The Vanished Third Person

Monk and Monkey came back loaded down with bags, moving quickly.

From a distance, they spotted Wen Yiqian still sitting by the roadside and felt the tension ease slightly. They picked up their pace.

Then, with a rush of movement from every direction, armed officers appeared — guns leveled, covering every angle.

The two of them stopped dead.

Wen Yiqian stood, took the bags from their hands, and walked away.

Something close to relief crossed Monkey’s face. He let out a short, bitter laugh, raised his hands, and stopped fighting it.

Monk’s expression went in the opposite direction. His eyes hardened, then turned cold, then hot with fury.

He understood now. When Wen Yiqian had said they were like headless flies without their handler, he hadn’t been implying it. He had been saying it plainly. And the two of them had spent the last few minutes proving him right.

Faced with betrayal, manipulation, and — worse — having been made to look foolish, Monk, who had always been the steadier of the two, felt something crack loose behind his eyes.

He watched Wen Yiqian’s unhurried retreating figure, reached under his shirt, and drew the pistol from the back of his waistband.

If he was going down, this man was coming with him.

A figure came from the side with no warning — a flying kick that connected squarely with Monk’s chest and sent him through the air, tumbling several meters before he skidded to a stop, the world going white at the edges.

Li Weiguo walked forward, picked up the fallen pistol, and said, “Take him.”

Behind him, Wen Yiqian had already cleared the perimeter without looking back. He found a spot by the roadside, sat down, and let out a long, slow breath — the kind that seems to take something structural with it, like air leaving a punctured tire.

“If I keep this up, I won’t need someone to kill me. I’ll frighten myself to death.” He pressed a hand against his chest, feeling his heartbeat still working to catch up.

By his own measure, this had been one of his more unremarkable performances. No anger breaking through. No uncontrolled highs. The situation had been genuinely dangerous at almost every point, but because he had maintained control of it throughout, there had been no real tension — not for him. No edge to it.

If he had to name what was missing: the feeling of being fully, recklessly alive. The exhilaration that came when things were not quite under control.

Each previous performance had left him with that — an involuntary, almost embarrassing rush, even when he would have preferred not to feel it.

This time there was nothing like that. Only exhaustion.

He shook his head, and the motion sent a thin current of pain through it. He held still for a moment, brow drawn.

Thinking it through carefully, it wasn’t hard to account for. Every time he performed, his mind accelerated to a state significantly beyond its usual baseline — a kind of overload. Previously the durations had been short enough that the cost went unnoticed. Today had run far longer. The headache and the faint dizziness were the predictable result of pushing past capacity.

When he had claimed carsickness in the car, it hadn’t been carsickness. His mind had already begun to slip, and he had needed to bring things to a close before it slipped further.

He took out his phone and checked the time, running a rough calculation.

About an hour. That was his window, apparently.

“I really am an idiot,” he muttered.

Then he caught himself.

He was currently inhabiting the body of this story’s male lead. A certified high-IQ genius. Brains like that weren’t supposed to buckle under pressure.

Which raised an uncomfortable question: had he brought his own unremarkable mind with him when he transmigrated, and simply slotted it into superior hardware?

Was he running ordinary software on exceptional architecture and somehow still managing to bottleneck the whole system?

“Surely I’m not that unlucky,” he said, to no one.

Though — there was another possibility. The male lead had been considered slow-witted from childhood. It was only after a head injury that his intelligence had fully emerged. What Wen Yiqian was experiencing might simply be a residual effect of that injury, not yet fully resolved.

He didn’t pursue it further. His head hurt.

He turned his attention to the bags in front of him.

The robbers, it had to be said, had done a reasonable job. Time had been short and they’d had no idea what he wanted, so they’d bought a little of everything — no staple food, but a solid spread of street snacks, fruit, and various small items. And, he discovered at the bottom of one bag, milk tea and desserts.

He hadn’t eaten properly in days. He stopped thinking and started eating.

“Several days since I arrived here,” he said, through a mouthful, eyes slightly wet, “and this is how I finally get a decent meal.” He made a soft, grieving sound. “They even got milk tea. They got desserts. You two are genuinely good people.”

He sniffled.

“If I had known, I would have told the police to take a little longer.”

Not far away, Li Weiguo had come over to go through the case details with Wen Yiqian. He stopped when he saw the scene in front of him and stood there for a moment, recalibrating.

This was the person who had single-handedly dismantled an armed bank robbery.

He shook his head, turned back toward the police cars where Monk and Monkey were being loaded in, and said quietly, “There’s still one unaccounted for. Where did he go?”

He exhaled. “No rest today.”

By evening, they still hadn’t found the one the robbers called Little Bai.

The area had been searched thoroughly. Every frame of available surveillance footage had been reviewed. Nothing.

The man had simply ceased to exist — present for a moment, then gone, leaving no trace behind.

Giving his statement at the police station turned out to be its own ordeal. In some ways it made the bank feel straightforward by comparison.

Wen Yiqian was genuinely afraid of what an investigation might turn up.

The root of all of this was his earlier confrontation with Fang Yu. If Fang Yu was eventually caught, Wen Yiqian would be pulled into it — there was no avoiding that. Today’s involvement could be explained well enough; he’d been essentially forced into it. But how would he account for what the original male lead had done before he arrived? The history that existed in the story but now lived in this body?

He couldn’t exactly say: I transmigrated here — whatever happened before was a different person, and I’d prefer not to be held responsible.

Even if he said it, no one would believe it.

The saving grace was Fang Yu’s extreme caution. The robbers had never met him in person. Everything between them had been conducted over the phone, which gave the police very little to work from. And Fang Yu was capable enough that he wasn’t likely to be caught quickly. For now, there was no immediate need to worry.

By the time he was done and walking out, it was dark again. Wen Yiqian felt the particular numbness that comes from a day that has contained too many things.

He had been coming here every day. In some ways it had started to feel more manageable than wherever he was supposed to be living. The interrogation room, in particular, had a quality he found oddly reassuring — it was enclosed and controlled and nothing unexpected happened inside it.

He looked up at the night sky and breathed out slowly.

There was only one problem left hanging. Fang Yu, who remained free, remained a threat — unpredictable in timing, impossible to ignore.

The solution, Wen Yiqian thought, was actually quite simple to identify.

“If that man dies,” he said quietly, eyes moving through the dark, “every problem resolves itself.”

(End of Chapter)