Twisted Love

Zhuo reached for his tail to nervously flick the tip, only to remember he didn’t have one in this human-avatar world of consciousness.

Chen Jiao was scolding him. Zhuo wanted to roar, “You f*cking know your own limits, old lady!” But he didn’t dare, mostly because Yuan Anqing hadn’t stepped in to speak for him yet.

“Do you know where the physical limits of a normal human lie?” Chen Jiao tapped her desk with her index and middle fingers, glaring at the giant ‘PE Teacher.’

The other teachers in the simulated faculty office acted as if they hadn’t seen anything, each busy with their own tasks in the background.

Zhuo replied softly, looking at the floor, “I know.”

“Do you know that this kind of thirty-four-degree weather isn’t suitable for staying outdoors too long?” Chen Jiao asked again, her voice tight.

Zhuo glanced back at Yuan Anqing and saw his Savior was still sitting there looking completely indifferent. “I know.”

“Then what was the purpose of making those kids pull drills until they dehydrated and collapsed?!” Chen Jiao’s tone was still calm, but she stared hard at Zhuo, hoping he would give a logical reason for his absurd behavior.

“I… I’m a teacher for the first time.” Zhuo lowered his head. “I was very happy to be helping.”

“Just because you were happy?!” Chen Jiao frowned.

Zhuo looked at Yuan Anqing again with wide, pitiful red eyes.

Yuan Anqing finally stood up. “They’re just phantom people calculated from your memories anyway. There’s no need to take it so seriously.”

“You sit down. Someone who’s lost all their professional principles after falling in love shouldn’t butt in now,” Chen Jiao pointed at Yuan Anqing.

Yuan Anqing silently sat back down, knowing he was in the wrong for letting Zhuo run wild in the simulation.

“I won’t do it again.” Without his Savior’s verbal support, Zhuo grew more nervous.

“This is a very serious incident! Do you understand? Huh? And why did you just add a tone word? What do you mean, ‘huh’?” Chen Jiao said coldly. “I don’t buy that submissive act for a second. The only one who buys it is sitting behind you. Go flirt with him instead.”

Zhuo didn’t move.

“This mental calculation almost went horribly wrong because of your interference!” Chen Jiao continued.

“Then I won’t come next time,” Zhuo mumbled, clenching his hands in his pockets. “I won’t follow you into the void next time.”

“Enough, enough.” Yuan Anqing quickly stepped forward, standing between Zhuo and the furious math teacher. “When Zhuo gets overly excited, he sometimes does strange things. It’s my fault for not explaining human fragility clearly before he went out to the track. Those kids aren’t real people anyway. I can make them recover from the heatstroke instantly.”

Chen Jiao watched Yuan Anqing mediate and felt a massive headache coming on. “You’re like a delusional parent with no boundaries defending a spoiled brat.”

“He knows he’s wrong and he will change. Zhuo isn’t a human; he can’t suddenly become one, but he is trying very hard to fit into society,” Yuan Anqing reached behind his back and patted Zhuo’s head.

Zhuo curled up tighter behind Yuan Anqing’s back, trying to make his massive frame look small.

“Zhuo isn’t a spoiled brat,” Yuan Anqing continued to explain defensively. “He didn’t do this with malicious intent. He was genuinely trying to help.”

Zhuo grabbed the back of Yuan Anqing’s suit jacket for comfort.

“You should know this is just your own consciousness world reflecting back on you. Your current emotions are somewhat off right now,” Yuan Anqing patted Zhuo’s hand gently, then looked at the math teacher. “Chen Jiao shouldn’t have such strong, uncontrolled emotional fluctuations normally.”

Upon hearing this, Chen Jiao paused and took a deep breath. “I am indeed not quite right.”

“Yuan Anqing?” Zhuo called his name softly from behind.

Chen Jiao turned and walked to the office window to compose herself. As she passed Zhuo, he shrank into Yuan Anqing’s arms, looking as if he wanted to bare his fangs and bite her.

To the right of the faculty office was the teaching building. Students who had finished class were playing in the hallway, and a few were hanging themselves over the railing like laundry.

“How do you even untie a knot in a teenager’s heart?” she muttered to herself, staring out the window.

“Just scold their parents like you scold me,” Zhuo suggested helpfully. “They wouldn’t dare say a word back.”

“Few human adults are as cowardly as you,” Chen Jiao pressed her temples.

Zhuo’s eyes widened slightly. He felt deeply attacked.

“Chen Jiao is just a math teacher; she can’t deeply intervene in those kids’ families,” Yuan Anqing explained to the monster.

“How do you know?” Zhuo asked.

“Because I also went to high school,” Yuan Anqing said. “Although I had absolutely no friends, I had classmates. I saw how it worked.”

“I’m the only one here who hasn’t been to school,” Zhuo grew dejected again.

“But you’re very smart in other ways,” Yuan Anqing patted Zhuo’s broad back.

Zhuo started squeezing into Yuan Anqing’s arms again for validation.

Chen Jiao turned from the window to see their domestic interaction. “In Class Ten of Grade Eleven, there’s a girl named Cheng Yu. Did you see her on the track?”

“I saw her.” Zhuo nodded; his memory was flawless. “Her behavior is a bit strange, like her socialization training wasn’t done well at the facility.”

“…She’s a pure human; there’s no such thing as ‘socialization training’ at a facility for normal kids,” Chen Jiao felt helpless. She thought Zhuo’s choice of words was particularly odd and clinical. “And since you made the whole class get heatstroke, how do you have the nerve to say others’ socialization training wasn’t done well?”

“I’m not human,” Zhuo muttered. “I’m saying her human socialization training just wasn’t done well.”

“How so?” Yuan Anqing asked Zhuo.

“Her cheerfulness seems incredibly forced, like she startles easily,” Zhuo said softly. “Other people can tell too, but they don’t say anything. They probably just think she’s weird.”

Yuan Anqing frowned slightly.

“She’s indeed strange,” Chen Jiao sighed.

“Is she going to jump off a building?” Zhuo asked, always so direct.

“No, that won’t happen.” Chen Jiao shook her head. “She’ll graduate smoothly, but this kid failed her college entrance exams.”

Yuan Anqing understood the trajectory.

“Mm…” Chen Jiao lowered her eyes. “I taught this kid when I was thirty-two. That’s the last I heard of her.” Chen Jiao’s memory was also very good, just like Yuan Anqing’s academic knowledge; she remembered every single one of her students. No matter how little presence they had in the classroom.

“This feeling is strange,” Chen Jiao said quietly. “The ‘her’ I knew was just a girl who didn’t fit in. But then I heard news of her again years later; she had already been married twice and became a mother.”

Chen Jiao was a person forever stuck in place. She felt her heart had aged, but her physical appearance hadn’t changed at all due to the Savior system. She also had no family or loved ones—forever alone. Suddenly, she felt she and that struggling student were from entirely different generations; the other person seemed like her elder now.

“Her once slender figure had been filled out by stress and pain, her youthful aura completely gone, like a woman of whom there are many in the world, yet no one cares about. Her eyes were murky, pain and numbness coexisting,” Chen Jiao recalled.

“Honestly, that kid wasn’t suited for marriage or family life,” Chen Jiao said. “She didn’t even know who she was supposed to be. How could she rashly become a parent?”

Yuan Anqing didn’t respond. He knew how common that tragedy was.

Zhuo asked, “And then? What happened to her?”

“She killed her child, then committed suicide.” Chen Jiao looked at Zhuo. “I don’t know the exact details.”

Zhuo frowned. In the past, he wouldn’t have had much reaction to such mundane human news. But recently, probably because life with Yuan Anqing was so good, he felt extremely positive. He was happy about everything and didn’t care about observing base, negative desires anymore.

So much so that his worldview was slightly shocked. “That skinny little brat is so fierce?!”

“She won’t be skinny later,” Chen Jiao pressed her forehead. “And that’s not important right now. The main thing is… I don’t know how to break this deadlock in my own mind.”

“Just reason with her. Even I learned to get along with people,” Zhuo said, thinking he himself had been a massive, world-ending trouble, and that girl was merely an ordinary human. If he could fix himself, she could too.

“Does the government dare to ‘manage’ you?” Chen Jiao asked Zhuo dryly.

Zhuo shook his head. “They’re afraid I’ll bite them to death.”

“Then you’re much better off than she is.”

“But I’m an orphan; that’s pitiful.”

“You don’t even have memories of your parents, and you don’t love them. What are you acting pitiful about?” Chen Jiao, also an orphan, scoffed.

“The love between this kid and her parents is twisted,” Yuan Anqing said.

He had probed Chen Jiao’s entire memory matrix and understood the ‘deadlock’ she spoke of.

This girl’s home state was incredibly unstable. Her father never cared about her or the household, only occasionally popping up to demand that his daughter get into a good university. Her mother, meanwhile, was extreme and neurotic; the girl wasn’t even allowed to close the door when using the bathroom at home.

In elementary school, her grades weren’t good, but after starting junior high, she finally wised up, realizing she needed to take responsibility for her own escape. She studied hard on her own and got into a provincial key high school.

She thought this was the beginning of a bright future, but it turned out to be the only shining moment in her entire life.

Her parents had no stable jobs. Her father was impractical, never learning to be down-to-earth. Her mother couldn’t interact normally with others—she was suspicious and mean, unable to stay long in any social group. Their child getting into a good high school was the only thing they could brag about to relatives. They reveled in others’ envy, while at the same time piling on the pressure, hoping even more that their child would stand out.

A good high school should lead to a good university, then to a good job. After graduation, she should enter a big company and become an executive to support them.

And then, the child they had pinned all their crushing hopes on completely cracked under the pressure.

This really was… a story that was nothing new—clichéd, yet always overlooked until the tragedy occurred.

Chen Jiao was just an observer. She was just a math teacher; she couldn’t really participate in the child’s past or alter her future. She was more like a forced spectator of this child’s tragic life. As a teacher, she had seen too many broken children, too many quiet tragedies.

But even if she wanted to intervene, she couldn’t solve anything.

“There are very, very many people who see the family problems of these kids,” Chen Jiao’s voice was cold. “And very, very many who raise objections to those parents.”

“If it actually worked, they wouldn’t still be like this in high school.” Chen Jiao glanced at her student roll on the desk. “The kids are already sixteen or seventeen…”

Zhuo looked at Chen Jiao, then at Yuan Anqing beside him. He keenly sensed the atmosphere in the office becoming heavy and depressing again.

Zhuo ‘ah’-ed, a bright idea striking him. “Then I’ll just sneak over and kill all the people in their families!”

The heavy atmosphere vanished instantly. Zhuo still thought his idea was brilliant. “If they’re all orphans, they won’t have to worry about this kind of problem anymore!”

Yuan Anqing silently reached out to cover Zhuo’s mouth.

“Isn’t being an orphan good?” Zhuo mumbled, pulling away Yuan Anqing’s hand. “I’m an orphan myself, and I like orphans too.”

“Stop emphasizing the word ‘orphan’!” Chen Jiao’s depressed emotions were completely derailed by the sheer absurdity.

“Then… ‘kids without parents’?”

“It’s not about the wording, you psychopath!”