021: Little Cat Heartbroken, Little Cat in Tears
In Sang Zhao’s opinion, even a fierce little orange cat like him didn’t count as “aggressive,” so how scary could a big-beaked pelican really be?
The psychological evaluation said An Tihu had signs of aggression. What did that even mean? Could it accurately predict when a big-beaked pelican was going to attack a human?
He asked Tang Yu. Tang Yu didn’t really understand the numbers either, which didn’t stop him from being scared.
Tang Yu lowered his voice. “I’m not sure about the exact metrics. That’s just what the report says.”
Sang Zhao thought it over.
He still couldn’t make sense of it. The more he pictured it, the more he wanted to laugh. I mean, how was a pelican supposed to attack someone?
Would she use that big tweezer-clip beak of hers to clamp a person’s head like a fried dough stick, and then not even bite through it, just open and close like a big pouch?
He couldn’t hold it in and the corners of his mouth curved up.
He wanted to laugh. Tang Yu absolutely did not. Tang Yu was really scared.
Noticing how unconcerned Sang Zhao looked, Tang Yu immediately got serious. “You can’t treat this like nothing. This could be dangerous.”
Dangerous where?
Was an orange cat really going to lose to a water bird?
Seeing how nervous Tang Yu was, Sang Zhao smacked his chest and made a solemn promise. “Don’t worry, ge. You don’t have to stress about this. I’ll protect you. So it’s totally not dangerous at all.”
Probably no big deal, he thought. Maybe the pelican had a bit of a temper, but who here didn’t?
Even the Samoyed had “aggression.”
Everyone there was a yaoguai. Even if they worked super hard at pretending to be human, they had become human after being monsters first. Of course some of their thinking wouldn’t match a standard human’s. That was normal, right?
How could a psychological scale designed for humans be used on monsters?
If An Tihu really was some ultra-aggressive, terrifying pelican, the Yao Bureau would have shown up with sirens blazing to haul her away already.
Sang Zhao could understand it. Tang Yu couldn’t. Tang Yu was timid.
He really was afraid An Tihu might have an episode. The suspicion in his eyes never faded.
To put Tang Yu at ease, Sang Zhao racked his brains to come up with explanations for Little An-jie.
“I feel like that report can’t be that accurate. And maybe she had something going on at home recently, so she was really busy and just clicked through randomly? That’s possible too, right?”
“Whenever I work with Little An-jie, her personality and temper both seem fine to me. I don’t see any aggression at all.”
“It just doesn’t feel reliable. It really doesn’t. Those assessment reports are not reliable.”
He explained and explained on An Tihu’s behalf. At first, Tang Yu could still listen. After a while, his expression went a bit off.
Tang Yu cut him off. “Why do you keep speaking up for her?”
Sang Zhao: …Uhh. How was he supposed to answer that?
He stiffened his neck and insisted, “Because I’m just as kind as you are.”
Tang Yu fell silent.
He didn’t think of himself as particularly kind, and his doubts weren’t gone either. Even so, he had to do something. He couldn’t just pretend nothing had happened.
Tang Yu decided he needed to sit down and talk to An Tihu properly.
Of course, talks between adults, especially between a boss and a subordinate, didn’t require him to drag out any terrifying stairwell handstand sprint horror scenes. A light, concerned check-in would do.
After thinking about it, Tang Yu slapped his thigh. “I should get her to use up her annual leave. Have her take a longer break, maybe a month off, go travel somewhere, reset, then come back.”
When he finished making that decision, he still had enough mental energy left to worry about Sang Zhao.
“By the way, Sang Zhao, you missed the last psychological assessment. Do you want to make it up now while we’re at it…”
Sang Zhao instantly took half a step back and waved his hands like crazy. “No, no, no, I don’t need that. I’m super positive, you’ve seen it, Tang Zong. I don’t have any aggression. Absolutely none.”
No one had said he did.
Adults doing a psychology check-up now and then was actually a good thing. It helped catch depression early and kept their emotions manageable.
But Sang Zhao resisted so hard that seeing him resist only made Tang Yu more curious.
They were stuck in a beautiful little feedback loop.
But since Sang Zhao hadn’t shown any particularly bizarre or terrifying behavior in front of him yet, Tang Yu didn’t push it.
When they walked out of the CEO’s office, Sang Zhao cranked his vigilance up to maximum.
He absolutely could not, must not, let Tang Yu see even a single hole in his act. Otherwise his little kitty identity would be exposed.
He slumped into his chair, munching on the crispy yellow dried fish An Tihu had given him earlier.
After a while, An Tihu got Tang Yu’s notification about her leave and came back in, bewildered.
She had no idea what was going on and whispered to a colleague, “Tang Zong is insisting I take my annual leave. I don’t even have any travel plans right now.”
Her colleague’s attention went off in a completely different direction. “Vacation? It’s perfect timing in summer. Jiejie, you should come to my hometown and play. We’re holding a beer festival.”
An Tihu wasn’t interested.
The whole day had been chaos.
Sitting there, watching the fluffy, white, cloud-like Samoyed surrounded by a circle of people petting him, and remembering Tang Yu’s nervous expression whenever he brought up that big-beaked pelican monster, Sang Zhao felt utterly exhausted.
When you were really tired, your instinct was to stop thinking. And he had already used up all his thinking quota for today.
So he slumped, zoned out, and slacked off. He had zero energy left to “reveal himself” to An Tihu today.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t cause trouble though.
He was a little cat with a bad streak, after all.
Sang Zhao cleared his throat. “Yeah, don’t invite Little An-jie to any beer festivals. If there’s ever a winter ice-fishing festival, fishing day, or all-you-can-eat fish buffet, then she should definitely go.”
An Tihu’s back went stiff. She slowly turned around.
Her colleague, totally clueless, laughed. “What kind of festivals are those? Never heard of them. Our beer festival’s been running over twenty years.”
Meanwhile, Sang Zhao put on the best innocent-kitty act he used to use every time he got caught raiding the cabinet for freeze-dried treats. He lifted his gaze slightly, eyes clear, and asked in the most natural tone, “What’s wrong, Little An-jie?”
An Tihu: …Tsk.
This young little kitty definitely had something hidden in those words.
Yes, at the beginning she had been following Director Li’s instructions, looking after him a bit more, and she had hidden her own species from him. She’d never been upfront about it.
So now, hearing that off note in his tone, she instantly grew wary.
Uh oh. Had the bird been caught by the cat?
An Tihu’s suspicions were about to punch through the ceiling. Where had she slipped and shown a bird’s claw?
She was always very well-behaved outside. She never reverted to her true form in public.
Sometimes she did have to sprint to work in a handstand, yet that was only so she wouldn’t be late, because humans were terrified of losing their attendance bonus.
Heaven and earth could testify that every strange thing she did was all for the sake of pretending to be human properly.
So where had it gone wrong?
Her imagination went wild.
She quickly narrowed it down to either yesterday, the day before, or today.
And today, the biggest event had been the “Samoyed abandoned downtown and picked up by a human” incident.
Her heart gave a hard jolt and a thought shot through her mind.
…Could this whole thing have been orchestrated by Sang Zhao?
Had he deliberately brought a Samoyed here to test her reaction and confirm she was Director Li’s planted eyes and ears?
The more she thought about it, the more sure she felt. After that whole mental spiral, the clear look in Sang Zhao’s eyes seemed bottomless to her. His pretty face picked up a layer of shadow in her view.
Such a tiny little cat, and yet so terrifying.
Her guard was completely up now when it came to Sang Zhao.
Sang Zhao had no idea that in An Tihu’s eyes, he had already become some epoch-defining evil feline.
He’d only meant to run his mouth and tease a bird a little.
What cat didn’t like teasing birds? He was just a very normal little cat.
Around four in the afternoon, staff from the Yao Bureau came by, bowing and scraping, to take the Samoyed back.
When the dog left, Tang Yu was reluctant to let him go. He hugged the dog again and again, ruffled his fur, and even kissed him on top of his head.
…He kissed that dog.
Watching coolly from the side, Sang Zhao saw the dog’s head go so dizzy with happiness that it might float away.
Why was that the reward he got?
Why wasn’t anyone rewarding the loyal kitty? Didn’t a cat deserve to hear “good baby” at least once?
Hung up on that, he couldn’t be a happy little cat at all.
Feeling dejected, he slacked his way through the rest of the day until clock-out. Then he pictured showing up at the Yao Bureau again and bumping into Director Li, and the bloody scene of getting yelled at again…
He skipped class. Immediately skipped.
On the subway back to his apartment, he got a voice call from the black panther.
The panther sounded both embarrassed and ashamed as he yowled into the mic, “I, I, I’m really sorry, man. All I remember is us speeding like the wind, and then, and then I don’t remember anything…”
Sang Zhao asked, “What about the pallas? Did you find him?”
“Yeah. He passed out on the second floor of some chain breakfast shop that sells soy milk and buns.”
Once they came back to the city, all the big cats had turned back into humans.
Only the Samoyed was different. His species was dog. That made him different from the black panther, pallas, lynx and the rest.
He wasn’t a wild animal, so there was no reason for mass panic. Wandering along the street with a group of big cats in human form, he was just a very eye-catching dog.
Which meant the Samoyed wandering the streets was easy to find.
The pallas in human disguise, sleeping in a bun shop, was not.
The shop’s business was only so-so and they didn’t mind if someone hogged a seat. No one bothered him, and he slept very soundly with the smell of soy milk all around him.
Once he heard that, Sang Zhao finally relaxed.
Back at the apartment, he stood in the lobby and sighed before deciding to stop by the Samoyed’s place first.
The Samoyed had made it home. Not just home either. He didn’t even blame the black panther for getting him abandoned in the city center.
In fact, he was proud of the whole thing.
“It’s fine. I used this chance to trick—uh, scam… anyway, the point is my mom-and-dad slots are full now. When the time comes, Jiujiu, you have to add Jiejie and Bro-in-Law to the group chat too.”
Xia Moye acted like he had stumbled into an unexpected treasure. He was over the moon.
He was also incredibly satisfied with everything that happened today.
He’d officially started liking Tang Yu. “He’s so gentle,” he kept saying.
Well of course he is, Sang Zhao thought proudly.
Even so, after saying goodbye to the Samoyed and going back to his own place, while he was lying on his bed scrolling on his phone, the scene from that afternoon came back to him all of a sudden.
Tang Yu hugging the Samoyed, calling him “good dog” over and over.
…Seriously.
Sang Zhao drooped his eyebrows.
It had been such a long, long, long time since anyone had praised him like that.
He turned back into a tiny orange ball of fur, curled himself up, and pulled his treasured little cloth over his body.
It was the cloth his first owner had used to wrap him up when they’d first picked him up. It was his favorite, most secret treasure.
He hid under his little cloth, curled into a ball, and dragged the tip of his tail slowly over his own fluffy head.
Imitating the way Tang Yu praised Ye Ye, he spoke softly to himself.
“Good baby. Good kitty.”
He praised himself slowly like that, and listened, trying to be happy.
Author’s Note:
If a little cat falls asleep under his blanket, will he dream of humans calling him “good baby, good kitty”?
Cat: prrrrrrrrr.
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