Chapter 3062: Mercury Chronicles (12)

The next morning, Clark got a scare when he ran into Bruce in the cafeteria. He looked Bruce up and down and said, "Good Lord, Bruce, I know you and Selina are deep in the throes of love, but you two…"

At that moment, Diana passed by with a tray in her hand. She also scrutinized Bruce but perhaps because Bruce was of the opposite sex, she simply clicked her tongue and walked away.

Clark slung an arm around Bruce's shoulders and said, "I get it, brother. Lois and I are sometimes like that too. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but talking all night might be a little… Never mind, you Bats are probably just good at staying up late."

Bruce let out a long sigh and said, "It's not because of Selina."

"Then it's you?!" Clark was even more shocked. He couldn't help but give Bruce a thumbs-up, but Bruce pushed his hand down, visibly annoyed, and said, "It's because of Jenna!"

Clark was completely taken aback, his expression gradually turning serious. But before he could say anything, Bruce said, "It's because of Jenna's paper!"

"Oh, right, now I remember. You said you had high hopes for that girl. I also think she's quite clever. What's wrong with her paper?"

"Nothing's wrong with her paper."

"Then what's the rush?"

"The rush is that she has no paper!"

Bruce had no choice but to repeat the conversation he had with Jenna the previous day to Clark. Clark sighed and said, "You're too serious, Bruce. Jenna is an alien; it's perfectly normal for her not to understand some things on Earth. You have to give her time."

"I don't get it. A paper with 10 details and 500 words, how much time does it really need? I didn't even ask her to look for a specific kind of detail, nor did I insist she must get them right. Even if she made up 10, it would be fine."

"That just proves she's honest," retorted Clark, his words nearly infuriating Bruce. "She doesn't want to make things up, and instead tells you she doesn't know how. That's an honest gesture. She keeps calling you because she's eager to learn. Even if she can't hand in the paper this morning, at least she didn't intend to fool you. That counts for respect and integrity."

Bruce was so mad he was smoking at the head.

It's not that he was hampering her, but as we all know, English actually has a low information density. With the same 100 words, many other languages can convey more information than English, and to express the same information, most languages can do it more succinctly than English.

Within a few hundred words, the difficulty is much lower than a Chinese 800-word essay, but due to various awkward grammatical aspects, for large papers with several thousand words, English becomes more difficult than a Chinese text of the same length.

Most English assignments are short essays, requiring just a few hundred words without strict academic requirements. Native speakers usually won't take more than an hour to finish, and if someone wants to bluff, it can be done in a matter of minutes.

Moreover, American schools don't vary homework assignments much. There are no workbooks, exercise books, or newspapers; generally, there are just two types: group work and short essays. These two kinds of assignments are given from middle school to university, and it's virtually impossible for someone to be unable to do them.

Even if Jenna is indeed an alien and has not attended middle school on Earth, she speaks English. She could even use voice input, requiring her to say only a few hundred words. If using complete written grammar, it wouldn't take many sentences in English.

But for just these few hundred words, Jenna had dawdled with him for the better part of the evening. You know how young people are good at staying up late; she kept at it until 3:30 in the morning, and then Bruce just crashed.

And there she was, a rejuvenated Jenna, walking right up to him. She was carrying a large plate of food and had half a piece of bread stuffed in her mouth, mumbling to Bruce, "Good morning, Professor."

"Do I look good to you?"

"Umm, it's my first time writing a paper. I was a bit nervous. Won't happen next time," Jenna said with an apologetic smile.

With so many people in the cafeteria watching, Bruce couldn't lash out at her. He just exhaled and said, "Put your paper on my desk when you get to the classroom. If it's less than 500 words, you're done for!"

But Bruce had no idea that the paper lying on his desk was the beginning of his true nightmare.

The bell rang for class, and Bruce walked in right on the dot. He still had to teach forensic science to the two classes that had not had their lesson yesterday.

He looked down, intending to review his teaching plan, but his eyes immediately caught the paper lying on top of it. Within three seconds, he spotted 16 grammatical errors, 6 spacing issues, and all the full stops were full-width separators.

Bruce was on the verge of suffocation.

Not that Bruce had any particular dedication to teaching or so-called teacher's ethics.

But anyone who has coached a child with homework would understand how infuriating it is not that the kid doesn't do the homework, but that you don't know if some of their behavior is instinctual or deliberate, whether they hate doing homework or hate you.

Distinguishing the two can drain all of one's energy and lead to emotional breakdown and exhaustion.

The problem Bruce faced was he also didn't know whether Jenna genuinely didn't know how to do it or if she was being purposeful.

After all, she is an alien and there's a possibility that she really doesn't know how to write a paper. Yet she seems so smart in other respects. How is it that when it comes to writing a paper, she starts acting like a retard?

Because of this, Bruce was not able to directly take some of the more aggressive measures against her because if she really couldn't do it, setting aside whether it would scare her off, he wouldn't be able to get past Superman and Wonder Woman.

So Bruce had to temporarily endure it, deciding to deal with it after class.

Curious to see if all those who hadn't received traditional social education couldn't write essays, Bruce specifically assigned a 500-word essay to the two classes to see how they managed.

And soon, Bruce would pay the price for his irrational actions spurred by anger.

At the end of the class, Bruce called Jenna over. Before he could say anything, Jenna started wailing.

"Help me, Professor Wayne. Professor Prince is just terrifying! She made us do more than 600 push-ups in over 40 degrees heat. My arms!"

Bruce's eyes widened as he exclaimed, "How many?!"

Jenna drew a number with her foot to show that she really couldn't raise her arm anymore.

"Has Diana gone mad? Do humans also do this many?"

"Oh, no, she said it's based on the different races' physiques, humans only have to do 60."

"That's still pretty outrageous."

"Who's to say it's not?"

"Wait a second, I didn't call you over to talk about this." Bruce took out Jenna's thesis and couldn't bear to look at it any longer, he said, "Miss, do you know how many dreadful grammar errors you used in this?"

"How many? Let me see."

Jenna leaned over to look, and Bruce had circled every error. Jenna listened intently, and when Bruce asked her to repeat back, she could do so, which made Bruce somewhat pleased.

But his pleasure was premature.

Grammar and punctuation are minor issues, considering Jenna is an alien, it's too normal to have many errors at the beginning when writing a thesis.

The content is the big problem.

Bruce didn't even want to let this knowledge approach his brain, but he still pointed to a line and said, "You say that the traces of the ambulance doors being opened can deduce the person's height and weight; tell me, how did you deduce that?"

"Based on the bloodstains, the right door was opened first, but the final location where he dismembered should be on the left side. However, he didn't exit from the left side but went out again from the right side. This shows that he probably ran out of strength, so he is a relatively slim person."

Bruce laughed as he said, "Why do you think his final position of dismemberment was on the left side?"

"Because of the bloodstains?"

"The bloodstains don't show that."

"Er, the footprints..."

"There are no footprints at all."

"The car's center of gravity."

"That has nothing to do with automotive engineering."

"Alright then, he would arrange his limbs last, from bottom to top, which represents a kind of inversion— a technique to express what he felt, and the hand is on the left side."

"So you still rely on a wild guess to reach a conclusion, and then treat the conclusion as a fact to speculate further."

"But it's not a wild guess, he definitely thought this way, absolutely."

"There's nothing absolute, okay, then explain this, how does the blood splatter on the ceiling explain his length of stay?"

Just as Jenna was about to say something, Bruce stopped her and then said, "Don't guess, just talk me through your deduction process."

"The murderer cut the victim's throat, which is a way to silence him because he had suffered such treatment before, so he chose this method to subdue the other person."

"The murderer deliberately let the blood from the arteries splatter on the ceiling; he wanted to create a barrier, to him it symbolized, 'your god won't see you anymore, won't help you either.'

It represents that he has taken over a part of the god's world within this independent space by killing the god's follower, this is also a provocation, resonating with the last case."

"He would wait, wait for the barrier to take effect, for him, the coagulation of the blood was a sign of transitioning from life to death, so he would wait until the blood has coagulated to act."

"But, he wanted the victim to be alive while being dismembered, so he wouldn't wait until the blood had dried and the victim died. Therefore, just by finding the balance between the time it takes for blood to coagulate and the time it takes for humans to die, it would be possible to determine approximately how long he stayed inside the carriage."

Bruce rubbed his temples and said, "The last two sentences sound somewhat analytical, but the earlier conclusions have no evidence whatsoever."

"I said I couldn't find any," Jenna responded.

Jenna's features knitted together, and she said, "Such a simple case, such obvious emotions, what else do we need to analyze? I could say this, if the murderer of this case appeared before me, I'd recognize him instantly. He's as obvious as high beams in the night, why don't you understand?"

"Let's talk about the second case, how many clues did you find?" Bruce said.

"Only one."

"What is it?"

"The posture of the body, the body in the oil drum is like a sleeping baby." Jenna looked into Bruce's eyes and said:

"The murderer once suffered from insomnia, unable to sleep soundly in most cases, but he was healed."

"How do you know he was healed?"

"Weren't you asleep yesterday?"