In the following few days, Qiao Yuansi felt like she was in a trance, experiencing a long dream. To call it a dream, she could clearly remember everything that had happened over these days; but to say it wasn't a dream, she felt as if she was not in her original place—as if someone had extracted a large part of her self from her body, her selfand the person who owned her body was no longer Qiao Yuansi.
No, that's not right, to say it like that is as if an outsider had taken over her body; more precisely, before the deformation of her face, her 'self' had started to change first.
The night she discovered that she couldn't understand her lesson plan, Qiao Yuansi could hardly describe her feelings at the time with words. Neighbors could turn into monsters, the world could come to an end, but if she lost her intellect, she wouldn't know who she was or how to survive. The foundation of thirty-three years of life suddenly collapsed and shattered; she buried her face in her arms and cried silently for an unknown amount of time before finally being persuaded by Shoreis to put down the lecture and go to bed, harboring a faint hope that maybe it would be okay after sleeping.
The next morning, she felt completely fine.
Shoreis seemed to have not slept all night. Upon hearing Qiao Yuansi's footsteps, he sat up from the sofa, his eyes following her as she moved around the room.
Just as she was about to go into the kitchen to prepare breakfast, Shoreis stopped her, spread her teaching materials on the dining table, and asked, "Can you understand it?"
Qiao Yuansi stared at the paper for a moment. "I recognize every word... but it's so hard to understand when they're put together like this and what it's all about."
"Then read it slowly, one sentence at a time."
Qiao Yuansi couldn't help but roll her eyes and bury her head again. She forced herself to read slowly for several minutes, only to barely understand one or two sentences; this small progress frustrated her even more, and she pushed the table and stood up, saying, "What's the use of reading this? I'm hungry, I don't want to read anymore."
Shoreis said nothing. He sat at the other end of the dining table, watching her go into the kitchen, watching her make breakfast for one; not until she had slowly finished eating did he speak again.
"The red marks on your face have lessened," he said calmly.
"Oh." Qiao Yuansi, reminded of the red marks on her face, touched it. "I think it's no big deal, it should be completely gone in a few days."
"You still think you won't deform?"
"No." Qiao Yuansi waved her hand, finding this idea utterly absurd. "I'm a living person, why would my face suddenly deform? What scientific reason could explain it? There's none, so it's impossible."
Shoreis' expression was as if he had suddenly heard something unbearable, and he stared at her with furrowed brows. "What?"
It's hard to explain why, but Qiao Yuansi suddenly felt like she had been stepped on, and all her defenses were up. "What do you mean 'what'?" she said, looking at him with caution. "Those deformations and doomsday, are you the only one talking about them? Was it on the morning news? Was it in the newspaper? Why didn't I see it?"
Shoreis rubbed his face, seemingly unable to believe the situation at hand. "You've forgotten what you saw with your own eyes?"
"What I saw must have an explanation," Qiao Yuansi said. "I've been hiking and camping for so long, and driving tired me out, I could have seen it wrong. And even if I did deform, so what? I still eat, sleep, and live my life, don't I? Even if I turned into a monster, the school would still pay me. Don't talk about this anymore; it annoys me, I don't want to hear it."
As she stood up to clear the dishes, she thought of something else and warned him, "Don't spew nonsense when you go out, or they can catch you for all I care."
Shoreis' eyebrows twitched, and he immediately looked up, seemingly stung by this remark and momentarily disoriented.
Even though he was annoying her right now, when their eyes met, she couldn't help but be stunned—the color in his eyes was so clear and pure, as if a small piece of blue sky was frozen on the snowy plains. She suddenly remembered that when she first saw him yesterday, she thought he resembled a wild eagle soaring over the mountains... this metaphor, how did she come up with it? Was it her idea?
She dropped the plate with a "clang" on the table, clutching the back of the chair tightly, and memories of yesterday began to timidly approach.
She hadn't forgotten what happened yesterday, but she had indeed been unable to recall it just now—the memories of yesterday were like old letters put away, still there, but far away in a drawer, never crossing her mind easily.
"Don't give me the textbooks," Qiao Yuansi said in a hoarse voice, still looking down. "They might be too difficult for me... Please bring me some general reading materials instead."
Before she could finish her sentence, Shoreis jumped up to find the books. He seemed to fear that if he was too slow, even a little bit, Qiao Yuansi might slip away from his body again, and he quickly placed a stack of books with the word "general" in front of her.
Qiao Yuansi's whole body was inexplicably trembling slightly, and she flipped through several books, feeling more and more frustrated and defeated; when tears welled up in her eyes, Shoreis suddenly sighed in relief, crouching in front of her, and whispered, "It's good that you can feel sad."
"What do you mean?"
"Listen to me," Shoreis said, his voice slightly urgent. "Those red marks are beginning to change your mind and personality. I don't know how they work, but perhaps we can suppress them in reverse."
"How do we suppress them?" Qiao Yuansi only realized she was crying when she saw a tear fall on his hand.
"By alleviating the symptoms they cause," Shoreis said softly, like a doctor comforting a child. "If you find these still too hard, do some simple mental exercises with me. You've said yourself, the virus can't kill a person one hundred percent, so why can't you resist and pull through?"
During the mental exercises, Qiao Yuansi's face in the mirror was once again completely clean, with not a trace of bloodstain left.
Strangely enough, even though her intelligence had not declined and she was still fast at math problems, soon she began to get simple elementary-level thinking questions wrong. She quickly became unwilling to continue, but Shoreis wouldn't let her go—despite his tall and thin appearance, his strength was terrifying, more like a construction crane than a human.
After pinning Qiao Yuansi down, he continued to question her patiently, asking, "Of the examples I gave, which one is true?"
She couldn't answer, so he repeated it. They went back and forth like a seesaw, and even Qiao Yuansi could feel that her condition was fluctuating in this repeated tugging, sometimes getting better and sometimes worse—but Shoreis was right about one thing: as long as she kept training to regain ground, the deterioration would be temporarily halted.
The transformation factor, like a living creature, slowly loosened its control when it realized that this battlefront was tough to seize. For a whole afternoon, Qiao Yuansi didn't worsen; the two waited in suspense until evening, finally breathing a sigh of relief—they had somehow made it through the second day.
On the third day, Qiao Yuansi's condition was much the same as the day before. They spent half the morning doing mental exercises, and things seemed to be improving; Shoreis' eyes were brightening, and he was getting happier. Had a bird not crashed into her window that afternoon, perhaps no one would have noticed the problem.
It was a pretty, unidentified bird, plump and yellow-brown, with sharp black tail feathers. It must have injured something, as it flapped a few times but couldn't fly. When Shoreis stood up at the sound, Qiao Yuansi instructed, "Throw it in the big trash can in the community."
Shoreis turned and looked at her. "It's not dead yet."
"It's almost dead," Qiao Yuansi said, waving her hand. "Just throw it away."
Shoreis smiled at her almost tenderly.
When Qiao Yuansi lowered her head again, she suddenly felt a hand grab her collar, yanking her up harshly, and she was hoisted on the spot by Shoreis. He dragged her to the door, his actions bordering on rough, and said, "Pick it up."
Qiao Yuansi wrenched back her arm. "On what grounds?!"
"Because you're not that kind of person," Shoreis said.
A rather large bird, flapping its wings with every beat, startled Qiao Yuansi each time, making her quite displeased. If she weren't afraid of offending Shoreis, she wouldn't have wanted to bring the bird into her home. Holding the bird, she sat down on the sofa, where a mirror was conveniently placed on the coffee table in front of her. As she settled down, she caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror swaying. It was as if a wave had swept across the surface of her skin, curling and undulating, in a flash.
She felt as if she had been frozen.
Shoreis, standing behind her in the hallway, must have seen the reflection in the mirror but said nothing. For a moment, the living room was filled only with the flapping sound of the bird's wings, the silence otherwise complete.
"Why... I haven't deteriorated, have I?" Qiao Yuansi muttered. "Why..."
Shoreis' footsteps approached from behind. As he bent over the back of the sofa, Qiao Yuansi felt a lukewarm hand slide into her neck, gently gripping her throat. Her trachea was pressed against his knuckles, making her realize for the first time how fragile it was.
"To be honest," Shoreis said slowly, his tone calm, "I thought the day before yesterday that since this world could still function normally, even if you were to transform, I don't necessarily have to kill you. You could live happily in this world with the other monsters, and perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. But now... I've changed my mind."
Qiao Yuansi's teeth were chattering slightly, and even the bird in her arms dared not move.
Posthumans were far more terrifying than the Changelings.
"I don't like what you're gradually becoming. If you can't hold on, I'd rather kill you now."