Hospital

Starved of air, the homeless man’s struggling grew frantic.

Then his strength gave out, and the struggling became convulsing.

He was one step from death.

“Brother Qian, I brought people! Brother Qian, are you alright?” Xiao Yuan’s voice crashed through the apartment from outside.

Wen Yiqian jolted. The coldness drained from his eyes as quickly as it had come.

He looked at the man convulsing in front of him and ripped the soaked paper from his face.

The homeless man choked and gasped, pulling air in ragged, desperate bursts.

Still alive. Wen Yiqian let out a slow, heavy breath.

What did I just do?

…

In the hospital room, Wen Yiqian sat on the bed with his wounds dressed, staring at nothing in particular.

“Why do all these criminals seem to find their way to you?” Li Weiguo stood nearby, his expression difficult to read. “Are you cursed or something?”

“Just unlucky,” Wen Yiqian said quietly.

He was the protagonist of this world, after all. Who else were they going to gravitate toward?

“I suppose I should thank you for breaking my door down,” Wen Yiqian glanced at him. “If the lock hadn’t already been broken, that man never would have gotten in.”

Li Weiguo looked uncomfortable. “Fair enough. I’ll cover your medical bills.”

He paused. “Your Outstanding Citizen Award came through. The prize money and the certificate will be presented tomorrow.”

Wen Yiqian was quiet for a moment.

“Thank you,” he said softly.

“You earned it.” Li Weiguo straightened. “Get some rest.”

He turned and walked out, and his voice dropped to something almost private as he moved down the corridor.

“Just bad luck, you say.”

“Or is all of this part of your plan?”

“Wen Yiqian. I’m finding it harder and harder to read you.”

…

Wen Yiqian turned to look at the night through the window, his expression subdued.

The events of the afternoon kept replaying, refusing to settle.

He had known for a while that he tended to lose himself during performances. It hadn’t caused serious problems before, so he had let it slide.

Over the past few days there had been multiple incidents. Setting aside this one, the only other time he had genuinely felt something close to the urge to kill was at the amusement park, when real anger had surfaced and a thought about using Liao Tong against An Zhi had briefly formed.

He had pushed it aside without much difficulty.

This time was different. He had gone somewhere he couldn’t see clearly from the inside, lost the thread of himself entirely, and only the sound of Xiao Yuan’s voice had pulled him back.

If Xiao Yuan had been five minutes later, the man on the bathroom stool would be dead.

He had read about actors who went so deep into a role that they couldn’t find their way back out afterward. Some had stopped being able to tell the character from themselves. Some had not recovered.

Wen Yiqian understood now, in a way he hadn’t before, that he was heading somewhere along that same road.

Every performance demanded everything he had. He had to go all the way in, because breaking character mid-way could get him killed. There was no safety net, no director to call cut, no retake.

So he sank deeper than any actor ever needed to, and each time it was harder to surface.

And this was still early. How many performances had there been? And already he had almost crossed a line he couldn’t uncross.

In that bathroom, for a stretch of time he couldn’t precisely account for, he had genuinely believed he was the male lead.

If this continued, the question wasn’t whether he would develop something like dissociative identity disorder. The question was when.

And past that point: what if he didn’t come back at all?

What on earth do I do?

He dragged his fingers through his hair, pushed his feet into his slippers, and left the room to find the bathroom. A nurse pointed him in the right direction and he headed down the corridor.

Passing another room, he noticed two officers posted outside the door. Something made him glance in.

The homeless man was sitting on the bed, wrists and ankles cuffed. A doctor and several nurses stood nearby, asking questions. A woman in professional office attire stood a little apart from the rest.

The homeless man sat with his head down, face blank, responding to nothing.

Then, as if he sensed something, he looked up and out through the open door.

His eyes met Wen Yiqian’s.

Wen Yiqian’s expression flickered.

The man’s reaction was something else entirely. His face filled with raw, animal terror. He let out a cry and tried to curl himself backward on the bed, as far from the doorway as the restraints would allow.

The room erupted.

Wen Yiqian dropped his gaze and walked quickly away.

“Excuse me.”

Footsteps behind him. He turned.

The woman in office attire had followed him out and caught up.

She was somewhere around twenty-five or twenty-six, composed and put-together, with the manner of someone used to being capable and in control.

“You’re Wen Yiqian?” She extended her hand when he nodded. “I’m Jin Siqiao. My father is Jin Shuihua.”

“Jin Shuihua?” The name meant nothing to him.

“The man inside who attacked you today.” She gestured back toward the room.

Wen Yiqian looked at her polished appearance and felt the confusion deepen. He reached out and shook her hand briefly before stepping back. It was his first proper handshake, and the last thing he needed was another misunderstanding.

“You’re wondering how my father ended up like that while I turned out like this,” Jin Siqiao said, with a small, practiced smile. “It’s a long story. If you’d like to hear it, I can tell you properly somewhere quieter.”

Wen Yiqian was feeling stifled and had nowhere particular to be. He nodded.

They found a bench in the garden behind the hospital and sat.

Jin Siqiao began.

Jin Shuihua had once had a life that was modest but genuinely good: a wife, a daughter, a household that worked. They weren’t wealthy, but they were steady, and there was warmth in it.

Then he developed a gambling habit, and the person he had been more or less ceased to exist.

He gambled constantly. When he lost, which was often, he drank. The drinking made him short-tempered in ways that escalated over time. The savings ran out, and then more than the savings ran out. When there was nothing left to lose financially, he started taking it out on the people around him.

Jin Siqiao’s mother was driven to the point where she took her own life. Jin Siqiao was taken in by a relative who showed more kindness than most.

After that, Jin Shuihua came apart. Something broke loose in him that never found its way back. Without anyone to anchor him, he drifted, and drifting became vagrancy, and vagrancy became this: scraping by on whatever could be scavenged or stolen, one day indistinguishable from the next.

(End of Chapter)