Different Anomalies, Similar Guesses

Before Zheng Qing turned eighteen, there was one thing he greatly appreciated about the world he had lived in—let's call it the Scientific World. That was its insistence on logic and on seeking truth from facts.

For example, white or bluish-green flames drifting up and down over a graveyard late at night could be identified, based on their properties and composition, as nothing more than the spontaneous combustion of low-ignition-point phosphine in normal temperatures.

Or when mountaineers encountered an avalanche in mountains six thousand meters above sea level, geologists would tell them it happened because the cohesion within the snowpack had been locked in a struggle with gravity, then disturbed by external forces—rolling rocks, vibrations from footsteps, wind, and so on. Once the external pressure exceeded the cohesion, an avalanche resulted.

Or if a murder took place in a locked room at some private club, the police could carefully inspect the scene, scrutinize the recordings, rack their brains, and ultimately infer an ingenious yet entirely reasonable method of murder from the water stains left at the scene, the locked windows and doors, and the composed waiter.

But that whole process did not work so well in the Wizarding World, the world Zheng Qing now inhabited.

Because this was a world with magic.

In the Magic World, the white or bluish-green flames drifting above a graveyard late at night might be ghosts wearing colored contacts wandering about; an avalanche on a mountaintop might be caused by giants dueling over the position of chief, or by a yeti throwing a tantrum after its long hair got snagged and torn off by branches. And there were even more possibilities for locked-room murders—curses, potions, witchcraft, black magic, nightmares, and so on. Even Zheng Qing, who had spent less than half a year in the