Distorted Faces

Zhuo knew that the news of his “secret crush” on the cold geometry teacher, Yuan Anqing, had successfully leaked to the students, but the teenagers definitely wouldn’t let him know they were gossiping about it.

Zhuo’s social intelligence came in fits and starts, but fortunately, his innate instinct to manipulate human emotions was highly refined.

“For the next few days in the office, you need to be a bit cold and distant to me, okay?” he whispered, sitting on Yuan Anqing’s desk. “We need to make it look realistic.”

After all, they weren’t actually here to have a high school romance.

Yuan Anqing’s brow furrowed slightly. “Cold?”

“Is that hard for you, Savior?” Zhuo slid his office chair closer, leaning into his space. “I’m supposed to be chasing you. If you’re too nice to me in front of the other teachers, it’ll look like we’re already dating, and the kids won’t buy the tragedy.”

Yuan Anqing didn’t speak.

Zhuo blinked his massive red eyes at him. “Can’t bear to look at me coldly, huh? You like me so, so much!”

“Indeed,” Yuan Anqing nodded deadpan.

Zhuo’s eyes widened slightly in surprise at the instant admission.

Yuan Anqing continued, “I’m just a bit unused to being intentionally cold to you. I feel that whenever I give you a stern face, you look at me with that pathetic, teary expression, as if you’re about to run to the bathroom and sob.”

After receiving Yuan Anqing’s blunt response, Zhuo let out a strange, soft whimper. To Chen Jiao, who was sitting across the office, it sounded like the whined protest of a large, spoiled dog.

After the whimper, Zhuo lunged forward and hugged Yuan Anqing tightly around the neck. “I can’t bear to be separated from you either!”

Chen Jiao: “…”

She truly couldn’t understand these two.

No matter how much Yuan Anqing liked Zhuo, he was physically incapable of being as expressive as the monster. Most of the time, Yuan Anqing still maintained his blank, corporate face. People who weren’t familiar with him couldn’t read his emotions from such slight muscle movements. As for Zhuo, his current persona was that of Yuan Anqing’s secret admirer, so he had a perfect excuse to constantly stick to him.

The two of them currently looked like a tragic couple about to be separated by a war, rather than two coworkers in a breakroom.

The warning bell for the next class rang, and Chen Jiao stood up, grabbing her lesson plan. “I’m going to class. Go do your PDA somewhere else.”

“She doesn’t seem very happy,” Zhuo muttered, sitting directly on Yuan Anqing’s lap. He turned to glare at the door Chen Jiao had just closed. “Why is she always so grumpy?”

“Mmm…” Yuan Anqing’s voice was muffled against Zhuo’s chest.

Zhuo silently looked down, realized he was crushing his Savior, and loosened his grip. Yuan Anqing finally had a chance to breathe.

“She just doesn’t understand the appeal of the dynamic,” Yuan Anqing said, adjusting his glasses. “In the past, when I saw overly affectionate couples in public, I would also silently move farther away.”

“She really shouldn’t be so judgmental. I helped her so much with her student,” Zhuo said, pouting. “I’ve been trying very hard to get along with those teenagers, even actively asking you to keep your distance from me so I look single. I’ve never made such a big sacrifice in my life.”

Yuan Anqing didn’t answer. He just silently buried his head back into Zhuo’s chest.

Zhuo’s eyes widened, then he let out that strangely pleased, soft whimper again and wrapped his tail-less body around him.

Meanwhile, in the hallway, Chen Jiao was conducting a pop quiz. She kept glancing at her target student, Cheng Yu. She figured this was a key high school, and the kids were generally self-disciplined—rarely did anyone pass notes during her tests.

But the news about Zhuo and Yuan Anqing’s “doomed romance” had actually reached Chen Jiao’s desk via a confiscated student note. After all, these kids were only sixteen; it was normal for them to be intensely interested in faculty gossip.

Cheng Yu felt incredibly nervous under Chen Jiao’s unblinking stare. Especially when Chen Jiao, after distributing the test papers, wandered directly behind her desk and stood with her hands folded behind her back, staring down at her answers.

Cheng Yu simply couldn’t concentrate. Finally, Chen Jiao asked softly, “Don’t know how to solve the derivative? Do you want me to explain the theorem again?”

Cheng Yu shuddered in terror and quickly shook her head, frantically writing random numbers.

Chen Jiao kept staring. She sensed the girl’s absolute, paralyzing nervousness and felt a bit frustrated. These children never seem willing to open their hearts to me, she thought.

Thinking of this, Chen Jiao sighed softly and looked back at Cheng Yu’s paper. “See? You can solve it after all when you focus.”

Chen Jiao asked again, “Why didn’t you write anything for the first ten minutes?”

Cheng Yu: “…Because… because… I was conceptualizing the formula, Ms. Chen.”

Chen Jiao thought for a moment, then praised her stiffly, “It’s good to conceptualize first. It helps avoid careless mistakes.”

Cheng Yu gave a terrified, awkward laugh.

After the quiz ended, Chen Jiao silently carried the stack of papers back to the faculty office, put her hands on her forehead, and started to self-isolate.

Yuan Anqing had already gone to the library. Now, only two or three teachers without active classes were in the office. Unfortunately, one of them was Zhuo.

Zhuo rolled his chair over to Chen Jiao and asked curiously, “Why do you look so defeated?”

“I’m not defeated,” Chen Jiao sighed lightly.

“Eh? Really?” Zhuo poked Chen Jiao’s arm. Seeing no reaction, he reached out and poked the back of her short hair.

“Tsk! Go find your Yuan Anqing! Stop bothering me!” Chen Jiao swatted his hand away.

“You…”

Chen Jiao: “…”

This giant guy is so incredibly annoying.

After concluding that the math teacher was unhappy, Zhuo became even more excited. “You can feel unhappy too? I thought you were an absolute ascetic—the type who wouldn’t even flinch if your whole family died.”

“I warn you, if you insult me, you might also offend Yuan—” Chen Jiao gave him a sharp look.

“Yuan Anqing used to be exactly like that too,” Zhuo said, pushing aside the thick stack of algebra books on Chen Jiao’s desk and lying flat across the wood. “Come on, tell me why you’re upset. I’m a good listener.”

Chen Jiao silently moved her chair a bit farther from him. “I’m really not upset.”

“I just don’t understand why these teenagers don’t want to share their lives with me,” Chen Jiao admitted, her eyes clouding.

“What’s so hard to understand? It’s because you don’t actually want to listen to them; you just want to manage them,” Zhuo said bluntly. “You’re lucky, old lady. If you weren’t, you’d end up like the old Yuan Anqing—completely alone without a single friend.”

Chen Jiao’s students didn’t dislike her, but they were terrified of her authority.

Chen Jiao sighed again, unable to refute his words.

Then Zhuo pointed proudly at himself. “You should learn from my social skills.”

“I… Huh? Yuan Anqing?” Chen Jiao suddenly looked toward the office door.

“I’m not falling for a cheap trick like that to make me look behind me,” Zhuo snorted, not moving.

“Something is wrong with this simulation,” Yuan Anqing’s voice came from directly behind Zhuo.

Zhuo jumped, quickly turning around. “Yuan Anqing?!”

“Did you notice something off on your way back?” Yuan Anqing looked physically tired, his golden eyes flickering.

“What do you mean?” Chen Jiao didn’t understand.

“This is the first time I’ve invaded another Savior’s mind-world so thoroughly,” Yuan Anqing said, putting his leather briefcase on his desk. “Just now, every student and teacher I met in the hallway… had Chen Jiao’s face.”

“Huh?” Zhuo’s brow furrowed. “That’s really creepy.”

“It is highly eerie,” Yuan Anqing looked at Chen Jiao herself. “No matter their height, weight, gender, or age… they all have your face.”

They still retained their own voices and student personalities, but Chen Jiao’s face was copy-pasted onto every body. On the male students, her face was noticeably more angular and masculine, and on the chubbier teachers, her face was wider.

“It’s very unstable. And the faces flicker—sometimes they look normal, then suddenly they glitch into your face,” Yuan Anqing said. “The visual is highly disturbing.”

“Because this is my consciousness world? Everything evolved from my memories?” Chen Jiao guessed, troubled.

“In theory, your memories should just be the structural blueprint. The continuous simulation of this world should have been completed by my Savior power,” Yuan Anqing said, his eyes serious. “But something is corrupting the system. An uncontrollable glitch shouldn’t occur.”

“I didn’t see anyone turn into Chen Jiao,” Zhuo looked at the other two teachers in the office. They had been sitting there all along, but they hadn’t reacted to the conversation.

Yuan Anqing looked over at them. As he watched, the two teachers’ heads twitched twice, like an old television with bad signal reception, before their faces glitched into identical, perfect replicas of Chen Jiao’s face.

Yuan Anqing: “…You two really didn’t notice anything wrong just now?”

Chen Jiao and Zhuo shook their heads in unison. For them, the simulation was still running normally.

Yuan Anqing fell into deep thought. He didn’t think he was the one experiencing the mental breakdown; the corruption had to be coming from the Savior remains they were analyzing.

Just as Yuan Anqing was about to speak, Chen Jiao’s desk phone suddenly rang.

Chen Jiao looked down, then her expression turned serious. “Cheng Yu’s mother?”

Chen Jiao exchanged glances with Yuan Anqing and Zhuo, then pressed the speaker button.

The woman on the other end first greeted Chen Jiao politely, asking how she had been recently. After getting Chen Jiao’s formal reply, she cut straight to the chase: “Ms. Chen, is there a new physical education teacher named Zhuo at your school?”

Chen Jiao and Yuan Anqing both looked at the giant sitting on the desk.

“Yes. What’s wrong?” Chen Jiao anticipated what the conversation would be.

“Well, I heard from some parents that this PE teacher has been… unusually close… to my Cheng Yu lately,” the mother said, her voice tight, trying to sound pleasant.

Chen Jiao interrupted her immediately. “Teacher Zhuo has a very good, friendly relationship with the students across several grades. The kids all like him very much.”

Zhuo’s eyes widened, looking completely bewildered.

He never imagined that the lively kids at school hadn’t misunderstood his intentions, but this human mother was already starting to speculate. He was a monster of desire, but he was physically asexual and emotionally child-like; he literally didn’t understand the concept of grooming or inappropriate behavior. He just thought he was playing a harmless game of “parenting.”

The parent on the phone hemmed and hawed for a moment, then finally blurted out, “Well, he is a male teacher, after all. And he’s so… large.”

Chen Jiao rubbed her temples. Before she could respond, the parent added, “And I heard Teacher Zhuo bought some custom gifts for my Cheng Yu? Isn’t that highly inappropriate?”

“He bought gifts for other students too. Just cheap plastic merchandise,” Chen Jiao said, her face falling.

“Cheng Yu is a student. Her main task right now is studying. Her mind shouldn’t be focused on those miscellaneous, non-academic things,” the parent continued coldly. “And I heard Teacher Zhuo gave her celebrity phone cases? Isn’t that distracting her from her exams?”

“Recently, our Cheng Yu’s grades have been slipping. I want to meet with this teacher named Zhuo.”

Zhuo was completely at a loss, his tail-less body shrinking back.

Yuan Anqing silently walked over and hugged him.

“Ms. Yu,” Chen Jiao’s face turned icy. “I actually wanted to talk to you about Cheng Yu’s grades too. When can you and your husband come to the school?”

Zhuo felt deeply wronged. He thought he had been more than appropriate with the kids.

Yuan Anqing whispered in his ear, “If she gives you any trouble when she arrives, just physically hit her. I have a way to erase her memory.”

“Okay,” Zhuo sniffled.

Chen Jiao, hearing the Savior authorize physical assault, sighed into the phone. “Ms. Yu, please. When you come tomorrow… don’t be too fierce.”

“Huh?” The parent didn’t understand the warning.