Chapter Text
1:
Sherlock Moriarty has a lucky coin. It’s one of five gold coins he found inside the box of his second hand pocket watch. He’s spent the other four during times when his case work was low, and he would have spent the fifth, except it rolled out of his hand when he tried to hand it over one day to pay for breakfast. Upon getting home he found that same coin hidden unassumingly in his shoe.
The next day, the owner of the bakery knocked on his door, asking him to catch a thief, and he would be compensated with free breakfast for a month.
It happens again. Sherlock tries paying for services rendered.
The gold coin runs away.
Sherlock—real name Klein, originally a transmigrated existence called Zhou Mingrui—stops believing in coincidences after the third time the coin flees, the thing nearly somersaulting into the Tussock River, and wouldn’t that be a waste of money? Rivers do not participate in trading!
That evening he shines it against a candle flame, squints at the grooves produced by the coin press, tries to identify if there’s anything different. Yes—there’s been a misalignment of the blank, for the edges of the coin are not struck cleanly, causing a faint and ghostly halo around the piece of metal. An error coin. Perhaps all five gold coins had been error coins. Accidents in the cosmos, like Zhou Mingrui’s transmigration.
He ends up looking at the coin for hours, and the next day, he gets visited by a Ma’am Mary.
It happens again.
Then again.
“Are you a mystical item?” Klein asks the coin.
The coin answers by glittering softly under the light of flickering fire.
…
“Talim was close to Prince Edessak?” blurts Sherlock. “That’s why the Prince wishes to directly commission me?”
Yes—because the third prince has fallen in love with a commoner; who has somehow gotten caught in a plot by a former archbishop; and all of this somehow turns out to be the exact perfect scenario for Sherlock to save countless lives with only a common cold to show for it.
He’s swaddled in blankets, promised an estate, a personal butler, and looking at the coin again. He no longer dared to flip it on a whim. There are sayings from his homeland about being so greedy for money that it blinds a person’s rationality.
What must a person pay to receive such unreasonable good fortune?
Sherlock asks: “Have I contracted with an eldritch god?”
The coin does not speak.
Sherlock rubs his eyes. Did he see the grooves within the metal start moving?
2:
Sherlock Moriarty dies on April 4th.
Cause of death: Slipping on ice.
As the last of his life leaves his body, he realises the coin has ended up in his left palm.
Really? thinks Klein. This is the best that this monstrous being could do after I had to dodge meteors that one time?
His consciousness turns dark and he fails to notice the gold coin trembling.
3:
Klein wakes up to a world of glass and concrete and steel that looks three times bigger than it should be.
He lampoons: Don’t tell me I shrank into a child? I already finished dying…
“Excuse me,” says Klein—
—except it sounds like “Mrooowww?”
“…”
There seems to be a problem.
Zhou Mingrui has reincarnated into a cat.