043: The Little Cat Gets a Part-Time Job!
Tang Yu was completely terrified by that one word.
That one “Mom” shook heaven and earth and made ghosts cry.
Whatever faint ambiguous, fluttery feelings he’d had were instantly wiped out.
What even was this? How was this reasonable in any universe?
In his 26 years of life, Tang Yu had never doubted reality as much as he did right now.
He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing coherent came out. All he managed were a series of meaningless “ah ba ah eh eh” noises.
Sang Zhao watched him, puzzled.
He didn’t say anything, but his attitude was obvious: What’s wrong with you?
Tang Yu forced himself to hold it in, then said, “I don’t know why you’d think that, but I swear on my character, I absolutely do not mean what you’re thinking right now.”
Heaven and earth as his witnesses, his conscience clear as the sky.
Who calls the person they’re in an ambiguous phase with “Mom”?
Who wants to be the mom or the kid in an ambiguous phase?!
Where had this gone wrong? Someone help.
Once Sang Zhao heard that, he hesitated for a moment, but then he clearly looked happier.
Great. See, it wasn’t like what Xia Moye said at all.
That dog was corrupting the youth of Catkind. He was definitely going to teach that puppy a lesson later.
Hearing Tang Yu’s words and seeing how violently he rejected being called “Mom,” Sang Zhao naturally ruled out the “family love” possibility.
That only left one other answer.
Yes.
Wasn’t this denial also a kind of confession?
Back when he and Ye Ye had done their emergency brainstorming, they’d come up with exactly two possibilities.
Either Tang Yu was trying to court him or he wanted to have kids with him.
Tang Yu had denied wanting kids and clearly said he didn’t want to be his mom, so wasn’t there just one option left?
Still, Sang Zhao just shook his head and didn’t ask anything else.
After all, if one out of two choices had already been eliminated, why rush the other person to admit the remaining one?
In a two-choice question where you know one is wrong, which one is right? It was obvious.
Even a terrible student like Sang Zhao couldn’t fail a freebie question like that.
He just squeezed the corn sticky cake in his hands, already sure of the answer, then looked up at the sky with the expression of someone who knew everything and was just waiting to be asked.
Tang Yu glanced at his face and finally let out a quiet breath.
His gaze softened, his breathing gradually calmed, and in the end he couldn’t help but chuckle under his breath.
“Then… do you still want to go eat with me?” he asked.
Of course Sang Zhao did.
He told himself this didn’t necessarily mean he was accepting Tang Yu’s courtship, okay.
He was only going to eat with Tang Yu because he liked eating, that was all.
What was wrong with that? Nothing at all.
He didn’t have the mood to play by himself anymore anyway.
He’d finally gone out to wander around, and ended up getting cheated.
Now he was pretty sure that when he asked for one jin, and the old man cut him three and a half, that had been cheating too.
The old man’s hands hadn’t “slipped” from old age. He’d done it on purpose because he couldn’t sell his cake.
Even when he got into the passenger seat of Tang Yu’s car, he was still muttering and grumbling, telling Tang Yu all his suspicions.
Tang Yu glanced over at him and shook his head slightly.
He comforted him. “Look, you’re tall, and your hair’s dyed. The old man could tell you weren’t easy to push around. If he hadn’t thought that, he would’ve cut so much that he’d have been selling you the cart along with the cake.”
The whole world seemed awful to Sang Zhao right now.
What a terrible old man.
Seeing a young person with a thin skin and picking on him, and now he’d gone and picked on a little cat too.
“This society’s way too evil. I’m going to be worse,” he said angrily.
Tang Yu tried not to laugh, his hands shaking a little on the steering wheel. “Yeah? How are you going to be ‘worse’?”
Thinking it over, Sang Zhao ducked his head and took a vicious bite of his corn sticky cake.
He chewed and tried to swallow it all in one mouthful…
Too sticky. He couldn’t.
His chin tipped up, his neck stretched out long as he worked on swallowing with a mix of chewing and forcing it down.
Once he got that bite down, he started talking.
“I’m going to take revenge on this world. Gege, pull over somewhere with a dirt slope later.”
Tang Yu had no idea what he was planning, but from the old neighborhood back into the city center, you could see plenty of little dirt slopes along the way.
When they passed a low, sunken patch of land, Sang Zhao suddenly shouted, “Here’s good. Right here!”
Confused, Tang Yu pulled over.
The moment the car stopped, Sang Zhao flipped the handle, shoved the door open with his hand, and practically dove out of the car.
On the roadside, using his pocket as cover, he pulled a can lid out of his spiritual sea, and then, using the lid as cover, crouched down and turned his fingers into cat paws.
He dug at the dirt a few times in a burst of fury.
By the time Tang Yu walked over, all he saw was Sang Zhao slowly using a little lid to dig a hole in the ground.
“What are you doing?” Tang Yu asked.
…That was the tricky part.
How was he supposed to explain this to a human?
It was kind of hard to put into human words.
In short, to summarize…
“I’m going to bury this disgusting cake as an offering to Earth,” he snarled. “I’m going to take revenge on society. I’m treating all humans and all animals together.”
Tang Yu opened his mouth and then shut it again.
It was clear he’d wanted to say something, but in the end nothing came out.
It was a very childish way of getting revenge, but actually, it was pretty good.
No one got hurt except for Sang Zhao himself.
Thinking it over, he decided it wasn’t a bad idea at all.
Environmentally friendly too.
Returning to the earth and nourishing the flowers.
He couldn’t just stand there watching though, so he started helping out as well.
Honestly, he was spoiling Sang Zhao a little.
It was the same energy as those parents of little terrors who smack the floor a few times when their kid trips, saying, “How dare you trip my kid.”
Filling the dirt back into the hole, he really did feel like that.
He didn’t say it out loud, but weren’t his actions screaming, how dare you feed my kid something this nasty, and Fine, all of Earth can have a taste, and he’s in a bad mood so all of you had better get buried with him…
He complained silently in his head, but his hands were fast, fully playing the role of accomplice.
“…So you just kept him company on a random empty lot to bury a disgusting sponge cake?”
This comment came from the vice president, whom Tang Yu had called over.
They’d known each other for years. After listening to the whole story, the vice president could not help blurting out in disbelief.
Tang Yu nodded.
The vice president stared for a moment, then started snickering, and finally burst into full laughter, clutching his stomach and collapsing onto the rug in Tang Yu’s living room.
Tang Yu’s face soured. “I called you over to help me analyze this, not to mine material for your comedy routine.”
“Come on, Tang Yu. We’ve known each other since college. After all these years, I’ve never once seen you have so much dumb patience that you’d do something this stupid,” the vice president said, catching his breath.
“I’m asking you for help because I’ve never dated before. If you keep laughing, I’m kicking you out,” Tang Yu said coldly.
The vice president wasn’t scared at all. He laughed even harder.
“No, seriously, why wasn’t I there? If I’d been there, I definitely would’ve taken a photo. ‘President Tang digs a hole to bury cake.’ That’d be enough to hold over your head for the next eighty years.”
Tang Yu drifted off a little, going quiet.
“It’s not something to hold over me,” he said after a moment.
“It’s really not,” he repeated.
His gaze turned clear and tender.
Every single thing he did with Sang Zhao, no matter how silly or ridiculous or absurd it sounded, was not some embarrassing little black mark.
It was fun, adorable, and worth remembering.
They were beautiful memories.
Faced with his sudden gentleness, the vice president also sobered up a bit.
He genuinely wanted to help, so he thought it over carefully and asked, “So you’re sure you’re interested in him?”
“Interested” felt too casual to Tang Yu.
It sounded like he wasn’t serious enough.
Not proper, not weighty.
So in his mind, he switched the word.
Not “interested,” but “moved.” That was much more accurate.
His heart was undeniably moved by Sang Zhao.
Tang Yu’s eyes lost focus as he said, “It’s a clean, pure kind of liking.”
“You know I was the bookish type when I was a student. My head was full of weekly quizzes, monthly exams, midterms, finals, the high school entrance exam, the college entrance exam… I just wanted good grades. I never thought about anything else.”
Resting his chin in his hand, he looked thoughtful. “There was no such word as ‘heart-flutter’ in my youth. It was all dark and heavy. A lot of pressure.”
Then, after he had already walked through all that heavy grey, Sang Zhao had appeared out of nowhere.
He jumped right into his life.
Describing how they met, Tang Yu smiled and said, “It’s like in the half-dead part of my adult life, I finally caught hold of a brilliant, colorful adolescence that showed up ten years late.”
Hearing that, the vice president’s expression got complicated.
He sat right down on the carpet.
He was fully settling in to ship them.
Tang Yu slowly dissected his own feelings. “It’s this kind of bright, lively, burning, dazzling emotion that… honestly, is a little unfamiliar to me.”
“He, and his family, and everything about him, they’re all vivid and dazzling.”
He even grumbled, half confused, “These past couple of days I’ve found the planning drafts and dead spreadsheets less hateful. I actually smile while I’m making PowerPoints. I don’t even feel like myself.”
“Do you think I’ve been abused by work until I’ve turned into some kind of weirdo?” he asked.
The vice president shot straight through the nonsense. “No, you’re not a weirdo. You’re in love.”
Smacking his lips, he was honestly shocked by the change.
But because the target was Sang Zhao, and his impression of Sang Zhao was that of an elementary schooler, he fell back on a more tactful line.
“I just don’t get it. Isn’t that kid a little… dumb?” he muttered.
Tang Yu glared immediately, clearly not allowing him to say that.
But thinking of Sang Zhao, his lips curved anyway.
Leaning back on the sofa, he looked down at his own fingertips.
“What’s the point of being that smart,” he said, defending him. “Look at him. He’s perfectly happy being how he is. He and his family… they’re very happy.”
Then he turned his words on himself.
“I don’t think I’ve ever really relaxed. I’ve always been trying so hard,” he admitted. “Studying, exams, starting a business.
“I’ve had so much pressure I started smoking and lost sleep.
“Night falls and dawn comes, again and again, the sky always ends up brightening eventually, but it’s still hard for me to feel happy.”
Maybe what he liked about Sang Zhao was precisely that freedom.
He sighed softly.
“I think… he’s the shape of happiness I’ve always imagined for myself,” he said. “How could I not like him?”
The vice president was actually moved.
He just refused to admit it.
Looking at Tang Yu’s empty expression, he knew perfectly well that Tang Yu was honestly envious of, fond of, and cherishing Sang Zhao.
He was touched by it and then deliberately ruined the mood. “Cut your AC and you’ll stop being this dramatic.”
He grumbled two lines, pretending to be unwilling. “Whatever. I’m still shipping it. When you two get married, remember to make me the flower boy.”
He didn’t want to be best man. He wanted to be the flower boy.
As if Tang Yu would ever indulge him.
He already had his own flower boy in mind.
Thinking of Xia Moye’s pretty little face, he chuckled. “No need. We already have a flower boy.”
If—
If there really ever came such a day, Tang Yu thought.
He’d have Xiao Ye wear a tiny suit and be their flower boy.
While Tang Yu was stuck pondering love and not-love, Sang Zhao was thinking about more practical things.
Namely, life.
…Life was very hard.
He’d been cheated out of sixty-eight yuan today.
Before, he’d thought his three thousand yuan salary was endless and felt very pleased with himself.
But Jiangyuan was a big city.
Lots of good food, all expensive.
A few extra takeout meals here, a few online orders there, and it all cost money.
He had never been good at math.
All he could do was stare at the shrinking number in his WeChat wallet every day and calculate how many days were left until payday.
He checked his pantry and sighed.
One paycheck wasn’t enough to eat all the good food he wanted.
That was when he thought, if he could have two paychecks, wouldn’t that be perfect?
One salary for food, one salary for online shopping.
That would be more than enough.
Aside from him, the one thing that understood him best was the big data push mechanism on his phone.
The moment he had this idea, he went searching, dreamed of getting two salaries then set the thought aside…
His video feed started shoving part-time gigs and side hustles at him nonstop.
He actually took them seriously and checked them one by one.
“Ranking the hottest part-time side gigs right now. Learn photography and portrait shoots, one commercial job gives you serious profit…”
“Teaching you, step by step, how to start a social media account. Find your niche and content tone, gain a thousand followers in thirty days…”
“Hiring live-in night shift customer service. Hours from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Easy work, zero pressure!”
…
“Easy” and “zero pressure,” huh.
Working from six in the evening to two in the morning, how was that “light work with no pressure”?
That was pure labor. Brutal labor.
A cat was not doing that.
The first two actually interested him.
He rewound the videos and opened up the comments sections.
He had to read slowly, so he took a long time with them.
In the end, he realized he’d been tricked again.
They were all course sellers.
He’d thought humans were going to teach a little cat how to make money.
Turned out it was the other way around.
They wanted to take money from him.
He really had no money left for them to take.
Plus the comments were all “sharing tutorials and tips,” but the more he read, the more they turned into “DM me,” “DM me,” “DM me privately.”
All that “ss sss ss,” like snakes.
He didn’t want to buy a course or pay anyone.
He’d just gotten scammed by humans and was feeling timid.
Now he felt like humans all wanted to cheat him out of six mao.
Six mao was still money.
A nontrivial amount, in his opinion.
So he thought for a bit and kept scrolling.
He saw netizens complaining about the whole course-selling trend and saying the only truly profitable side hustle was four characters:
He squinted at them. He knew all the characters. It said: “Not eating dinner.”
…That actually made sense.
It really did save money.
When money was hard to earn, saving money was the same as making money.
Wasn’t that an excellent side hustle.
Except he couldn’t do it.
If he didn’t eat dinner, he’d lose all his motivation to love life. He wouldn’t even feel like living.
So that was out.
He eliminated it without hesitation and kept scrolling until he saw a video about making money walking other people’s dogs.
That looked promising.
He was strong. He could do that.
He wasn’t afraid of being dragged around by a dog.
But, if he was being honest… he didn’t like dogs that much.
Being dragged around by one wasn’t fun, and being surrounded by overly excited dogs with furry paws on him and wet tongues licking his fingers, just thinking about it made his skin crawl.
Still…
It gave him an idea.
He couldn’t walk dogs, but he could do cat-related side gigs to make some spending money, couldn’t he?
A lot of the time, cats were less cooperative than dogs.
Baths and nail trims were a pain.
Oh, and when owners had to travel, they often left their cats home alone and needed someone to come feed them.
He could do that.
Once he’d thought of it, he wanted to try.
He needed clients and someone to hire him first, though.
He’d need some kind of advertisement so people would see it and reach out.
The problem was, he didn’t know how to write copy or run ads online.
He’d stayed home and struggled with it for days and just couldn’t do it.
When Xia Moye heard about it, he really wanted to help, but he was even worse.
The puppy brains churned once, he slapped his own leg, and said that the border collie teacher upstairs had every skill under the sun.
Word, Excel, PPT, Java, PS, this-that-ABCD-ABO, that border collie knew them all.
Ye Ye said maybe they could ask Teacher Bian to make a poster.
Then in the future, if Sang Zhao wanted to advertise, he could just post an image and the job would be done.
Of course that made him happy.
Unfortunately, the border collie was insanely busy.
After he added Teacher Bian on WeChat, he never got a chance to see him face-to-face upstairs.
It sounded like he was working on some project and basically living at school.
But teacher or not, he was reliable.
He’d asked for all of Sang Zhao’s info, plus a selfie.
Silly as ever, Sang Zhao sent him a voice message. “What do you need my photo for?”
The border collie replied with a voice message.
As soon as he hit play, Sang Zhao felt like he was listening to Xia Moye’s homeroom teacher.
That voice was terrifying, the kind where just talking normally felt like urging you to study harder.
Teacher Bian said bluntly, “Because Ye Ye says you’re very good-looking.”
He was painfully rational, weighing pros and cons like a pro.
“In human society, if you have an advantage, you use it. Regular cat-feeding services are already saturated. Where are you going to get business?”
“You’re not doing regular cat-feeding,” he said, making a decisive declaration. “You’re doing handsome-guy cat-feeding.”
Sang Zhao made a confused little noise. “Oh.”
He could, of course, go to people’s homes and feed their cats, but anyone could do that.
As Teacher Bian said, that didn’t distinguish him from the rest.
If you wanted to earn money doing something, you needed to be different.
Teacher Bian wrote up a poster for him:
“In-home cat feeding with playtime included. Brushing, baths, and nail trims. Old problem cats, broken cats, bad-tempered cats, biting cats, destructive cats, cats you can’t beat in a fight, I’ll return them as good cats, new cats, sweet-tempered cats, cats who score a hundred out of a hundred in Cat Morals.”
On top of the text, the most eye-catching thing on the poster was the photo.
In it, his orange hair was fluffed up, his chin tipped slightly, a teenager’s attitude practically spilling out of the screen.
He was killing people with his looks.
Looking over the poster, he went quiet for a long moment and then hit the voice button.
“There’s no such thing as an ‘old broken cat’…”
How could he call little kitties that.
Smart dogs and dumb dogs alike made cats puff up in anger.
Still, as Teacher Border Collie had said, that was his advantage.
He could handle any cat.
Timid or fierce, punchy, scratchy, screaming, wailing, whichever type.
He could get along with any kind of personality.
Such a useful skill obviously could earn him money.
Especially in a big city like Jiangyuan, where tons of people had pets and a huge number of them were cats.
He set his prices: twenty yuan for a feeding visit, sixty for a bath, brushing and nail trims free and thrown in, and an extra five yuan per five kilometers.
Once the ad went up, locals started seeing it.
Drawn in by the devastatingly good looks, they clicked in and found out it was for in-home cat feeding.
They had to find someone to feed their cats anyway.
Compared to a total stranger, a silly boy who’d used his own pretty face as his poster felt safer somehow.
That’s what everyone thought.
So the jobs started coming.
At first they trickled in.
He only got low-price feeding requests.
A little slow on the uptake, he was very serious about his process: disinfecting before going in, putting on shoe covers and gloves, and video calling the owner while working, doing everything meticulously.
He was thorough.
And his way with cats was so good it practically seemed like he had magic.
Fierce cats looked like they’d seen ghosts the moment they saw him.
Not only did they behave while he was there, after he left, their owners found them softer and better-behaved too.
So after only a few jobs, word spread quickly from one cat owner to another.
His little business started getting a good reputation.
Soon he wasn’t just working with regulars but also their friends.
It was going great.
After a while, jobs were coming at him from every direction.
He was slowly getting a name in the local cat circle.
Curious, Xia Moye kept asking about this side gig.
He even asked whether he could chat with cats while working.
If you had to keep your head down working anyway, why not chat for a bit?
But Sang Zhao refused.
Cats with enough spiritual energy were rare, and cats who could string together full sentences in human language were basically nonexistent.
On the job, the cats he met were mostly just “meow meow meow, mii mii mii, ao ao ao, Lao Wu Lao Wu,” all nonsense meowing.
If they meowed enough, a few whispers might sneak into his ears, but even then they were fragmented, meaningless phrases.
“Mom.”
“Food.”
“Fun.”
Stuff like that.
What was there to talk about?
He couldn’t have a decent conversation with them at all.
One day, he finished his regular job and went to do a side gig on the way home.
This client lived near the office, so it was convenient and he didn’t need to go out of his way.
He made an exception and took a quick nail-trim-only job for ten yuan.
The client clearly thought she’d gotten an amazing deal.
But as far as he was concerned, he was the one who’d made out well.
Ten yuan could buy a Mixue drink and a grilled sausage.
He was using his labor to earn his food.
That was extremely cool.
Today’s cat was obviously bold.
He had it in his arms and was trying to trim its nails, but not only was it uncooperative, it actually tried to struggle free.
“Bring something it likes to eat,” he said to the owner.
She brought over a handful of freeze-dried treats.
He took them all, palming them and feeding the cat one piece at a time from between his fingers.
Dangling them like a carrot on a string, he let the cat see them but never all at once.
Using the treats to hold the cat’s attention, he moved fast and finished trimming all the nails.
Ha. Didn’t he say little orange cats were great workers.
Easy. Done.
Feeling proud and relaxed, he let his guard down a bit.
His focus slipped, and his instincts took over.
Absentmindedly, he popped the leftover chunks of freeze-dried meat right into his own mouth.
He chewed twice, swallowed, and only then remembered he wasn’t at home right now.
He was in a client’s apartment.
The owner had been watching from the side, her expression already frozen.
“Ah??” she squeaked, like a startled duck, sucking in a sharp breath and failing to hide her shock.
She had watched him chew, swallow, and even smack his lips.
His brain exploded.
He’d eaten this stuff so often at home he’d gotten used to it.
He’d just eaten it without thinking.
He scrambled for an explanation.
“Ah, um, I… because I really, really like cats,” he stammered, “so I eat a little bit of cat freeze-dried sometimes. It’s just chicken and duck anyway. It’s fine, really, I’m very normal!”
The owner did not understand any of this but was deeply shaken.
She still tried to be respectful.
After a long pause, she asked, “Is… is it good?”
He answered honestly. “It is.”
“Then… want some more?”
“No, no, that’s okay, thank you… kind human.”
Author’s Note:
Eat! The kitty eats like crazy! Drink! Juan Juan chugs like crazy!
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