“My name is Mir Chris, I’m fifteen this year, I live in the faculty dormitory of Meichuxi Academy, unmarried, and every day I’ve got class until six in the morning before I can go home.
I don’t just smoke—I drink like a fish.
I go to sleep at eleven a.m., and I make sure to get a full half hour every day.
Before bed I always down a whole barrel of vodka, then do twenty minutes of stiffness calisthenics.
Once I’m in bed I toss and turn and can’t sleep, sleep straight through till dark, and I absolutely save all my exhaustion and stress for the next day.
Even my doctor asks how I’m not dead yet.”
“I only asked for your name.
What in the world was all that nonsense?” said the City Guard Captain sitting across from Mir, her face utterly deadpan.
“And how much of that was even true? There’s no way it’s that over-the-top!”
That’s right—the protagonist Mir’s very first appearance is in that delicate sort of place: a police station.
As for why, well, that’s a long story.
Mir was originally an ordinary orphan living in the Modern World (the modern city, “Modern World” for short).
His original name wasn’t Mir, but who’d care about a thing like that?
Yet this ordinary orphan, at the age of twelve, awakened a power no ordinary person should possess.
As the power awakened, Mir found his body starting to shed skin like crazy; the joints of his limbs began to turn puppet-like, and a hole five centimeters across appeared in his chest.
Inside the hole was a Light Sphere—and worst of all, when he reached his hand into the sphere to explore, he found a little girl inside.
Then he turned into that little girl, and his intuition told him the girl was his true self.
Having lived all these years only to find out he wasn’t a boy—thankfully, he discovered he could still turn back into a male, even if that body had become puppet-like.
Freshly gifted with superpowers, Mir was thrilled.
He decided he ought to do something to carry forward his protagonist’s Golden Spirit.
Those movie scenes had given him enormous inspiration.
So he went and robbed a bank.
That’s right—this kid didn’t go off to fight for justice.
At the tender age of twelve, he went and R-O-B-B-E-D a B-A-N-K!
(Mir’s position: when a penniless nobody suddenly gets superpowers, wanting to rob a bank is perfectly reasonable, right?)
As it happened, his little escapade was witnessed by a big shot from a parallel world—namely the aforementioned Director of Meichuxi Academy—who hauled him off to the parallel world and educated him for three years.
Over those three years, he learned that his superpower was something called Psi-Spirit Energy.
So-called Psi-Spirit Energy is a power that most beings in the Magical World—the world running parallel to the Modern World—have a chance of awakening, and almost everyone’s Psi-Spirit Energy is different.
Crossing into another world is the opportunity most people dream of, but Mir’s take was that life without the internet was absolutely killing him.
So during every vacation he’d ride the Phase Train back to the Modern World to bask in the warmth that Wi-Fi brought him.
But this vacation was a little different from the usual.
This time he brought back a black-haired girl of about sixteen from the Modern World.
The girl seemed to have awakened her Psi-Spirit Energy less than a month ago, but the villagers of the remote little mountain village where she lived had noticed she was different, killed her family, and attacked her as a witch.
Mir, who’d been in the city, hadn’t gotten the chance for a heroic rescue.
His whole role amounted to sensing—from a full city away—the murderous, killing-intent-laden magic radiating from the girl, then using his Psi-Spirit Energy to rush to the scene, using his Modern-World authority to clean up the aftermath for her, and inviting her to join the academy.
The villagers’ fate goes without saying.
Now, back to the main point.
(No idea how many of you noticed I went off-topic. Heh.)
Why is young Mir at the police station?
Could it be because of the girl?
No—and let me note here, the station Mir is currently in isn’t a Modern-World one, but a Magical-World one, and the messes of the Modern World are none of this City Guard’s business.
The main reason: as Mir was walking the girl—one Xia Ye—toward that not-exactly-impressive-sounding Meichuxi Academy, an old man suddenly rushed out in front of him, expertly flopped to the ground, latched onto his leg, and hollered:
“He hit me!
Aiyo, you brat, why weren’t you watching where you were going—you’ve broken my leg, aiyo… You’re not walking away today unless you cough up a hundred grand or so!”
“…” Mir’s reaction: turns out there was someone even more shameless than himself.
He hadn’t even gone to swindle anyone yet, and here someone was reaching right over his head to do it.
Feeling the gazes gradually gathering around him, Mir didn’t panic.
Just as Xia Ye thought he had some clever solution, Mir declared that the old man’s acting was too fake, too hammy—and so he kindly broke the old man’s leg for him, helping the old man scream his lungs out for real.
Ah, what a warm-hearted person I am!
“So—that’s your reason for hitting an old man?” The Guard Captain across from him tapped her fingers, staring speechlessly at this boy wearing a face of righteous conviction.
“No no no, how could you call that hitting an old man? I saw the old fellow acting so hard and so hammy, so I went out of my way to let him feel this kind of pain firsthand. That way, next time he’ll scream a whole lot more convincingly, won’t he?”
Where’s your shame?
The Guard Captain fought down the urge to jab her pen into the boy’s face.
“Officer, is there anything else? There’s a girl waiting outside for me to get her enrolled.” Mir wore the expression of this woman is such a pain, I don’t want to play with you anymore.
Facing a Mir like this, the Guard Captain couldn’t help her head starting to ache.
This brat was the adopted son of the Meichuxi Academy Director—the one known as “Her Majesty’s Bestie”—and his guardian had said she’d pay compensation, and the old man had pulled the scam first.
She didn’t seem to have any reason left to hold him.
But the boy’s whole I don’t know what I did wrong, and I’m not going to change attitude truly infuriated her.
“Even though your guardian says she’ll pay compensation, as punishment you still have to write a fifty-thousand-character self-criticism before you go.
Otherwise you can spend the night here.”
Faced with the unreasonable Guard Captain, Mir calmly rummaged through his hefty backpack, then whipped out a stack of paper and proudly flung it at her: “I came prepared for every kind of punishment long ago.”
Not knowing at all what there was to be proud of about this—though the Guard Captain could have used the excuse “only ones written on the spot count” to keep the boy, that would’ve made her seem too nitpicky, so she decided on a clever approach.
She began hunting for wrong characters in that fifty-thousand-plus-character self-criticism.
This time it was Mir’s turn to stare at the Guard Captain, speechless.
How did a dumb woman like this even make Guard Captain?
Mir stood up and worked his stuck joints.
“What are you doing? You can’t leave until I’m done checking.” The Guard Captain eyed Mir warily.
“I’m just going to the bathroom. Want to come with?” Mir said to her, a picture of innocence.