“Is someone watching me?”
From the moment she stepped through the school gate this morning, An Ling had felt many gazes faintly watching her.
By the time they reached the corridor on their classroom floor, those gazes had grown even more numerous.
The gazes came from all directions.
She even seemed to hear her own name in the mouths of several classmates.
Beastkin like An Ling were especially sensitive to everything except people they trusted completely.
She could confirm those gazes were looking at her.
Some fell on Li Yang as well, but the vast majority were focused on her.
Whenever she looked toward the direction of those gazes, some classmates would hurriedly look away.
A few even stared at her openly, their eyes carrying a hint of smugness and contempt.
For someone as socially anxious as An Ling, this situation made her uneasy.
She instinctively entered a defensive state.
Subconsciously, she moved closer to Li Yang.
Her small hand couldn’t help pinching the corner of his clothes, seeking a bit more security.
Li Yang saw her small action.
He didn’t think An Ling was lying about people watching her, or that it was just her being overly sensitive.
His expression grew serious as he scanned the surroundings.
Those who had just been glaring at An Ling also lowered their heads guiltily when they met his eyes.
He had of course noticed something was wrong.
Between yesterday afternoon and this morning, something had definitely happened at school.
The probability that it involved An Ling was extremely high.
These past two days he had been busy with the major life event of exposing An Ling’s secret, so he hadn’t paid much attention to school matters.
“Let’s go. We’ll head to the classroom first.” He took An Ling’s small hand that was pinching his clothes and enclosed it in his large one.
Feeling the warmth from Li Yang’s palm, An Ling felt much more at ease.
As they approached the classroom door, Li Yang saw Zhou Meng pacing back and forth in front of it, looking anxious and glancing around.
Zhou Meng spotted them at that moment as well and hurried over, taking two steps as one.
“What’s going on, Class President?” Li Yang asked.
Seeing her like this, he knew something was definitely up.
The class president definitely knew things he didn’t.
“You two still don’t know? Something big happened!” She practically pushed the two of them in another direction.
“Hurry, hurry. Let’s find a place with no one around so I can tell you.”
The three of them quickly arrived at a quiet corner of the corridor where few people came.
“What exactly happened, Class President?” An Ling asked a little anxiously.
Although being with Li Yang made her feel much more at ease, she still wanted to know what had happened.
Why was a nobody like her being watched by so many malicious gazes?
Zhou Meng took out her phone.
As class president, she rarely took out electronic devices in the teaching building area.
“Look at this.” She flipped the phone over for the two of them to see.
It was a forum interface.
An Ling didn’t recognize this forum, but Li Yang was all too familiar with it.
This was the school’s student forum, privately established by the students.
Normally, classmates shared things they wanted to share and daily life there.
Most of it was various pieces of gossip related to school.
Which cafeteria window’s food had gotten worse, someone finding foreign objects in their food, which dorm was especially noisy after lights-out and disturbing other dorms’ rest, some classmate two-timing, and so on.
Most classmates were happy to eat the gossip.
This forum wasn’t managed by the school.
There were teachers or teachers’ informants mixed in, so most of the posts were gossip among students.
Li Yang often lurked on this forum too.
After all, everyone loved gossip.
It was one of humanity’s underlying codes.
Today, hanging at the very top of that forum was the newest and hottest post.
An Ling’s name was prominently in it.
【Gossip, gossip: An Ling from a certain Year 2 class, as a male student, is simultaneously being ambiguous with multiple male students. Suspected abnormal sexual orientation + two-timing multiple people.】
This post had been made last night.
The likes had already broken a hundred, and there were more than ten comments.
Li Yang’s expression was grave as he opened the post.
Inside were photos taken at unknown times.
From the looks of it, they had started secretly photographing from before the sports festival, but most were photos from the sports festival period.
There were also a few taken yesterday.
Except for An Ling, the faces and some parts of the bodies of the other people had been mosaicked.
Without exception, there was always a man’s figure beside An Ling.
And without exception, the actions were a bit ambiguous.
They looked like different people, but Li Yang judged from the clothing of the people inside and his memories of being together with An Ling that the people inside were undoubtedly all himself.
However, they had been photoshopped to look like different people.
If it weren’t him looking at it himself, he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell that the people inside were all him.
With photoshop plus the blurry mosaics, you only needed to edit the body a little to make them look like different people.
You didn’t even need particularly good technique.
If these were placed on someone else, they wouldn’t have attracted this much attention.
But with An Ling’s face that was prettier than most girls, it made the content of the post even more convincing.
Moreover, under the post there were some people who claimed to be insiders coming to prove the words in the post.
Li Yang clicked on the account that posted it, as well as the accounts of those few witnesses.
Without exception, they all looked like alt accounts.
This was a long-planned rumor.
The poster was targeting An Ling.
Li Yang could feel the small hand in his palm trembling with fear.
Li Yang turned to look at An Ling.
She was biting her lip.
Her body was trembling slightly from anger and grievance.
Tears had gathered in her eyes.
She kept her head down, trying hard not to let the tears fall.
An Ling was timid.
Li Yang knew that.
He was very angry right now.
He hadn’t protected An Ling well.
No matter what, An Ling was the person closest to him.
Whether in the past or now, whether An Ling was a boy or a girl, Li Yang had long regarded her as family.
He squatted in front of An Ling so that she could see his face without raising her head.
His tone was very gentle.
“I’ll help you ask for leave first and send you home, okay?”
An Ling grabbed his hand, shook her head, then nodded.
“Don’t worry. I count as your older brother after all. Leave this to me.” He patted An Ling’s head.
“You stay at home first. I’ll be able to solve the problem soon. Then you can come back to school for class as normal.”
He didn’t wait for An Ling to answer and pulled her toward the school gate.
An Ling didn’t resist.
When they reached the school gate, Li Yang took out his phone and called the homeroom teacher to ask for leave for An Ling.
The homeroom teacher originally didn’t agree.
Li Yang found an excuse, saying An Ling was seriously ill and couldn’t come to school.
Li Yang’s tone was very firm.
In the end the homeroom teacher still agreed to approve the leave, but Li Yang had to go to the office to fill out the leave slip for An Ling.
Li Yang himself also asked for leave for two periods and sent An Ling home.
Along the way, An Ling thought a lot.
She was a nobody at school.
Who would target her?
What benefit was there in targeting her?
Unless it was related to Li Yang.
But many classmates liked Li Yang.
Most classmates stayed at the level of secret crush and admiration.
Except for that one obsessed person who, from the future in the memory fragments, had used scheming against her to get close to Li Yang.