Slacker Assassin's Multiverse Daily

Heiji Hattori's Suspicions

Although Jiang Hang knew that Heiji Hattori had a childhood sweetheart too, being thought about so much by another guy still made him feel a little uncomfortable.

He was just about to make up an excuse to go back to his room and rest when Kanatani Hiroyuki suddenly handed him a thick stack of papers that looked like an answer sheet, smiling broadly. "Mr. Jiang, please take this first."

"What's this?"

Jiang Hang glanced at it and saw that it was filled with questions about Sherlock Holmes.

Such as what Sherlock Holmes was best at, or how one of Holmes's cases had been solved.

Jiang Hang flipped to the last page and discovered that the paper contained a full thousand questions about Sherlock Holmes.

"This is a regular event at our Sherlock Holmes fan gatherings," Kanatani Hiroyuki explained to Jiang Hang. "Since Mr. Jiang was willing to attend our gathering, you must be a Sherlock Holmes fan as well, right? You can try answering these questions."

He briefly explained the process of the gathering to Jiang Hang.

Once everyone had arrived that evening, he would hand out the questionnaires to everyone present. Those whose scores exceeded a certain threshold would advance to the final deduction Q&A session.

"Of course, Mr. Jiang, you're a special guest I personally invited, so you can join the final deduction Q&A directly. As long as you can solve the case I designed on the spot, you'll receive my long-cherished first edition of A Study in Scarlet. It's an exceptionally rare collectible with more than a hundred years of history, and very few copies still exist!"

A Study in Scarlet was the first work in the Sherlock Holmes series. The first edition in Kanatani Hiroyuki's possession was among the earliest books in the world to tell Sherlock Holmes's stories.

Even though Conan had no idea how many times he had read A Study in Scarlet, his eyes still gleamed when he heard that the prize was something with such great commemorative value.

He immediately asked Kanatani Hiroyuki, "If I answer these Sherlock Holmes questions, can I take part in tomorrow night's deduction Q&A?"

Kanatani Hiroyuki looked at Conan beside him. He naturally knew that the person registered for this gathering was not Jiang Hang, but this child who looked only seven or eight years old. Still, he nodded with a smile. "Of course you can. But little boy, these questions are very difficult. Some even involve lines from the original English version. You've only just learned to read at your age, haven't you?"

"I learned to read early, so I finished all the Sherlock Holmes stories a long time ago. I've learned a little English too, so it shouldn't be a problem!" Conan was brimming with confidence. He really had grown up reading Sherlock Holmes, and the original English versions were naturally no challenge for him.

Kanatani Hiroyuki added, "Of course, the case I designed will be very complicated. I've held so many gatherings over the past three years, but no one has managed to take that copy of A Study in Scarlet away from me yet!"

Naturally, Conan was not about to admit defeat so easily. He immediately took the thick questionnaire from Jiang Hang, seemingly preparing to pull an all-nighter to finish all one thousand difficult questions.

Heiji Hattori noticed Conan's actions at this point.

"Come to think of it, Conan should only be in first grade this year, right? His family let him read Sherlock Holmes this early?" he asked Jiang Hang curiously.

"Well, his name is Conan. Just hearing that name tells you how much his family likes Sherlock Holmes," Jiang Hang explained to Heiji Hattori. It looked like Heiji Hattori had begun to suspect something about Conan.

At the same time, Jiang Hang silently complained that Conan always exposed his true nature the moment Sherlock Holmes was involved.

Seeing Heiji Hattori stroking his chin as though pondering something, Jiang Hang said nothing more. The guy was not a bad person anyway, so Conan could deal with his own headache.

With that thought, he followed Kanatani Hiroyuki to his room.

The moment he entered, Jiang Hang spotted a surveillance camera mounted on the wall.

Seeing that Jiang Hang had noticed it, Kanatani Hiroyuki hurriedly explained.

"For this test, you aren't allowed to look at books or use your phones to search for information. Since I was worried someone might cheat, I deliberately installed cameras in every room. But don't worry, Mr. Jiang, they're all fake cameras. I only use them to fool the others. You can rest normally in here. Of course, please don't tell anyone else about this."

Jiang Hang used Eagle-Eyed Detective to confirm it and found that the man was indeed telling the truth.

"Don't worry. I won't tell anyone."

After seeing Kanatani Hiroyuki out of the room, Jiang Hang looked back at Conan and found that he had already sat down at the desk and begun writing furiously.

From ten in the morning until seven or eight at night, by the time the main group attending the gathering arrived, Conan had somehow finished almost all one thousand questions!

"I've completed nine hundred and fifty questions now. The remaining ones are all rather obscure, so I'll need to think for a bit before I remember them."

"But that uncle's questions are really interesting. If an ordinary person had merely read Sherlock Holmes, then without being able to look up information, they could probably answer only a few dozen of the easy giveaway questions at most," Conan said to Jiang Hang as they left the room to meet the other attendees.

"Even if they had phones to search for information, one day might not be enough for them to find all the answers to these thousand questions. Only readers who truly understand Sherlock Holmes could possibly finish this test in a single day!"

Looking at how animated he was, no one would have guessed that he had just shut himself in a room and spent an entire day answering questions.

But Conan was so carried away that he completely failed to notice another high school detective standing at the doorway.

"Oh, Conan, you've already answered more than nine hundred questions? At your age, you're probably the first-grade elementary schooler in the world who understands Sherlock Holmes best, huh?"

The instant Heiji Hattori's voice reached him, Conan's body stiffened. After a long while, he finally turned to Heiji Hattori with an embarrassed look on his face. "Hattori, you were here too?"

"Ahaha, because Big Brother Jiang Hang is with me, whenever I ran into a question I didn't know, I asked Big Brother Jiang Hang... Thanks to Big Brother Jiang Hang, I probably wouldn't have been able to answer many questions otherwise. Right, Big Brother Jiang Hang?" Conan answered Heiji Hattori's question with a dry laugh.

When there was no trouble, Conan simply called him Jiang Hang. But the moment he ran into a problem, he remembered to add "Big Brother" after Jiang Hang's name.

Heiji Hattori's gaze lingered on Conan, and the look in his eyes made Conan's scalp prickle.

After a long while, he finally looked toward Jiang Hang beside Conan. From his expression, it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

"Everyone's downstairs. Mr. Kanatani asked me to bring you down to meet them."

Sherlock Holmes's Fanatical Fans

When Jiang Hang and the others reached the first floor, Kanatani Hiroyuki, the inn's owner, had already distributed the thousand Sherlock Holmes questions to everyone.

Furthermore, to prevent anyone from cheating while answering the questions, he had collected everyone's phones as well as any Sherlock Holmes books they had brought with them.

According to him, every attendee at his gatherings was a Sherlock Holmes fan he had carefully selected. If they could not even answer these questions, then he could only ask them to leave his inn.

As Jiang Hang's group of three came down the stairs, everyone's attention focused on them.

Sensing everyone's gazes, Kanatani Hiroyuki introduced Jiang Hang to them.

"Everyone, this gathering is different from our previous ones. This gentleman is Mr. Jiang Hang, the Eagle-Eyed Detective who has recently risen to fame after cracking several major cases in succession." Kanatani Hiroyuki wore a broad smile as he spoke.

"People online have already started calling him 'the Sherlock Holmes of the new era.' It is our honor to have invited Mr. Jiang Hang to this gathering!"

At once, the way everyone looked at Jiang Hang changed. Whispers also rose from nearby, as though they were discussing the cases Jiang Hang had solved recently.

Even Conan looked at Jiang Hang strangely. "The Sherlock Holmes of the Heisei era" had clearly been his goal, yet now it seemed Jiang Hang was going to snatch it away from him.

Jiang Hang himself felt that a title like Sherlock Holmes did not suit him. He knew his own limits well enough. Conan could have that title instead.

He waved a hand at Kanatani Hiroyuki. "Sherlock Holmes is a world-renowned master detective. Right now, I'm merely a novice who has just started out."

Jiang Hang truly did not care much about fame, and he was also being modest. Yet the moment he said that, an ill-timed voice sounded from beside him.

"To be fair, Mr. Jiang Hang does have a good mind, but I have already read through the details of those cases."

"Even if it were me, I could have easily solved them. It seems Mr. Jiang Hang has some self-awareness after all."

"Sherlock Holmes is not someone just anybody can be compared to. Lately, I've heard about quite a few people like that—the so-called Sleeping Kogoro, and that Shinichi Kudo who seems to have recently disappeared. People actually compare them to Sherlock Holmes? In my opinion, that is utterly ridiculous!"

"In my view, they probably could not even measure up to Watson at Sherlock Holmes's side."

The speaker was a young man who looked to be only in his early twenties. Judging from his clothes, he was probably still a university student.

From his introduction, Jiang Hang learned that he was Tojū Kenjin, a fourth-year chemistry student from Kyoto University and the president of Kyoto University's Mystery Research Association.

The woman beside him was his girlfriend, whom he had brought along, and she was also a member of the mystery association: Ōki Ayako.

As top students at Kyoto University, they seemed extremely confident in their deductive abilities.

Listening to him, Jiang Hang glanced at Conan, whose expression had changed slightly.

Conan aspired to become the Sherlock Holmes of the modern age, yet now someone was saying he was not even as good as Watson. He probably wanted desperately to step forward and protest.

Noticing Heiji Hattori standing beside Conan, apparently lost in thought, Jiang Hang reached out and pressed a hand onto Conan's head, making him calm down.

This man was clearly the sort of rabid dog that every circle inevitably had.

Jiang Hang had already observed him with Eagle Eye.

A chemistry student—yet from the placement of the calluses on his hands, Jiang Hang could tell that he had practiced boxing. Perhaps he had also trained in fencing for a time. The marks on his neck further showed that he habitually practiced the violin.

Jiang Hang had even spotted a thick copy of the Complete Six Codes in Tojū Kenjin's suitcase, suggesting that while studying chemistry, he might also have been minoring in subjects related to law.

These were all hobbies and areas of knowledge that Sherlock Holmes had displayed in the stories.

Combined with the way he had just endlessly glorified Sherlock Holmes, it showed that he was an obsessive Sherlock Holmes fan. He was trying every possible way to draw closer to the Sherlock Holmes in his heart, while harboring hostility toward every detective who tried to approach Sherlock Holmes.

By comparison, although Conan also liked Sherlock Holmes, aside from the knowledge necessary for solving cases, he still rationally maintained his own personal interests. He had not blindly tried to imitate Sherlock Holmes, making him a rather levelheaded Sherlock Holmes fan.

"Can't you tell? That guy is just a rabid Sherlock Holmes fan. There's no point in arguing with someone like that," he whispered to Conan.

After hearing Jiang Hang's words, Conan calmed down considerably. However, he also made up his mind to thoroughly defeat Tojū Kenjin during the deduction quiz the following night.

Kanatani Hiroyuki had already explained the itinerary for the next two days. He then had the inn staff carefully bring out that first edition of A Study in Scarlet and display it for everyone who had come to see it.

It could be said that, aside from Jiang Hang and Heiji Hattori, all the other participants showed tremendous enthusiasm.

At that moment, however, Heiji Hattori walked over to Jiang Hang. "I heard that Mr. Kanatani's questions every year are difficult, and no one has ever managed to solve them. Are you interested, Jiang Hang?"

It seemed he wanted to challenge Jiang Hang during Kanatani Hiroyuki's deduction quiz.

Jiang Hang looked around and saw that everyone's attention was focused on that copy of A Study in Scarlet. Then, in a voice only Heiji Hattori could hear, he said, "My museum recently acquired a first edition of A Study in Scarlet signed by Arthur Conan Doyle. It will be put on public display after some time, so I'm not that interested in this one."

Seeing the astonished expression appear on Heiji Hattori's face, Jiang Hang continued, "Come to think of it, I also obtained a Queen Manuscript. It isn't exceptionally valuable, but it records the brothers' ideas and thought processes when they created the Nationality Series."

"If you can be the first to solve Mr. Kanatani's question tomorrow, I can let you have a look at that manuscript."

As a devoted Queen fan, Heiji Hattori's eyes immediately widened, and even his breathing became rapid.

Another Formidable Addition to the Tool Army

For Jiang Hang, distracting high school detectives like Conan or Heiji Hattori was an extremely simple matter.

Whether it was the signed copy of A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle or the Queen Manuscript, both were items the system had gifted him after the art museum's level increased.

Jiang Hang did not know whether it was a coincidence or whether the system had arranged it deliberately. In any case, among that batch of artworks and cultural relics, there were quite a few items related to detectives. The first edition of A Study in Scarlet and the Queen Manuscript were simply the most valuable among them.

Beika Art Museum was currently planning a small mystery exhibition. It would improve the museum's reputation while also drawing Tokyo's mystery novel enthusiasts to visit.

Seeing that Heiji Hattori had now focused all his attention on the deduction quiz the following night, Jiang Hang was quite satisfied with his attitude.

He relied on Eagle Eye whenever he solved cases. His own deductive ability certainly was not as strong as Conan's or Heiji Hattori's.

And Kanatani Hiroyuki's question the next day would obviously not be the kind where Jiang Hang could see the answer with a single glance, so naturally he would not go embarrass himself.

He could leave deduction quizzes and the like to Conan and Heiji Hattori.

As for whether Conan would stand out too much during the deduction quiz and arouse Heiji Hattori's suspicions, that was none of his concern.

Compared with the deduction quiz the following evening, what Jiang Hang cared about more now was whether, among this group of Sherlock Holmes fans attending the gathering, anyone looked like they might become a murderer.

If Conan alone had been here, he would have thought there was an eighty percent chance that a murder would occur at this gathering. After seeing that Heiji Hattori had come as well, that probability had completely gone through the roof.

He no longer needed to worry about whether a murder would happen here. He only needed to consider who would kill whom.

After drawing Heiji Hattori's attention away, he turned his gaze toward the other attendees.

There were not actually many people at each gathering. Including Jiang Hang and the other two, only nine people had come this time. With Kanatani Hiroyuki, the organizer, there were exactly ten.

According to Kanatani Hiroyuki, eight to twelve people were more than enough for a gathering. Any more than that, and it would only become chaotic.

This was also a good thing for Jiang Hang. If dozens of people had arrived at once, it would have been far too difficult to identify a possible killer or victim among them.

Kanatani Hiroyuki was the organizer of the event and currently the person Jiang Hang considered most suspicious. This was Kanatani Hiroyuki's territory; if he wanted to pull any tricks, it would have been all too easy.

That fanatical Sherlock Holmes fan, Tojū Kenjin, was also quite likely to be involved. People like him often loved to obsess over trivial matters. Perhaps he would quarrel with someone over an issue that seemed insignificant to others.

Aside from them, Jiang Hang greeted the other participants and exchanged a few words with them, gaining a preliminary understanding of each of them.

These Sherlock Holmes fans actually had their own forum. Long before coming here, they had already known one another online for quite some time.

However, whether they had ever had any conflicts on the forum was not something Jiang Hang could ask about.

He could only judge how likely they were to commit a crime through his conversations with them.

One of the attendees was a high school PE teacher. He had a sturdy build, and if he wanted to kill someone, the victim probably would not have had much room to resist.

There was also an uncle with a somewhat hot temper. He was a station attendant and, among those attending this gathering, the one with the best relationship with Kanatani Hiroyuki.

According to him, Aileen Adler's Mockery had been published through a collaboration between himself and Kanatani Hiroyuki.

Perhaps he and Kanatani Hiroyuki had privately clashed over publishing matters, leading one of them to want to kill the other. That possibility existed as well.

Of the remaining two, one was a librarian, while the other was a somewhat mysterious fortune-teller. Both were women, and neither appeared to have any motive for murder, so Jiang Hang temporarily placed them at the bottom of the list of likely killers.

After everyone took their questionnaires back to their rooms, Kanatani Hiroyuki also greeted Jiang Hang and the others before leaving the hall.

Only Jiang Hang and the other two remained in the hall.

Seeing that Heiji Hattori seemed to be heading back to his room as well, Jiang Hang called him over and motioned for him to stay and chat a while longer.

"Before tomorrow's deduction quiz begins, are you interested in playing a little game first?"

Heiji Hattori immediately stopped and looked at Jiang Hang with clear interest.