The Forty-Four Hours It Took to Disappear

[Shu: I suddenly thought of something.

You were doing perfectly fine studying in the U.S., and your major was such a niche field too.

So why did you come back after getting your PhD instead of just staying there?]

Sitting in the restaurant, Wu Qie lowered his eyes to the question that had popped up on WeChat.

He picked up his phone and thought for a moment.

Had he revealed something inappropriate just now?

[Wu Qie: Why are you asking?]

[Shu: Oh, Sun Mi’s been pestering me to go abroad with the national youth team for a couple matches.]

[Shu: He said maybe you could help connect us with people you used to know over there and arrange some practice games.]

Wu Qie pressed his lips together.

Only after a long while did he send back four concise words.

[Wu Qie: Probably not possible.]

To this day, Wu Qie still remembered every second of that day.

He remembered how he drove the fork into Rhine Sevi’s eye.

That strange sensation had made him hate Western food for a very long time afterward.

Even in his nightmares, he could still feel the contradiction between the soft squish of an eyeball and the hard scrape of bone against the fork’s prongs.

When he climbed down from the table and hurriedly pulled up his pants, his vision was still dark from whatever drug had been slipped into the alcohol.

He no longer cared who had handed him the drink.
Either way, it definitely had something to do with those bastard twins.

In his haste, he groped himself once, wiping away the saliva left there.

Only then did Wu Qie realize he actually had a cleanliness obsession too.

His d*ck was noble and pure.

Even if the mouth trying to suck it belonged to someone who would never bow beneath another person in their entire life, that still wasn’t acceptable.

He staggered into a taxi and headed home.

Along the way, the driver kept glancing through the rearview mirror at the black-haired young man who had just walked out of that heavily guarded luxury villa compound.

He saw Wu Qie’s unfastened waistband exposing his underwear.

Saw his pale face.

Saw the blood on his wrinkled white shirt.

Saw the dazed expression in his eyes.

But the driver never asked a single question.

What was there to ask?

A brilliant graduate from a top university, just about to begin a beautiful new chapter of life, had simply abused some substances the night before as a farewell to his student years.

In that country, that kind of thing was utterly commonplace.

The moment he received the absurdly generous tip attached to the order, he knew to keep his mouth shut.

Wu Qie couldn’t care less about the driver’s probing gaze.

His head was splitting with pain, exhaustion weighing on him so heavily that he couldn’t even close his eyes and rest against the backseat for a moment.

He forced himself home, packed up the important documents, and left with his luggage.

His hands shook while booking the plane ticket on the way to the airport.

They shook again while buying new clothes at the airport.

Even while showering in the restroom, he was still trembling—

At the time, he had fully prepared himself for the possibility that he would never leave that country alive.

With every step he took, he imagined that perhaps in the next second a group of men in black would rush toward him, slam him face-first onto the ground, and stuff him into the trunk of an unmarked black sedan.

And from then on, the world would simply cease to have a person named “Wu Qie.”

So many people vanished without reason every year.

He would not be the most special among them.

The Wu family might be rich.

Wu Wenxiong’s name might carry weight throughout Southeast Asia.

But across the ocean, this was the foreigners’ world.

The pyramid stood right in front of everyone, and anyone could try climbing upward—

Yet for Asians, there would always be an invisible ceiling.

Wu Qie bought the fastest departing international flight available.

He didn’t care about transfer countries.

Didn’t care how long it would take to reach the final destination.

As long as it was outside the twins’ sphere of influence, anywhere was fine.

After passing security, he curled up in a corner with his eyes closed, waiting for boarding.

Every second was agony.

His heart pounded violently inside his chest without pause.

Only when the boarding announcement finally sounded did the black-haired young man’s fingers stop trembling around his passport holder.

He opened his eyes and looked toward the runway.

The sun had fully risen.

A new day had arrived.

Wu Qie took out his phone and logged into Picline.

Everything on his social media looked perfectly normal.

Amid all the chaos and devastation, to everyone else, this was merely another ordinary day—

Except half an hour earlier, someone named “Hermit” had sent him a photograph from an operating room alongside a headache emoji: “(@·@）”.

Wu Qie never replied to Biqita Sevi.
Not even with a punctuation mark.

He expressionlessly watched the gray “Read” notification appear beneath the message…

Too lazy even to say, “You deserved it.”

He removed the SIM card, snapped it in half, and flushed it down the toilet.

Then he threw the phone itself into the trash can outside the boarding gate of a neighboring flight headed for Japan.

And just like that, on the very morning after the graduate banquet, nobody could have imagined that their outstanding graduate representative would board a plane back home without looking back once.

From then on, the number became invalid.

The Picline account never logged in again.

Wu Qie returned to his own country—

A vast land with countless people, tangled social networks, and a societal system almost entirely separate from the other side of the ocean.

No one would ever be able to find him again.

That had been the most meaningful journey of the first half of Wu Qie’s life.

Including the layover time, it took him forty-four hours to travel from the United States to finally land in the Imperial Capital.

During those forty-four hours, he barely slept at all.

Ten thousand meters above the ground, he completed an unprecedented reconstruction of himself.

The first five hours were spent blankly staring into space.

The next five hours were spent endlessly questioning where exactly his life had started going wrong—

Like a broken machine.

Or a waterfall plunging downward uncontrollably.

It seemed…

Probably…

Maybe…

Everything had started the day he differentiated into a Beta.

All the effort he had poured in before that suddenly turned into a joke.

The coach’s admiration when he became a four-star player early on.

The sports agencies approaching him to discuss which Ivy League school he should attend.

The envy of his teammates.

His own confidence and pride, believing life would continue smoothly forever—

All of it vanished in an instant.

He stayed on the basketball team and insisted on finishing the final game of his high school career.

Whether people sighed in pity, expressed regret, or mocked him behind his back for struggling pointlessly—

It didn’t matter anymore.

Just like Rhine and Biqita’s betrayal of friendship at the very end.

Or his own foolish inability to realize those two mad dogs had been plotting for a long time.

He truly no longer cared.

Life was like an automatically flipping calendar, mechanically turning forward.

No one could stubbornly remain forever on the single day they loved most.

In the middle of the night, Wu Qie asked a flight attendant handing out popsicles for a cup of alcohol.

He downed it in one gulp.

Then he wrapped himself in a blanket and began trembling silently beneath it, convulsing as he cried bitterly over the catastrophic failure that had been the first half of his life.

Half the blanket ended up soaked with tears.

Only when he felt that continuing to cry might make him go blind did he finally stop.

After lowering the blanket, he turned his head—

And realized the elderly white woman sitting beside him was still awake, staring at him brightly.

She was an Omega woman.

Elegant, healthy, and well-dressed.

Wu Qie had no idea why she had ended up in economy class.

There shouldn’t be two runaway Disney princesses on the same flight, let alone seated shoulder-to-shoulder beside each other.

The old woman reached out and patted the black-haired young man’s hand.

“You can be broken, but you must not wither.”¹

Wu Qie could be shattered.

But he absolutely could not rot away.

The old woman’s final destination was also the Imperial Capital.

And so Wu Qie spent the remaining twenty-four hours receiving an impromptu psychology lesson from a psychology PhD.

Only later did he realize he had accidentally come into contact with a new psychological concept called “Black Vitality.”

The black-haired Beta seriously reviewed the collapse of the first half of his life and attempted to rebuild himself.

Before the plane landed, he made a decision—

He would calmly accept every past disappointment and every collapse.

But he would never allow himself to die in that swamp.

He could lie down.

He could crawl.

He could stop moving forward for a while.

But he would never allow himself to rot halfway through life.

“Life is in your own hands, young man. Maybe you feel that life is beyond your control.

Yes, time is merciless, but it is also fair.

It will not stay forever on your favorite day… but neither will it replay your nightmare-like yesterday.”

The old woman felt like a miracle sent by heaven to someone drowning in despair.

“Keep walking forward.”

It was as if a single glance from her had completely seen through Wu Qie’s thoughts.

“Life is an adventure.
Perhaps there are still tomorrows ahead that you will come to love.”

All the abstract philosophy was too complicated.

If Wu Qie had to simplify it, it was basically this—

You thought you had died.

But in the end, you survived.

You faced a new world with a new understanding and a new ability to adapt.

Congratulations.

What cannot kill you will only make you stronger.

Penang had springlike weather year-round.

Jiangcheng was humid and muggy, but still decent enough.

A little over ten days after fleeing back to China in disgrace, Wu Qie learned one piece of good news and one piece of bad news from the front-page headlines on Picline through the maid Dorota’s phone—

The good news was that Rhine Sevi had permanently lost his left eye.

The bad news was that after suffering a severe infection and many days in a coma, Rhine Sevi survived.

Originally, he should have died.

Originally, that should have been the best news of all.

Wu Qie returned the phone to Dorota, who was exclaiming that “the Sevi family is going to go insane over this,” then calmly turned around and continued drinking the mung bean soup in front of him.

The discarded domestic-brand phone from the family gardener.

The beat-up domestic electric car with no fancy technology or tracking systems whatsoever.

The completely ordinary Beta teacher Xiao Wu from Hongtie High School.

The Sevi brothers would never find Wu Qie again.