Another Participant

“Where did that come from?” Wen Yiqian scratched his head and walked out onto the street.

He patted his pocket and felt his mood lift immediately.

The two thousand yuan Outstanding Citizen reward was still sitting there, untouched. Enough to keep him from starving for a while, at least. The only frustration was that the award could apparently only be given to the same person once. There was no running that particular scheme again.

“I need to think seriously about how to make money,” he said to himself, walking at an unhurried pace along the roadside.

“But what can I actually do?”

“In the past few days I’ve been averaging one or two genuine lunatics per day.”

“At this rate, I’ll soon be giving that elementary school kid a run for his money. The one they call the God of Death — everywhere he goes, someone dies.”

“Who could live like that?”

He was still turning this over when a figure rushed at him from the side and he flinched hard enough to feel it in his back teeth.

“Fang Yu?”

He recognized the face and took an involuntary half-step back.

Fang Yu didn’t speak. He simply stood there and stared at him with cold eyes.

Wen Yiqian felt his stomach tighten. He arranged his expression into something that approximated a calm smile.

Was this a final confrontation? A man who couldn’t accept defeat coming to settle things in person?

The police station was not far. He began quietly calculating his exit options.

Then Fang Yu dropped to his knees on the pavement.

Forehead pressed to the ground. Both hands flat on either side. Perfectly sincere.

“Please. Let me be your dog.”

Wen Yiqian choked on his own saliva.

“Cough — cough —” He looked around quickly. “Get up. Right now. If someone sees this, I will not survive the embarrassment.”

“I’m not concerned with embarrassment,” Fang Yu said, forehead still pressed to the ground.

“I am!” Wen Yiqian’s scalp prickled. “Have you no shame at all?”

“I won’t get up until you agree.”

“There has to be a reason for this. Tell me the reason.” Wen Yiqian stepped to one side.

Fang Yu caught the movement from the corner of his eye and shuffled on his knees to face him again, maintaining the bow.

“I lost, and I lost completely. I accept that.” His voice was level, and there was something genuine underneath it. “If I broke my word and ran, you would find me. With your abilities — that’s not something I doubt.”

He paused. Fear moved through his eyes, briefly and unmistakably. “What happened to me then wouldn’t simply be death.”

“I can tell you right now, if you got in a taxi and went a few kilometers in any direction, there is genuinely no way I could find you.”

Wen Yiqian could not stand this. The shame of it was physical. He moved to the other side.

Fang Yu rotated to keep facing him.

“I know you’re mocking me.” A thin, bitter smile crossed his face. “I don’t mind. Spare my life, and I’ll be the most reliable subordinate you’ve ever had. All the things you don’t want to deal with — hand them to me. I’ll handle them.”

“Someone save me,” Wen Yiqian said, clutching his own hair.

An elderly woman passed, gave them both a long look, clicked her tongue, and walked away faster.

“Please stand up.” Wen Yiqian’s face had gone slightly red. He dropped his head and shielded his face with one hand. “Even if you have no concern for your own dignity, I have some concern for mine.”

He would genuinely have preferred Fang Yu came at him with tactics. Anything but this.

“Does that mean you agree?” Fang Yu had the relentless quality of someone who had decided that pride was a resource he could no longer afford to spend.

“I’m not agreeing to anything.” Wen Yiqian rubbed his face. “Here is what I’ll do. As long as you don’t come near me and don’t cause me trouble, I can pretend we’ve never met. The dog arrangement — no. Just stay out of my life.”

Fang Yu looked up for the first time. “You mean that.”

He couldn’t read whether it was genuine or another layer of something else.

“Yes,” Wen Yiqian said, with the exhaustion of someone who has run out of patience. “And if the police ever catch up to you, don’t drag me into it.”

“Never.” Fang Yu’s expression opened into something that was almost relief. He swore to it without hesitation.

“Watch yourself.” Wen Yiqian hunched his shoulders slightly, stepped past him, and kept walking.

Fang Yu rose to his feet. He turned and watched Wen Yiqian’s retreating figure, something shifting behind his eyes.

His hand moved inside his jacket and found the cold, hard outline of a handgun.

He held it there, through the fabric. His expression changed — light and dark moving across it in turns, the way they do when a person is making a decision they haven’t quite finished making.

The darkness faded.

“One more thing,” he called out.

Wen Yiqian stopped and turned, his face openly wary. “What now.”

“Among my people,” Fang Yu said, “do you remember the one in the White Dragon Horse mask?”

“Little Bai,” Wen Yiqian said, after a moment. “The one who got away.”

He thought back. Little Bai had been mute — or appeared to be — hadn’t said a word throughout. That was the only impression he’d left.

“The real Little Bai is already dead,” Fang Yu said.

Wen Yiqian didn’t follow immediately. “What do you mean?”

“A few hours ago, I found the body.” Fang Yu’s voice was flat and precise. “The person inside that bank was not Little Bai. Someone killed him and took his place.”

His tone dropped slightly colder. “Someone slipped into our game uninvited, played their part through to the end, and then walked out without leaving a trace.”

Wen Yiqian went still.

He turned it over carefully. That Little Bai — silent, never once drawing the eye. Present but somehow absent. Even now, thinking back on it directly, Wen Yiqian found he couldn’t reconstruct the man’s face, couldn’t land on a single distinguishing feature.

Build, posture, reactions — everything had been calibrated to blend. He had laughed when the others laughed, tensed when the others tensed, played every beat precisely without once overdoing it.

An extra standing just behind the protagonist. Never the wrong amount of anything.

And no one had remembered him at all.

“I don’t know what that person’s purpose was,” Fang Yu said, his eyes moving briefly across the street around them. “But they’re not someone to take lightly.” A short, cold sound that was almost a laugh. “They could be watching us right now from somewhere nearby.”

Wen Yiqian’s arms came up around himself. He looked in several directions at once. “Don’t — don’t do that.”

Fang Yu observed this reaction and shook his head with something approaching amusement. “Too much. A person with nothing to hide doesn’t move like that.” He paused. “Your acting could use work. You won’t fool someone like that with these tells.”

“Ha,” Wen Yiqian said. “Ha ha.”

(End of Chapter)