The Wild Detective

The Wild Detective is a long urban supernatural crime novel by the web author Kuanghai Wanghu, serialized on Qidian from February 27, 2017, to July 11, 2020, totaling about 6.31 million characters. The protagonist, Zhao Yu, is a thuggish king of the streets who fights without regard for his life and has no scruples or bottom line. An accident transports him to a parallel space, where he becomes a detective in the Major Crimes Unit. From street thug to law enforcer, the vast gap in identity makes him a source of endless comedy at the police station and turns his colleagues' and superiors' lives upside down. At the same time, he acquires a "sinister" adventure system, and with its special abilities and his own underworld methods he repeatedly uncovers clues others overlook in baffling cases and solves one bizarre case after another. The book unfolds in a structure of "cases within cases," in which the Hand-Chopping Case, the Murder-Swap Case, the Mianling Mass Kidnapping, the Bank Robbery, and other cases of varying size nest and interlock, with clues from small cases often leading to larger conspiracies. Through clashes and cooperation with supporting characters such as Miao Ying, Ding Lan, and Cui Lizhu, Zhao Yu gradually comes to understand the weight of being a police officer, growing from a thug who lives only for the thrill into a "rogue master detective" who is brash but willing to shoulder responsibility. The work wins readers over with its coarse, blunt language and densely packed case progression, and its reputation is polarized because of the protagonist's outrageous early behavior and the relatively explicit nature of some episodes.