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Superpower Detective Academy

Author: Polar Day

Shang Yun jolted awake from the nightmare again.

A woman's agonized scream. Blood pooling across the ground. A wall collapses with a thunderous crash. The nightmare from his childhood clung to him like a shadow.

He already forgot the details of that accident, yet since then, he has developed hyperthymesia.

Every day, every moment, every second. Everything was stored in his mind, and he could no longer forget anything.

It felt like a curse. And also like a superpower.

"School starts today."

Shang Yun quickly tidied himself up, grabbed his bag, and ran toward the nation's most prestigious institution: the Superpowered Detective Academy.

This academy claimed to train only top-tier detectives, so its admission criteria were extremely strict. Not only academic performance, but also various on-the-spot evaluations were considered, and only those with exceptional abilities could gain direct admission.

"Welcome to the Superpowered Detective Academy. Future elite detectives, please note, this is not an ivory tower. It is full of lies and traps. Every action you take will be recorded in your annual assessment. If a class ranks last in the annual assessment in the future, then regrettably, the entire class will be expelled. You will all be transferred to the ordinary college next door..."

The moment those words fell, half the hall lifted their heads in shock.

Expelled?

The entire class... together?

Wasn't that terribly unfair? In any class, there were both good and bad students. Would the hardworking students really be dragged down by the weaker ones?

The students were already imagining all kinds of terrible outcomes.

The dean continued: "You may be shocked, but this is the academy's rule. A detective without restraint can easily become the culprit in the next unsolved case. So the most important lesson in being a detective is learning how to be a decent person. This lesson will run through your entire time here. Don't be too pessimistic. Based on past experience, you'll all become good partners!"

Standing in line, Shang Yun quietly observed his classmates. Whether he would become a top detective was closely tied to these people. He felt uncertain, but decided to abide by the rules.

As he toured the campus, he came upon portraits of legendary alumni. One of them was Mr. Zhong. He stood before the portrait and gazed up with great respect at this renowned figure.

There were other detective portraits on campus as well, like Mr. Dawn, who continued to get entangled in cases even after retirement, and Mr. Swamp, who specialized in resolving family disputes...

]

"This is an Easter egg!" Saen exclaimed in delight. "Previous detectives are appearing! I love it when characters from earlier series intersect with current protagonists!"

Other readers chimed in from the comments:

"If this were just a tribute, they wouldn't dare describe it in such detail, so this isn't fanfiction. The probability of Polar Day being Yongye just jumped significantly!"

But some readers subtly objected:

"Or maybe, it's just someone who knows Yongye well..."

If it was a friend of Yongye's, someone capable of imitating his style to this precise degree, who could it be?

A thought flashed through Saen's mind but quickly sank as it immersed back into the story.

[

Three days later, something unexpected happened. The homeroom teacher entered the classroom with a stern expression.

"Your behavior this time is extremely serious. In this week's assessment, I'll be giving everyone an F."

The kindhearted class monitor stepped forward. "Teacher, what happened?"

The teacher placed a stack of homework on the podium. "The assignments you submitted these past few days, every single one is blank."

"That's impossible," the monitor blurted out. "I personally checked everyone's homework before submitting it. I went through each notebook, and they were all full of writing..." But looking at the blank pages on the podium, he fell silent.

"I definitely did my homework," said a student with long, wavy hair, brushing it back. "So the only explanation is... someone erased it just to make us fail the assessment? That's quite the effort for a villain. But we used ink. Can that even be done?"

"Use your brain," muttered a gloomy student as she lifted her head. "If this person happened to have a chemistry lab, they could develop a reagent that fades ink without damaging the paper. If anyone shares this particular hobby, I'd be very interested..." She smiled in a way that wasn't exactly friendly.

"As detectives, the first step is to gather evidence!" The curly-haired student snapped open a folding fan, and their long waves swayed in a graceful arc. "Teacher, let us visit the scene!"

Shang Yun couldn't help but admire his classmates' energy as he followed the group to the office.

The office was a standard setup: six teachers, all homeroom instructors. The windows were always open, green plants sat on the desks, and there was a surveillance camera.

The footage showed the class monitor carrying a white bag filled with the notebooks of all 36 students. The monitor took the notebooks out of the bag and placed them on the teacher's desk before leaving. After that, no one, except for the homeroom teacher, entered the office.

The curly-haired student immediately spoke up: "I've looked into the abilities in our class. One of us is a computer genius. Other classes may have similar talents... but that's fine. Because today, you have me. I am the legendary incoming student with hyperthymesia!"

They winked at everyone. The class responded with subtle surprise as they clearly heard about this prodigy.

Shang Yun remained silent in the crowd.

"According to my memory, one student submitted their work before the ink dried. If the culprit handled the notebooks, there would definitely be stains on their hands. So let's check each other first."

"I think mine used fresh ink..."

"My hands are clean."

Whispers spread across the room.

In the end, only four people refused to have their hands checked, including Shang Yun.

When the curly-haired student's gaze swept his way, Shang Yun said calmly:

"It wasn't me. But I already know who the real culprit is. They made the homework disappear right under our noses."

He walked across the classroom and picked up the class monitor's white bag.

"If you put blank notebooks with names already written on them into the bag beforehand, and then pretended they were our homework when you placed them in the office, you could fool the camera. Am I right, class monitor?"

He shook the bag. Sure enough, something heavy rattled inside.

The monitor's face turned ugly.

"So that's how it was!" The curly-haired student applauded quite generously. "That explains everything! Impressive!"

"The essence of being a detective is reasoning," Shang Yun said with a hint of helplessness. "Don't overuse your special ability so casually. You claimed to have seen evidence, but what you were actually doing was trying to bait out the real culprit. Unfortunately, you went in the wrong direction... Miss Deception Specialist."

"You're quite impressive, Shang," the student with curly hair complimented with hands clasped behind their skirt. "I wonder if you can see through my next trick?"

Shang Yun stared at them for a long moment, then asked in sudden alarm:

"You... you're actually a boy, are you?!"

]

Saen stared at that last line in stunned silence, then dazedly wrote a comment:

"This time Yongye is... well... how do I put it. Completely unrestrained."

Replies quickly followed.

"In terms of plot, he introduced superpowers and built an entire academy setting. There's even a collective expulsion system. It's interesting, but doesn't feel like Yongye."

"And the close-friendship dynamic is so smooth and natural! The characters are vivid and full of tension. For the first time while reading Yongye, I actually feel like shipping them. Before, when I read The Case Files of Mr. Zhong, I was always like, 'Wait, those two are a pairing?' Yongye must have secretly devoured a few romance-focused authors."

"How far is Yongye willing to go for a disguise... I'm moved."

"I don't buy it. What if he kidnapped a few romance writers and hid a rescue code in the story? If readers can't figure it out, he'll eliminate them?"

"Didn't we establish that Yongye only commits virtual crimes? No wait! Yongye only commits crimes in the virtual world... Yongye's crimes are all virtual. Hmm, that doesn't quite sound right either?"

As Saen read through the replies, another idea in its mind grew clearer and clearer, and a bold guess took shape.

Suddenly, its friend Buti exclaimed, "I can't believe Yongye's writing is this good!"

Saen immediately turned around. "What did you read?"

"Superpower Detective Academy," Buti said while waving its optical computer. "Everyone says Polar Day is Yongye. I always assumed detective fiction had a high barrier, and you have to read through long chains of reasoning. When I passed by your seat and saw those dense blocks of text, honestly, it intimidated me. But I didn't expect detective stories to be this much fun!"

Buti praised sincerely, "Seeing it from a student's perspective makes it so relatable. And the superpowered academy setting..." It blushed slightly. "It's kind of cool. And the class competition system... Just thinking about it is exciting! A genre that's supposed to be hard to read, yet it felt so easy and enjoyable, that's remarkable!"

A supposedly difficult genre, written in a light and engaging style...

And one particular Blue Planet novelist was known for being able to write anything in a light and engaging style.

Could it be...?

"Oh, right! I'll recommend something I like too," Buti said and sent a link to Dragon Witch's Secret Words. "I think you'll like it."

The moment Saen saw the author's name, its previous suspicions vanished entirely.

Wild Tyrannosaurus Rex! This style sounds exactly like Xunming!

—

Tidal Peace.

Xi Yujin was brainstorming new pen names for his remaining aliases.

This time, he didn't want to have one alias imitate another. One trick was enough. He simply wanted to write something new. Ideally, though, it would still have some connection to each alias's existing work.

Hum...

A low vibration suddenly filled Tidal Peace, and the viewing window blazed with a brilliant flash. The visual enhancement function activated immediately, filtering out the glare and revealing the spectacle outside.

Near Tide of Calm was a rare supermassive planet.

It was neither too far nor too close to its star. But what was extraordinary was the massive bowl-shaped structure of ice pressing tightly against it. The reflected light from that icy "bowl" was the cause of the blinding flash. Zooming in on the images, a small, high-density sphere could be seen resting at the very center of the bowl.

A giant planet, an icy bowl, and a tiny sphere. Together, they formed a breathtaking cosmic spectacle.

Gano consulted the knowledge database in his armor. "The Zerg have records of this battle."

Xi Yujin suddenly remembered that they were traveling along the edge of an ancient battlefield ruin.

"In that battle, the Intelligent Machines attempted to push the supermassive planet toward the Zerg's position. They used the planet's magnetic field to block stellar radiation, which allowed them to infiltrate the Zerg base from the opposite direction. Observing that the planet's trajectory had become elliptical, Queen Surya decided to launch a smaller celestial body in response. The smaller body struck the supermassive planet, stripping away much of its mass. All the water on the planet flew out into space, where it froze, and subsequently revealed the Intelligent Machines' infiltration trajectory."

"You really do go through planets when you fight," Xi Yujin commented objectively.

The battlefield was silent now, with only this ice-bowl planet still reflecting light in every direction.

Looking at it, Xi Yujin felt a sudden rush of inspiration.

"I can write some Blue Planet-style mechanical sci-fi."

Among Earth's famous stories built around the Three Laws of Robotics*, the most iconic character was surely the robopsychologist Susan.

A robopsychologist... roughly equivalent to the real-world psychologist Carl Jung... which mapped neatly onto the Blue Planet novelist Jung.

"So the next layered alias is you, Jung. Your new name will be..."

Eden.

A different possibility for the evolution of intelligent machinery.