Special Talent

When the police arrived, Tian Buyi was curled up in a corner, trembling, a puddle of murky liquid pooled beneath him.

Wen Yiqian stood over him, kitchen knife in hand.

Looking at that scene, no one would have guessed that the one who had wet himself in terror was actually the criminal.

Wen Yiqian was apprehended on the spot without question.

If he hadn’t looked so calm about it, he might have been shot dead right then and there.

Meanwhile, Tian Buyi, the deranged criminal, received the warmest reassurances from the officers on scene.

“Don’t worry, the bad guy’s been caught. Everything’s fine now.”

Hearing that, Tian Buyi burst into tears, sobbing like a child.

…

Ditan City Police Station, Interrogation Room.

Wen Yiqian, his wounds briefly treated, sat in the now-familiar seat.

Hauled in twice in a single day: in a way, he truly was a special talent.

Once again, the two familiar faces across from him were Criminal Investigation Team Captain Li Weiguo and An Zhi.

“How do you plan to explain yourself this time?” Li Weiguo asked, arms crossed, his expression unreadable.

“I can only say… luck wasn’t on my side,” Wen Yiqian replied with an awkward smile.

“Luck wasn’t on your side…” Li Weiguo nodded slowly, then slammed the table and roared, “You call it bad luck to run into two deranged murderers in one day? You’ve really outdone yourself!”

“Have you spoken to the others yet?” Wen Yiqian asked carefully.

“We have,” An Zhi said, glancing at Li Weiguo’s expression before nodding. “We have a general picture of what happened.”

“Then you know I was just trying to save people. I didn’t do anything wrong…”

“Save people?” Li Weiguo cut him off. “Are you sure about that? Instead of calling the police the moment you spotted a dangerous individual, you impersonated an officer and played the hero. Is that your idea of saving people?”

“The situation was urgent. I didn’t have any other choice,” Wen Yiqian said, sounding a little put out.

Given how timid he normally was, the only reason he had dared to risk so much was a surge of adrenaline in the heat of the moment.

Looking back now, he still felt the chill of it. If his plan hadn’t worked, he could have lost his life.

Wen Yiqian was at most a bit of a dreamer: not the kind of reckless fool who charges headlong into danger without a thought.

When he entered that abandoned building alone, he had already mapped out a plan.

Plan A: find an opportunity to ambush Tian Buyi.

In that environment, with the element of surprise on his side, the other man almost certainly had no idea he was there.

Careful planning against an unsuspecting target: the odds were good.

Unfortunately, luck hadn’t cooperated. Just as he was moving in, he tripped in the dark.

The ambush failed, and he had put himself directly in harm’s way.

With no other option, Wen Yiqian moved to Plan B: use himself as bait to draw Tian Buyi away and give the grandmother and granddaughter a chance to escape.

After he led Tian Buyi off, the two of them slipped down the staircase on the other side and went for help.

It might have seemed cold-blooded, but it was the most rational call available.

An elderly woman and a small child had virtually no ability to fight. Having them stay would only have gotten them hurt. Getting them out fast and keeping them from becoming a liability was the right move.

The key to Plan B was simple: run fast enough, and nothing bad happens to you.

But the dark had other ideas. He went down again.

Which meant Plan C.

Compared to the first two, Plan C was a little less reliable.

It came down to one thing: deception.

All writers are liars. The deception begins the moment they put down the first word.

The more skilled the writer, the more readers they can take in.

Wen Yiqian wasn’t a spectacular liar, but he was a competent one.

What set him apart from other writers was something else entirely: his acting.

When writing, Wen Yiqian had always had a habit of physically acting out his characters to sharpen his sense of immersion. When writing a scene where a psychopath flashed a sinister smile, he would mimic the expression himself, sometimes checking it in the mirror to see if it felt right.

As long as he captured the essence of it, the feeling would land immediately, as vivid as if the character had stepped out of the page and stood before him.

Over the years, his control over his own expressions had reached a quietly impressive level.

He could cycle through any number of them without effort, and at one point had even considered going into acting.

That idea, ultimately, had been shelved due to a minor shortfall in the looks department.

When he had faced Xu Xuanmei that morning, the nerves had shown: his performance was still a little stiff.

First time awkward, second time smooth.

By the time he faced Tian Buyi that evening, it came as naturally as breathing.

In fact, by the end, he had gotten so into it that he went slightly overboard.

The plan had always been: scare Tian Buyi off, then get out. The man was a psychopath, after all. Push a cornered animal too hard and it bites back, and that would have been a disaster.

But in the moment, riding that high, he couldn’t stop himself. He ended up chasing the man with a kitchen knife down several flights of stairs.

In the end, he had nearly frightened the psychopath to death.

As a writer, Wen Yiqian’s strengths had never been his prose style, his creativity, or his plotting. His real talent was his acting, which was honestly a little absurd.

“After everything, there’s really only one question we want to ask,” An Zhi said, pulling him out of his thoughts. Her gaze moved steadily across his face. “How did you know that Tian Buyi was a psychopathic criminal?”

Wen Yiqian’s heart skipped a beat.

Most of what had happened tonight could be explained away without too much trouble.

But not this.

How could he have known, from a single glance at that driver, that the man was a killer?

Why would he go so far as to impersonate a police officer, chase down a taxi in the rain, and risk his life to save two strangers?

What had given him that certainty?

He could hardly tell them that this was the world from his novel and that the psychopath was a character he had invented.

Say that, and he would end up on a dissection table.

“Could it be that everything you said to Tian Buyi was actually true?” An Zhi’s eyes were full of quiet suspicion.

“That you really are a psychopathic killer yourself.”

“But you have no interest in ordinary people.”

“Your targets are other psychopaths.”

“That would explain why you crossed paths with two of them in a single day: because you had already been watching them.”

“And you can neutralize them using nothing but psychological manipulation, all without a shred of legal liability.”

An Zhi spoke without rushing, as if she were simply laying out facts she had already settled in her own mind.

She leaned forward slowly and looked straight into his eyes, her expression unreadable. “The truth is… you’re the most dangerous kind of criminal there is.”

(End of Chapter)