the detectives investigated and they submitted the evidence they had prepared beforehand, everything simply fell into place.

Moriarty extended the invitation to me just as I had seen before, but there were no more thoughts for me to glimpse.

I felt even more tired today than I had yesterday.

Yesterday, I had just stayed in the library reading. The strongest feelings I'd had were worry that the police would see through my act and that Sherlock would realize Professor Moriarty and I were cooperating. I'd even been indignant that I'd prepared so well, and that if Moriarty didn't give me even a little trust, I'd get angry. In the end, I'd ruined things for myself by skipping class.

I really was an idiot.

I didn't want to read anymore. I was beyond saving. I might as well wait for death...

I was about to close the comic forum when I saw the final scene.

Standing tall, Sherlock silently watched Professor Moriarty's retreating figure, turning one word over in his mind. "Is"? Not "was"?

—[Chapter two end]

[It is a secret. Wait, does Sherlock mean he knows the other party is aware that Sherlock knows he and Lanny cooperated, but the other party still insists on using "is" instead of "was"?]

[What? I don't get it.]

[If he used "was," it would mean the little professor subconsciously considers his cooperation with Lanny a thing of the past, but that's not actually the case.]

[Wow, that's Sherlock for you, spotting the crucial detail so precisely! I didn't even pay attention to why that line alone used the present continuous.]

[When he answered instinctively without using the past tense, does that mean the little professor is actually still willing to cooperate with Lanny?]

[Hahaha, this is so interesting! I wonder what kind of wonderful interactions Sherlock and the little professor will have with Lanny as their intermediary?!]

[I just want to see the two of them fight already!]

[Looks like the little professor really was moved by Lanny!]

[The little professor must think it's useful to keep Lanny around, right? Since he used the present continuous.]

[I'm going to reread it. See you next time!!]

"!!!!"

I jolted.

What? Things had taken a turn for the better!

I felt like I could happily go to class again!