Chen Ge hadn't expected things to go so smoothly. He'd only been trying to make himself look pitiful to build rapport.
Who could have guessed that Teacher Liu Zhengyi would be so direct — asking right off the bat who'd been bullying him and offering to stand up for him.
"This is a good teacher." Chen Ge genuinely thought Liu Zhengyi was a decent man, right up his alley. "The haunted house is short on someone who can keep the puppets in line. He looks like a perfect fit."
Chen Ge took a soft breath and didn't answer Teacher Liu's question right away. Instead, he lowered his voice. "Teacher, I know you mean well, but I can't tell you."
"Are you afraid they'll bully you even worse afterward?" Teacher Liu frowned. "Have you considered that the less you fight back, the more they'll see you as weak, and it just spirals into a vicious cycle?"
Chen Ge hung his head as though he were seriously weighing Teacher Liu's words.
"Don't be afraid. I'll handle it for you." Teacher Liu said it with an air of authority, and he truly intended to follow through.
After a while, Chen Ge seemed to finally make up his mind. He slowly raised his head. "Teacher Liu, my situation involves a lot of people. If I told you, you'd find that some of the students — even some of your colleagues — are hiding sides of themselves you never knew about. You're a good person, and I don't want to drag you into this."
"Involves a lot of people? I've met most of the people in this school. They wouldn't do something like that." Teacher Liu had a strong sense of justice, but he wasn't stupid. He ran through it in his head for a moment. "Apart from the principal, there are six teachers here including myself — a few of whom are experienced clinicians. From what I know of them, bullying students is something they would absolutely never do."
Chen Ge kept his head down, quietly committing every word Teacher Liu said to memory.
"If the teachers are ruled out, that leaves the students, security staff, and maintenance workers." Teacher Liu thought about it for a long time but couldn't pin it down, though Chen Ge didn't look like he was lying.
"Teacher, those people are one way in front of you and something else entirely in front of me. They're beasts wearing human skin." Chen Ge spoke through gritted teeth, his fists clenched tight, veins bulging across the backs of his hands.
Seeing Chen Ge like this, Teacher Liu was all the more convinced the boy had been wronged.
"I can't drag you into this. But if the chance comes, I'll tear off their masks with my own hands." Chen Ge wasn't just saying that. Moments ago, he had sensed a bottomless well of malice radiating from that security guard.
The guard, assimilated by the blood-red world, had no interest in Teacher Liu. But if he caught sight of Chen Ge, he would attack in a frenzy — and then Teacher Liu would naturally see the true faces of those "people."
"Very well." Teacher Liu didn't press Chen Ge to say more. He walked over to the two sets of student corpses and resumed his lecture.
Standing off to the side by himself, Chen Ge was getting bored. The longer he stayed, the thicker the blood membrane on his skin would grow.
"Teacher Liu is a good man. This might be a chance to test my theory — to see whether helping the souls trapped behind the blood door earns the approval of the world beyond it."
He headed toward Teacher Liu, but before he could get close, Teacher Liu stopped him. "No one approaches the dissection table without a lab coat on."
"Teacher, I just wanted to ask if there's anything I can help you with?"
"Forget about helping. If you can learn what's taught in class and go on to help more people in the future, that'll be more than enough for me." Teacher Liu shook his head at Chen Ge. "There are lab coats in the sterilizer cabinet. Go put one on first. You can observe this session with me, and after class we'll go together to find your teacher and see what's going on."
"All right." Chen Ge changed into a lab coat and a thick mask, then walked over to the dissection table to stand beside the four corpse-students, looking at the cadaver — the "great teacher" — laid out on the table.
Before Chen Ge had walked in, there'd actually been only one living person in this room — Liu Zhengyi himself. Everything else had been a corpse. When you thought about it that way, it was actually pretty terrifying.