036: A Brown Little Piglet Appears by the Sea
Xia Moyè’s barking was really something else. Every time you heard it, you had to sigh over it all over again.
What a realistic bark…
It was rare to run into a kid who could sound that much like a dog. Tang Yu thought that even if a real dog came over and barked, it probably wouldn’t sound as convincingly dog-like as Xia Moye did.
Then he hurriedly brushed that thought away.
What are you thinking? You can’t just stand here thinking some kid sounds like a dog. That’s not right!
But after all, Tang Yu was human. Of course he had human thoughts.
With his eyes suddenly covered, he didn’t think, “Is there a yaoguai? Is Sang Zhao stopping me from seeing it to protect me?”
He thought, “Whoa, is he going to whisper something to me?” or “Is he teasing me?”
Especially since he was five years older than Sang Zhao, and usually the one playing the role of caretaker.
Having his eyes covered like that, Tang Yu couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed.
Even when Sang Zhao was hissing in full alert, Tang Yu still thought he was just fooling around. He lifted his arm and swatted lightly, only saying helplessly, “Don’t mess around.”
His eyelashes trembled against the center of Sang Zhao’s palm, like the flutter of butterfly wings brushing across his heart.
Sang Zhao was not messing around.
He stared warily at the sea otter drifting their way, eyes narrowing.
Then he looked over to see the stupid dog still going whoof-whoof-whoof at full volume, and his anger flared.
He jerked his chin and shot Ye Ye a look, signaling with his eyes so hard his eyelids were about to cramp.
What is this! Aren’t you supposed to be my dog? Where’s the teamwork?! Stop barking already, look! Look over there! Do you see that or not?!
Ye Ye was several beats behind, but a dog’s sense for danger was still there.
Once his brain finally caught up, he followed Sang Zhao’s line of sight out over the water.
Ye Ye: …？？
His jaw nearly hit the ground.
What he saw was more shocking than seaweed floating on the surface. The seaweed of the sea was one thing, but sea otters floating on the surface…
His expression was pure thunderstruck.
What is that? Is this normal? Is this allowed?
He grabbed the railing and leaned out to get a closer look, then shrank back again, hesitated, and finally ducked behind Sang Zhao’s back.
His mouth hung open in a dumb, slack way. He stared at the water, then rapidly swung his head back to look at Sang Zhao, then whipped his head toward the sea again.
Every thought he had was written all over that doggy face, those little expressions vivid as a cartoon.
Think of a plan, Cat! Once you give the order, your dog will bare his fangs!
But Sang Zhao didn’t feel there was any need to fight.
The sea otter was just drifting toward them, not charging over with bulging muscles and a salted fish to smack people around. This level of threat was still within the range of controllable.
He was a reasonable cat. He wasn’t about to leap in and slap some silent, floating sea otter in the water half to death.
Still, in those few seconds, the sea otter floated closer, and he could see more clearly.
And he had to admit, the little thing was actually kind of good-looking.
Its body was fat and round, thick and solid, looking extremely clumsy, with everything on it squat and wide.
Its fur was grayish-white, its head an oval. That kind of face looked inherently adorable, not dangerous at all, with zero visible aggression.
But who knows.
He couldn’t relax.
He stayed ready. The moment the sea otter did anything weird, he’d rush in and rip its head off.
Throughout that whole watchful process, his hand never left Tang Yu’s face. He kept Tang Yu’s eyes covered the whole time.
At first Tang Yu behaved quite nicely.
Confused, yes, but he didn’t ask too much.
After a bit, though, he started struggling, trying to peek out.
“What’s going on?”
He kept asking that same thing.
That was what made Sang Zhao start to panic.
He put a bit more strength behind his hand and refused to move it away, arm blocking Tang Yu’s view completely, shutting out every trace of light.
Tang Yu let out a questioning little noise.
“…Hm?”
He was clearly baffled. If Sang Zhao kept this up without an explanation, he really would start getting suspicious.
And human suspicion would be a huge blow to the cat’s “pretending to be human” career.
So Sang Zhao scrambled for an excuse, blurting out the first thing that came to mind.
“Ah, nope, you can’t look! Because, um, we’re… preparing a surprise for you!”
Sure enough, Tang Yu quieted down right away.
His lips moved twice, then pressed softly together again. He stood still, saying nothing, fingertips rubbing against each other in secret.
With Tang Yu finally calm, Sang Zhao went back to observing.
Good news: things weren’t as bad as he’d feared. The sea otter didn’t lunge out of the water to fight him.
Bad news: once it reached the shore, he realized the otter wasn’t alone.
It had backup.
There was a dirt-brown, four-legged shape that had been hidden behind the rocks the whole time: a capybara.
…What is this?
What kind of party is this supposed to be? We’ve already got a sea otter. Why do we need a capybara on top of that?!
And it wasn’t some little capybara either. It was a big one, obviously full-grown. Next to it, the sea otter was just a tiny sea otter.
The sea otter quietly paddled over, climbed up onto the capybara’s back, and the capybara gave a little shove, boosting it up.
One little animal stacked on top of another, the two set off walking in a wobbly animal totem pole, looking strange and unhinged.
Watching that scene, something in the back of Sang Zhao’s mind twitched.
Capybaras liked carrying stuff on their backs. They looked really practiced at it.
The capybara moved like it had done this a thousand times. And the more he watched, the more familiar it felt, like this wasn’t a “mount and rider” relationship at all, but something else.
An idea flashed through his head like lightning.
He suddenly understood and sighed under his breath.
I knew something was off.
That was the dad. The kid’s dad.
What human dad had that kind of emotional stability, that kind of Buddha-level detachment that was so abnormal it looped back around?
Of course it was because he wasn’t human. He was a capybara!
As a capybara, that attitude made perfect sense.
…But how did a capybara give birth to a sea otter? Wait. Was that kid even his kid?
In the time it took him to get lost in that thought, his grip on Tang Yu loosened a little.
Tang Yu was very sensitive to that. He thought the so-called “surprise” was finally ready.
He bent his knees, turned, and slipped out from under Sang Zhao’s arm.
Standing face-to-face with him, Tang Yu smiled, eyes full of expectation.
“Hi?” Sang Zhao said weakly.
He didn’t have any surprise ready at all. Was he supposed to just kiss him and claim this was the surprise?
Great. As if things weren’t bad enough.
In the distance was a capybara balancing a sea otter, and right in front of him was Tang Yu’s hopeful gaze.
He was stuck, no way forward and no way back, hopeless and lost.
Standing there, he shut his eyes in despair.
Why is being human so hard?
When he’d been a little cat, life hadn’t been this complicated.
Back then, his days were simple and happy. He just waited for his owner to come home from hunting and feed him. He could sleep twenty hours a day if he wanted.
There were no short, thick, cylinder-shaped animals wandering around his owner’s house, and no Corn Bean standing there waiting to see some surprise.
Now that he was pretending to be human, life had started picking on the poor little orange cat.
Luckily, fate was still on Sang Zhao’s side.
This wasn’t just him and Tang Yu. They still had Xia Moyè.
He’d only had the dog for three weeks, but now it was time to use him. A Samoyed’s brain wasn’t pure cotton.
Tang Yu was standing in front of Sang Zhao, so Ye Ye was naturally behind Tang Yu.
The moment he sensed something was wrong, Ye Ye jogged a few steps, squatted by the curb, and yanked a blade of grass from the flower bed.
Sang Zhao: …??
He knew Ye Ye was trying to help somehow, but this wasn’t it.
What’s with the grass? What’s the grass for? Is that the surprise?
What the hell, Dog? Grass is a surprise now? You giving Tang Yu grass, are you trying to say “草”?
Ye Ye also realized something was off. Just grass wasn’t enough. But you couldn’t underestimate a dog’s creativity.
He yanked up several blades in a row.
This wasn’t just any grass. This was dog-tail grass, also known as “fluffy dog grass.”
Hiding in Tang Yu’s blind spot, he pinched the grass near the roots and twisted it around, knotting the stalks together.
Twist at the top for a head, twist four times below for four legs, then pull out a bit in the middle for a tail.
In times of crisis heroes emerge; in times of emergency a divine dog awakens.
His dog paws had never been this nimble before. They moved so fast he looked like he could start knitting sweaters.
In the blink of an eye, he’d made a little grass dog.
Never mind the craftsmanship. Just look at it: a dog made out of dog-tail grass, a rushed little grass dog from a real dog.
Just as Tang Yu, still empty-handed and confused about his “surprise,” turned toward them, Ye Ye finished, and frantically held the grass dog up high in front of him.
The knotting was rough, the edges fuzzy and messy, but for a kid his age, it was honestly vivid.
Tang Yu let out a genuine gasp.
“Wow— oh my god.”
He carefully took it, eyes widening as he examined it from all sides, clearly loving it.
It was crude, the lines were uneven, and you could only barely tell it was a four-legged animal. At best it looked eighty percent like a dog.
But Tang Yu had a good heart and was very good at praising kids.
“It’s so cute. You did such a great job. You’ve got real artistic talent, Xiaoye.”
“In the future you could study art, you know. Look at this taste. Your little dog has a head and legs and everything.”
In his head, Sang Zhao thought, If it doesn’t have a head or legs, it’s not a dog at all, is it?!
While keeping a wary eye on the capybara and sea otter combo, he wondered again why Tang Yu complimented Ye Ye so much.
Ye Ye barked twice and Corn Bean said he had acting talent.
Ye Ye made a grass dog and Corn Bean said he could study art.
No matter how he looked at it, Cat couldn’t see any particular acting or artistic potential in Dog.
While Tang Yu and Xia Moye were talking, Sang Zhao noticed that the capybara, balancing the sea otter, was slowly making its way toward them along the beach.
He glanced down at his own very human-looking body, then at human-shaped Xia Moye, then at very standard human Tang Yu, and suddenly realized something.
Hold on. What was he even afraid of?
They were all human-shaped.
The ones who should be worried were the ones looking like capybaras and sea otters.
If their yaoguai forms got seen, the Yao Bureau sirens would go whoop-whoop and show up, right?
Once that occurred to him, he stopped thinking about hiding at all.
If the other side turned out to be bad ones, he could rush in and fight and exposing himself in the process would count as protecting civilians. You couldn’t blame him for that.
If they turned out to be good yaoguai…
Then they’d definitely hide faster than he could.
Thinking it, he did it.
While Tang Yu’s attention was focused on Ye Ye and his grass dog, Sang Zhao stretched, raising one hand high like he was simply loosening his shoulders.
In reality, he was waving at the capybara.
His gesture was obvious. The capybara did indeed see him.
The brown little piglet-looking creature jumped in fright.
Capybaras might be slow most of the time, but when they needed to move, they could be very quick.
On reflex, it jerked its head up like a startled stallion, and the sea otter on its back went flying back into the water.
Even Sang Zhao was stunned.
Holy little kitty, what a fierce tailless giant rat.
The otter hadn’t even had time to process getting yeeted, but the whole thing took only a second or two.
And in that same short moment, Ye Ye had already kept Tang Yu’s attention on the grass dog as long as he could, and between that and Sang Zhao’s arm movement, Tang Yu finally looked up.
He wasn’t blind, after all. His eyesight was perfectly fine.
One look and he saw it.
They saw the capybara, and the capybara saw them.
Even though he’d already thought this through, the moment Tang Yu actually saw it, Sang Zhao’s brain still filled with, It’s over.
Tang Yu would definitely be scared, then the capybara might go berserk and attack, and the war between humans and yaoguai would start right here and now.
It was over. He was doomed.
The little orange cat had become the fuse that set everything off. This great historic turning point was now resting on his fluffy shoulders.
But when Tang Yu squinted, leaned forward, and took a closer look, he fell quiet for a beat, then spoke.
And the tone of his voice held far more delight than fear.
“Wow, a capybara.”
In the stunned silence of one cat and one dog, Tang Yu rose onto his toes, trying to get a better view.
“It is a capybara!” he said, sounding honestly excited.
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