The University of Low IQ

Chuan-Yu University sits in a mountain city where light rail trains pass through buildings and hotpot aromas fill the air. It’s a campus of “eight-D-level weirdness,” home to a low-IQ underworld of its own: the food thief gives off a strong air of guilt, yet donates half the stolen money to compensate the victims; the orange cat “Curator,” sought by the entire university, actually escaped on its own to elope, then gave birth to quintuplets; and a university seal “sprouted” in a pothos plant in the principal’s office. The thief is the “Ultraman” students say stamps documents by day and protects the Earth by night. The protagonist, Gao Cai, is a third-year finance student who calls himself a “high-IQ detective,” though people keep mistaking his name for “top student.” He joins forces with Su Wanqing, a sharp-tongued senior in forensic medicine; Wang Tiezhu, a Chongqing local; and Niu Dashan, a security chief whose blood pressure is permanently through the roof, to form the “Gao Cai Detective Agency.” They specialize in solving bizarre campus cases: a string of food-delivery thefts, the “kidnapping” of the orange cat, a missing university seal and an essay-writing racket, a lip-syncing scandal at a singing competition... Behind every case is a “criminal” who’s short on brains but has an understandable reason for what they did. Every twist in their deductions reveals an absurd yet heartwarming truth about human nature. The book has 25 chapters and 150 installments, with a planned length of one million words. Each chapter features a complete case, while every six installments form a narrative arc: crime, investigation, misunderstanding, and reversal, all tightly interwoven. The book seamlessly weaves in popular campus slang like “study buddies,” “strong thief vibes,” “I’ll behave, just let me off,” and “unhinged literature,” with jokes and memes packed into every page. Meanwhile, the mystery running through all 150 installments, the enigmatic strategist “Old Zhou of the Mountain City,” who sells the ability to “come and go freely,” will reveal his true identity at the graduation ceremony in the final chapter. Low-IQ crimes, high-IQ love.