Chapter 369: Mercury Chronicles (19)

Bruce felt very disheartened.

At 3:30 in the morning, he suddenly sat up in bed, walked to the refrigerator in the living room of his bedroom suite, grabbed a beer, and sat by the window to watch the sun.

Since Mercury was very close to the Sun, virtually all the room windows here could see the Sun. The glass, treated with a special material, allowed one to gaze directly at the fiery orb, watch various mysterious patterns slowly unfold before the eyes, and feel uplifted.

However, Bruce's mood was far from uplifted. After drinking a bottle of beer by the window, he sat down at his desk and began reading Jenna's paper.

Regarding whether she was right or not, her accuracy wasn't 100%, but it was at least 90%. But if you asked whether her writing was good, it would mostly be considered a mess.

Often, correctness and quality should be related. As long as the information is correct, even if it's not excellent, it shouldn't be bad. But Jenna managed to make her writing both correct and poor.

Specifically, in the analysis of a case, her conclusions and starting points were right. She could analyze why the victim died, the motive of the murderer, and pinpoint who the murderer was. However, the process in between was entirely fabricated.

Normally, reasoning is linear. Even if a case has several threads and requires more evidence and testimonies, it still proceeds step by step.

From the material of a piece of evidence, one would deduce the social class of the person possessing it, then identify a likely group within that class, eliminate other individuals in the group, and finally determine a few suspects. This is an essential process in modern criminal investigation.

However, Jenna's reasoning process was disjointed. When she obtained the material, she immediately identified the suspect. When asked why, she just claimed these individuals were the type to use that piece of evidence.

Was her judgment correct? Of course, it was. She pinpointed the suspects very accurately, often beyond what the evidence itself could suggest.

But looking back at her reasoning process, it simply made no sense.

Since the courses were heavily compressed, Bruce had already moved on to case analysis within a few days.

Bruce deliberately chose an obscure case, a decades-old murder in Gotham, with only sparse information available in the confidential database of the Gotham Police Department. No one else had access to this information, and Jenna couldn't possibly find out who the murderer was online or elsewhere.

The critical evidence in this case was a handkerchief. Theoretically, observing the handkerchief's image could determine that its material was high-end imported silk, and the embroidery was exquisite. Investigations revealed that maintaining this kind of material was very challenging. Even slightly rough hands could snag the silk.

From this, one could deduce that the owner of the handkerchief was either wealthy or noble. If it were stolen by lower-class individuals, the calluses on their hands could damage the handkerchief. However, the handkerchief in the photo appeared very well-maintained, suggesting that its previous owner was almost certainly not a poor person.

Apart from Jenna, everyone else Bruce brought in inferred the handkerchief's owner must be a wealthy lady of the upper class. They began to search for suspects among the women of Gotham's Twelve Families.

But Jenna pinpointed a male hairdresser instead. She determined he was the most likely owner of the handkerchief and the perpetrator the moment she saw an advertisement for his barbershop.

Of course, she was right.

When Bruce asked her to report her reasoning process, she only said that the owner of the handkerchief had to be a male with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a homosexual. She claimed to have seen traits common to homosexuals and psychopaths in the barbershop's poster, which she felt matched the handkerchief owner's characteristics perfectly, thus deducing him as the suspect.

Such an assertion failed to convince anyone, as normal thought processes don't function this way.

Most people seeing a pale pink silk handkerchief embroidered with a dextrose pattern might associate it with women, the wealthy, and those obsessed with hand care.

This isn't a stereotype but a rigorous reasoning combined with the historical context.

The case happened decades ago when forward-thinking was scarce, and the wealthy had conservative mindsets, unlikely to use items unfitting their status or outside their class framework. Men's and women's attire and jewelry could be considered uniform. Almost everyone in that group used the same items.

Thus, the normal procedure would be to start the investigation among women because 99.9% of handkerchief users were female, and in the absence of other evidence, women should be checked first.

But Jenna's thought process jumped, leading her to believe the handkerchief belonged to a man.

Bruce asked for evidence. To align with the Behavioral Analysis Method, Jenna began fabricating stories.

At one point, she claimed that in mythology, grapes were often associated with the blood Jesus left behind. Choosing a grapevine pattern subtly indicated that the person was a male, akin to Jesus.

Then, she said that grapes bearing much fruit represent a potent fertility, a male-oriented fertility worship, making it highly likely that men used this pattern.

She even said, since producing silk resembled combing hair and felt like soft hair, the person's occupation might involve working with hair.

The most headache-inducing thing was that you couldn't say Jenna was entirely unreasonable; her points indeed had merit.

In Western culture, wine is typically used to symbolize the blood of Jesus, and in Eastern culture, grapes also symbolize fertility, so it wasn't like she was talking about fertility worship without basis. The similarities between the smoothness of silk and hair, though somewhat far-fetched, also couldn't be said to be entirely dissimilar.

But all these deductions felt like someone rigidly forcing a preconceived answer onto the process.

But precisely because her answers were correct, everything she said made sense, and the students below would suddenly have an epiphany, making faces as though they couldn't believe they hadn't thought of that.

At that moment, when Bruce came forward to speak about normal behavioral analysis deductions, others would feel like he was just beating around the bush.

Why should they investigate the females first when the evidence for male fertility worship made quite a bit of sense? Wasn't this just purposely wasting time?

Even worse, some thought that what Bruce was suggesting was too old-fashioned. Solving cases clearly required inspiration; only those kinds of people could become great detectives. The method of methodically eliminating suspects step by step was seen as inflexible and outdated.

This annoyed Bruce to no end.

With Jenna pulling such a stunt, Bruce's entire class was essentially ruined because the students would split into two factions and start debating about who was right.

The logic faction thought Jenna's deductions lacked logic, but the intuition faction felt Jenna was correct, which in turn made the logic faction look like they were wasting time. Yet when Jenna proved right every time, the intuition faction could turn around and mock the logic faction.

Neither side would budge, and as they argued, it even escalated into a full-blown brawl, and what's worse, it dragged in issues of race and gender.

Some people, to suppress the arrogance of the intuition faction, said things akin to "women have weaker logic." It wasn't said outright, but the implication was roughly there, indirectly suggesting Jenna wasn't rational enough, which angered the women from Amazon.

Then there were some who started saying that Jenna was an alien and might have mind-reading abilities. Maybe she directly read the answer from the teacher's mind, deliberately interfering with the Earthlings' learning. This sparked discontent among other aliens and races not part of the human race.

Eventually, the groups entirely clashed, and today during the daytime classes, Bruce had to call Clark and Diana over just to barely manage to stop the students' disputes.

Both factions demanded Bruce to give them a verdict, asking him to act as the judge to decide which side was correct.

Although Bruce excelled in the Behavioral Analysis Method, he still stuck to the textbook definition, telling the students that psychology itself was divided into behavior analysis and psychoanalysis, with some people leaning towards behavior analysis and others towards psychoanalysis, and Jenna belonged to the latter.

Naturally, this led to someone asking, "Then what is the principle behind psychoanalysis? Does it mean that a part of these people's brains are different from others, allowing them to guess the murderer out of thin air? Why would God make people's brains different?"

The question again returned to the realm of theology.

When Bruce discussed the Behavioral Analysis Method, he was all very clear, but if you asked him to explain the Psychoanalysis Method, he couldn't clarify it well, other than what was defined in the textbooks.

Because in reality, he also fundamentally learned that Psychoanalysis Method was just theology, just like God had opened up an extra groove in some people's brains.

But these were things he couldn't say to the students. If you told them that some people were naturally accurate in their guesses, then what was the point of studying?

Although everyone also knew that there was a disparity in talents between people, and even more so between humans and aliens, Jenna wasn't considered particularly strong, but could casually do 600 push-ups, far surpassing any robust human male.

However, the disparity in physical talent was visible, whereas the gap in intellectual capability was not muych apparent, which is why those mildly self-sufficient mentally challenged people are not easily recognized in daily life – because there's no specific instrument to measure this, and it isn't enough to only confront reality when they see the actual coffin.

Moreover, when one is in a disadvantaged position, no one wants to admit it, even ordinary people. How many are willing to admit they have a lower IQ?

Now, everyone here was considered a prodigy, at least among the top in their own groups— who would want to admit they were inferior to others?

But the talent for psychoanalysis was indeed hard to discuss; without witnessing it firsthand, one could hardly imagine how profound it could be.

Bruce had already witnessed more miracles on Shiller, just as Shiller had acknowledged that Bruce simply couldn't learn the Psychoanalysis Method. Bruce too had long acknowledged that the talent for psychoanalysis did indeed exist, that guessing accurately every time wasn't a coincidence but a real ability that could substantiate a school of psychology.

But even knowing this, he couldn't just tell the students; it was simply too demoralizing for some people.

After all the painstaking deductions, every step meticulously reliable, yet the deductions were wrong, while the other party could simply look at a photo of the evidence or crime scene and accurately state who the murderer was. Why bother learning then?

After looking at Jenna's nonsense on his desk for a long time, Bruce decided to put down the paper and went to the fridge to grab a beer.