Replication
Yu Mao chose to answer Nan Changgeng’s question first. She stuffed her finger bone into her mouth to demonstrate. “It was bitten like this.”
The three of them all froze.
“Hey! Stop that!”
“Don’t move!”
They hurriedly called out to stop her.
Nan Changgeng was closest. She reached out and grabbed Yu Mao’s wrist, forcibly pulling her hand back out.
Fortunately, there was no sign the wound had worsened; she probably hadn’t bitten all the way through. Nan Changgeng let out a slightly relieved breath, released her hand, leaned back in her chair, and rubbed at her brow with a soft sigh.
“Any other injuries? Are you okay?” Yuan Li and Lin Baiyu stood up to check on her.
“No.”
In the short few minutes she’d spent with Yu Mao, Nan Changgeng already felt more exhausted than if she’d taught students all day.
This lesson had truly been full of twists and turns.
“Good thing nothing’s wrong,” Yuan Li said, unable to hold back her complaint. Standing behind Yu Mao, she secretly lifted a foot and gave her a mock kick, huffing, “What’s going on in that head of yours? If you’re going to explain something, just explain it. Why are you demonstrating it too?”
Lin Baiyu glanced at her with amusement and asked, “So how did this injury happen?”
“It was probably bitten at night. When we got up this morning, we saw her finger in her mouth, and there was blood on her lips too,” Yuan Li said, frowning as she remembered.
Lin Baiyu hissed under her breath, briefly at a loss for words.
Yu Mao had no reaction to their conversation. She only looked at Nan Changgeng, tilting her head. A faint sparkle flickered in her catlike pupils, carrying a trace of uncertainty.
She was thinking about the reason for Nan Changgeng’s sigh, then remembered Yuan Li’s earlier question and had an idea.
“The gauze got wet.”
The wound isn’t healing. I can’t let Changgeng see it.
After that, she cheerfully walked to the bedside, pulled out a tissue, and wrapped it around her finger; then she returned to her spot and stood at attention, staring intently at Nan Changgeng’s face.
But she still couldn’t see the woman’s brow relax.
Nan Changgeng was frowning as she studied her. It was hard to say exactly what she was thinking.
In the first half of her life, she had met all kinds of people—strange and inexplicable ones, gloomy and mad ones, upbeat and sunny ones, restrained and gentle ones… yet she had never met anyone like Yu Mao.
Her abnormality was obvious; both her build and her behavior revealed her pathology, but Nan Changgeng couldn’t make sense of her pattern of behavior.
Excessive attention and fixation on her; excessive obsession with her songs; and an excessive disregard for her own body.
An irrational, crazed fan? Not quite.
“What are you using a tissue for? It’s going to stick to the wound in a bit. There’s gauze in the first-aid kit.” Yuan Li sounded like a worried old mother, completely oblivious to the subtle shift in mood between the two of them.
She went and cut a piece of gauze, then took Yu Mao’s hand, removed the tissue, and wrapped the gauze around it before tying it off.
Yu Mao looked down at it and said softly, “Thank you.”
Yuan Li smiled a little.
Polite kid. Somehow, that made her feel relieved.
Nan Changgeng gave a faint smile and lowered her gaze. She shook the lyric sheet and began singing the lyrics:
“Accustomed to facing the deviations of reality… swallowing both praise and criticism…”
The sudden start made the three of them freeze for a moment.
Yu Mao’s gaze shot straight over, focused and bright, catching every fluctuation and tremor in the movement of the woman’s lips and tongue.
Once Yu Mao entered study mode, she looked so clear-headed she seemed like a cold machine, emotionless, the gears inside whirring at full speed with exact precision. No one would have taken her for a psychiatric patient at that moment.
Until the song ended, Yu Mao’s gaze flickered; then she opened her mouth and sang it a second time.
A complete replication.
She had memorized every detail of the singing that could be heard. Aside from the voice timbre, she imitated Nan Changgeng’s song as though it were being played back a second time.
All three people present had good ears, and the more they listened, the more shocked they became.
Nan Changgeng looked at her uncertainly, forcing herself not to interrupt. Only after Yu Mao finished did she say in surprise, “You have this kind of ability, so why could you sing this song badly? If you can’t bring out your own emotions, isn’t it easy to imitate the original singer?”
“Yeah, with learning and replication ability this insane, how can you still sing badly? You’re not messing with us, are you?”
Lin Baiyu was almost losing it. Her specialty was dance; learning a song well was already difficult enough. If she had Yu Mao’s kind of ability, why would she ever have to worry about it?
Yuan Li thought even more deeply. Looking at Yu Mao, then at Nan Changgeng, it was hard not to suspect she’d done it on purpose.
Although this whole thing had been pushed along by her and Lin Baiyu, and really didn’t look like something Yu Mao had planned, it was just… too suspicious!
“I can’t.”
Faced with their suspicion, Yu Mao only shook her head calmly. Her face carried a faint, unreadable numbness. “I can’t hear clearly what kind of emotion is inside it.”
Nan Changgeng pressed at her temples, looking at her with a complicated expression.
She was extremely difficult to understand.
Sometimes what Yu Mao said sounded like a riddle; the answer was right there in the riddle itself, yet no one could guess it.
Yuan Li and Lin Baiyu naturally didn’t understand either.
They didn’t even know where to start asking.
Fortunately, Yu Mao seemed to have noticed Nan Changgeng’s confusion and added another explanation: “I can’t focus my attention on listening to other people sing.”
This time all three understood.
“So I’m the exception?”
Nan Changgeng gave a soft laugh and pointed back at herself with her other hand. Leaning forward, she lifted an eyebrow.
With those exotic features of hers, even such a flippant expression carried a natural hint of provocation and seduction.
But the smiling eyes didn’t seem to reach the depths.
Her body, lowered in a forward lean, exposed an unconscious wariness and aggressiveness; the sharp chill in her brows no longer had gentleness to soften or cover it.
And the faint contempt and coldness in her gaze, though gone in an instant, still landed clearly in Yu Mao’s eyes, which watched her every move.
When facing Nan Changgeng, Yu Mao’s ability to read the situation had sharpened.
She suddenly dropped into a crouch and knelt on the floor, making herself shorter than Nan Changgeng. She lifted her head to look at her, exposing the vulnerable line of her neck without any cover, using animal-like body language to show she meant no threat, and answered seriously:
“Yes.”
The effect was excellent.
The surprise Nan Changgeng couldn’t hide shattered the emotional defenses she’d subconsciously raised, leaving nothing behind.
“What are you doing? Tired of standing?”
She laughed for real, and every thorny edge in her mood melted away. She couldn’t quite make sense of Yu Mao’s inexplicable behavior.
Lin Baiyu opened her mouth, her expression strange. “…Why does that posture make it look like she’s kneeling to Sister Nan?”
From an onlooker’s perspective, the scene really was bizarre…
The relief Yuan Li had felt moments ago vanished without a trace. She pressed a hand to her forehead, already getting a headache, and couldn’t be bothered to look at Yu Mao again.
Unlike the two who hadn’t thought too deeply, she really felt Yu Mao had done this on purpose. It looked like she was kneeling… then she really was kneeling!
But she couldn’t say anything. Some illusions just couldn’t be exposed; otherwise, the atmosphere that had only just become somewhat harmonious would instantly turn awful.
[What happened? Why do I suddenly not understand? Are you guys playing some kind of thing?]
[Done. Mom-fan has gone bad; I understood the CP vibe of these two in one second. This scene totally hits my fetish…]
[Little cat turned into little dog, and Sister Nan’s aura and posture really do feel so much like a master’s! I can’t take it anymore, Yu Stare-Stare get out of the way and let me kneel! Sister, step on me!!]
[This is the bullet chat, not the no-man’s-land; I advise you netizens to put on some pants]
Yu Mao looked up at the woman’s smiling eyes. Her gaze flickered slightly, neither shaking her head nor answering yes. Instead, she suddenly asked:
“Is there anything I can help you with?”
Asking that while in this posture, even if Nan Changgeng didn’t overthink it, she couldn’t help finding it odd.
Her eyes changed slightly. Thinking that it made sense to want to give back after receiving help, she relaxed again and spoke warmly:
“I don’t have anything that needs help, and I didn’t help you with anything either; I only sang a song once. Don’t take it to heart.”
As she spoke, Nan Changgeng stood up, preparing to leave. “Don’t sit on the floor anymore; it’s cold. I need to go to the practice room; see you later.”
Yu Mao’s eyes dimmed for an instant, but she didn’t get discouraged. She nodded obediently and got up from the floor.
Then she solemnly emphasized once more, “If you ever run into something that needs me, remember to tell me.”
She would wait patiently until the program’s recording was over.
Nan Changgeng looked at her in surprise, then nodded. “Alright, I know.”
She didn’t take it to heart, only feeling a little surprised by Yu Mao’s persistence.
Yuan Li and Lin Baiyu also stood up to leave.
“We’re going too. You’re not going to the practice room? Isn’t it boring being alone in the dorm?” Lin Baiyu didn’t understand what Yu Mao could possibly do by staying here; there wasn’t even a phone in the dorm.
Yu Mao took it in. She stared at Nan Changgeng for quite a while, as if reaching a conclusion after long consideration, then said, “This afternoon, can I go to your team’s practice room?”
At first, Nan Changgeng had rejected her as a teammate; Yu Mao had sensed avoidance, so she’d kept her distance. But this time she had come to them on her own. Did that mean she no longer resisted her approach?
If Nan Changgeng showed any reaction that might be interpreted as reluctance, she would take the sentence back immediately.
Fortunately, Nan Changgeng only paused for a moment before nodding readily. “Sure. It’s the third day already; everyone isn’t so strict about staying in their own practice rooms anymore.”
The three said their goodbyes and left the dorm room. Before leaving, Yuan Li even looked back once, her expression indescribably complicated.
This was fine now; she could stare openly without having to peek through the door.
Yu Mao watched them leave, then happily tiptoed around the dorm room in a full circle.
After that, she took out her earphones, hesitated while staring at them for two seconds, then, seeing no one around, took out the player, turned off the Bluetooth connection, and chose to play it through the speaker.
The deep, mellow cello drifted softly through the room. The volume was low, and the player hung in front of her chest, just enough for her alone to hear clearly.
Yu Mao walked to the chair and looked down at the spot Nan Changgeng had just sat in. After a moment, she crouched down again and sat on the floor, placing her arms on the seat and lying on top of them.
The warmth had already faded, but she caught a trace of lingering orange scent.
She decided that at noon today, she would go to the cafeteria to eat oranges.
The desk blocked her body completely; the fixed camera on the wall could no longer capture her, and only Little Flying Hero was still dutifully working, lowering itself to keep filming.
The audience could see Yu Mao’s side profile pressed against her arms, squeezing out just a little bit of cheek flesh, her large round black cat eyes gradually losing focus.
[Reality version: eyes losing color .ing]
[I can really feel Sister Nan’s influence on Little Cat now… once she leaves, it feels like even her soul gets taken with her]
[I thought she’d sit in the chair, but she just lay down on it directly… that’s a little perverted, no?]
[I think it already counts as restraint that she didn’t press her face against it]
[Restraint? Is that really a thing? She didn’t exactly seem to care about the camera last night when she was kneeling outside someone’s dorm room reciting prayer, and poor Little Sheep was so frightened she went into seclusion and skipped class]
[Can the production team be reliable!? When are they going to ask Yu Stare-Stare and Nan Changgeng’s story for us!?]
[I don’t think it’ll be soon. Even if the production team plans to ask, they’ll drag it out until later. The director of this show has a pretty bad reputation; she’s definitely shameless enough to use it to hook us]
The director, who was watching the live feed in the control room, paused at that bullet chat. She picked up the wellness tea on the table and took a sip, her expression unchanged.
She thought to herself that this netizen really did know her pretty well.
She knew she was shameless too, but for the sake of making money, getting cursed at was a small matter. It was just that after being cursed at too much, she was starting to worry about dying young; hadn’t she begun learning to take care of her health because of that?