044: Mash You All into Bean Paste!
The owner’s expression clearly wasn’t right.Of course, Sang Zhao knew he shouldn’t eat the client’s stuff while working, but he’d just popped it into his mouth without thinking.
It had really been a reflex. You could only blame his hands for that, not the little cat.
The owner hesitated, but very quickly she seemed to have talked herself into something and tentatively said, “Why don’t you… take a few boxes home?”
He thought, How could I? How could a little cat come do a job and then literally eat and take things with him? No way, absolutely not.
But he couldn’t withstand the client’s enthusiasm…
“It’s fine, I get it. People all have their quirks,” she said.
“And…” She paused, then lowered her voice. “Honestly, before I buy new food and freeze-dried for my cat, I taste them too.”
“Whoa,” Sang Zhao said.
“Some cat food is covered in a layer of grease and tastes kind of fishy and gross. Some baked kibble’s pretty good. It’s dry and not too oily, kind of like little cookies. Some freeze-dried is even better, pure meat with lots of stringy fibers. It’s dry but really fragrant. Cats tend to like those more.”
He looked at her with genuine admiration. “You’re a master.”
She clearly had that “I’ve finally found a soulmate” expression and was determined to send him home with freeze-dried snacks.
She tried stuffing the treats into the cat’s arms.
Wasn’t that testing a cat’s self-control? Cats practically didn’t have any self-control at all.
Hesitating and tugging back and forth, he was just like a kid getting New Year’s money.
On the surface it was “no no no, Auntie, I can’t take that,” but under the surface it was “Auntie, quick, my pocket’s right here, put it in, put it in.”
In the end he still left with a box in hand.
So the final result was: he came to the client’s place and really did both eat and take.
That was a done deal.
…This could not get out.
If people heard, how was he supposed to keep doing his part-time gig and save money for food? His reputation would be ruined.
And yes, he actually had a reputation now.
He’d only been doing his side job for just over a week, but he was already pretty well known and very busy.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t very smart.
Net profit, gross margin, all of that… that was tough stuff for a little cat.
He couldn’t calculate it and didn’t understand it, so he had no idea how much he was actually making.
But he had to be making money.
According to Teacher Bian’s functions and formulas about time cost and market share, after his border collie evaluation, the conclusion was that he was earning a nice amount.
So this part-time job was definitely worth continuing.
As for him, he only knew one thing:
Every time he went out to work, he immediately got money on WeChat as soon as he finished the job.
He’d be working one second and getting paid the next.
That was way better than his regular job.
With his regular job he had to sit through a whole month before seeing a paycheck.
Now he worked a bit and got a bit of money.
Trim a cat’s nails here and snag a bite of freeze-dried there, then take the ten yuan and go buy food at the subway entrance.
Life as a little cat was really full of flavor.
That day, he went out on another job.
This time it wasn’t a referral from a regular.
Someone on the platform had put in a rush booking for his time and requested an in-home bath for their cat.
He took his little bucket and headed over.
When he got inside, he realized… wow, this person looked really familiar.
He’d taken a job at the home of their company’s vice president.
This was the same vice president, surname Xiao, who’d joked about wanting to “ship” Tang Yu. He liked treating people and often brought milk tea to the secretariat.
He’d also heard some gossip at work: Vice President Xiao and Tang Yu had been friends for years, roommates in college, later co-founders in starting the business, with a very good relationship ever since.
The vice president recognized him too.
His eyes lit up. “Oh! Xiao Sang! So you’re doing a side job?”
He didn’t have time to make small talk though, because he clearly really needed someone to bathe his cat.
Standing at the door, on the way over, Sang Zhao had smelled it the whole time.
The place was full of chili hotpot smell.
Even the air, and Vice President Xiao standing in that air, smelled like beef tallow hotpot.
He hadn’t seen the cat yet, but he could see the vice president nervously looking around, totally panicked.
Clearing his throat, the VP said, “It’s not my cat, it’s my mom’s. It’s twenty-three years old already. Usually she only bathes it, like, once every year or two.”
He forced himself to admit, “But, um, the thing is…”
“Yesterday I had hotpot, and I kept the leftover broth to use for noodles later. And then, well, I was holding the cooled beef fat and a chunk fell right onto the cat…”
“??” thought Sang Zhao.
If the little cat version of him had been there, he would have puffed up on the spot.
He gave the man a sideways look and thought, Is that even human speech? How can you be so careless? That cat is twenty-three.
How could he treat a senior feline like that.
The VP turned his head away in misery, unable to face the world.
“I really do feel guilty, but I can’t get close to it. Its temper is, like, more tyrannical than a tyrant,” he said.
“The main thing is, if it isn’t perfectly clean before my mom gets home, she’s going to kill me. So I rushed to call you over. Xiao Sang, you’re not just giving it a bath, you’re saving my life.”
Normally, he charged sixty yuan for a bath.
But for this cat, its cleanliness was directly tied to the VP’s survival.
The sixty didn’t matter to him at all.
Why did people earn money if not to save their own lives?
“I’ll give you extra. Forget sixty, I’ll pay six hundred,” the VP said, waving his hand generously.
Six hundred.
His heart moved immediately.
Six hundred? That was next-level foolish-rich-client behavior.
Forget bathing the cat, he felt like he’d be willing to bathe Vice President Xiao himself.
Right at that moment, the cat slowly came out.
Wow.
A big tabby cat with a slightly drooping face but surprisingly decent energy all over.
The problem was, it should have looked majestic…
But its back was coated in a sheen of fat, and it had an Elizabethan collar around its neck.
The VP clearly thought he’d been very smart.
“I was afraid it would lick the chili oil off its fur, so I quickly put a cone on it. Look at that look, it’s gorgeous.”
…humans were awful.
You don’t give the cat hotpot, but you let the beef fat fall right onto it.
This was a top-tier tabby boss in the cat world, and just because it got old, the human was putting it through this.
He didn’t feel like talking to the VP anymore.
Walking forward, under Xiao’s anxious gaze, he bent down and grabbed the cat.
The VP squawked behind him.
“Ah? Ah?? Why! Why can a stranger pick you up? I grew up with you, and you just beat me up!”
Carrying the cat into the bathroom, he set his bucket down and got to work.
At this point he had plenty of experience.
He always brought his own bucket.
He put the tabby in, aimed the shower at the side of the bucket, and let the water run in.
A lot of cats hated baths not just because of water but also because they lacked a sense of security.
If you tried washing them directly on the floor with just the shower head, any cat that didn’t try to run was practically a statue.
If you used a wash basin, it was too shallow. Cats had nowhere to put their noble paws.
So he brought a bucket.
That was different.
Even a bath-hating cat would find itself stuck in a barrel, and a barrel was just a round, chubby box.
Cats loved boxes.
The desire to climb into the “box” suppressed the fear of water, and they could stand inside with their front paws braced on the rim.
It was safe and fun.
While the cat’s little brain was still foggy, he washed it from top to bottom.
This time was no exception.
He worked quickly.
But there was one difference.
This cat was twenty-three.
Compared to the two- and five-year-old cats he’d washed before, this one was much more mature.
It had that seen-it-all air, calm and unruffled.
No matter what happened, it stayed steady.
Other cats might squeak out the occasional half-understandable word amid the meowing: “Mom,” “Dad,” “food,” “bad,” that kind of thing.
This cat was different.
The things drifting into his ears as he washed it were clearer than usual.
They made his expression turn strange.
Of course, the VP talked too much and had to ask.
“Xiao Sang, I heard that people like you, who work with animals a lot, can kind of guess what they’re thinking. Do you know what it’s thinking now?”
He glanced at him, rubbing the tabby’s chin, and very solemnly translated, “It?”
“It says you’re not as cute as you were when you were little. It’s only letting you live because it’s old now, otherwise it would’ve killed you and your hotpot.”
“Ah?” said the VP.
Looking pure as ever, Sang Zhao smiled, showing off a pretty grin. “I’m making that up. Just a joke. Heehee.”
The VP turned and met the cat’s narrow pupils.
He shivered and begged, “Don’t kill me and don’t tell my mom. Please.”
“For old times’ sake. You watched me grow up, remember? When I was little, you used to hold me.”
Lies, thought Sang Zhao. You’re two years older than the cat. How was it supposed to hold you when you were little?
Once he finished washing, he used the hair dryer to gently dry the cat’s fur.
The VP kept babbling in a panic, clearly terrified his mom would suddenly come home.
So he had no choice but to hurry up and rush the job to match his client’s anxiety.
He’d just finished blow-drying the tabby and was starting to brush its fur when Vice President Xiao’s mom came in.
She had a fluffy perm like teddy-bear fleece, and she was holding a real teddy, a small poodle, in her arms.
She didn’t even look around the room at first, just stared at the dog. “Come on, baby grandson, Grandma’s going to get you some water.”
Silently brushing the tabby, he let out a soft laugh.
If she was calling herself “Grandma,” then the poodle in her arms was the “grandson,” which made it the VP’s kid.
And since the tabby was the VP’s peer…
The situation was clear.
The cat was the poodle’s second aunt or second uncle.
As expected of their mighty Cat Kingdom, whenever they went out, they outranked dogs.
Once she’d changed her shoes and put the dog down, she finally saw him on the couch with the cat in his lap, brushing its fur.
He was good-looking, with orange hair.
Anyone would stare at him.
“Ah, you…” she started.
He glanced over at Vice President Xiao, raised his brows, and began, “I’m giving the cat…”
“Brushing! Brushing! I hired him specially to come over and brush the cat,” the VP cut in, jerking to a stop and frantically patching things over.
She didn’t get why he needed to hire someone just to brush the cat and thought he was wasting money.
But with this pretty boy sitting there with her favorite cat, she couldn’t stay mad at all.
Scooting over, she very politely set out fruit and tea and chatted with him.
The VP was nosy, of course.
He hovered sneakily nearby, eavesdropping.
“So, Xiao Sang, how old are you?” she asked.
“Auntie, I’m twenty.”
“How come you’re not in school anymore?”
“I didn’t get it, so now I’m doing manual work.”
“Do you have a partner? Are you dating? Auntie can introduce someone to you.”
“Not yet, but it’s okay, Auntie,” he said, trimming the tabby’s nails. “I’m tracking my own target.”
…Oh my.
The next day at work, the VP passed this right along to Tang Yu.
Clicking his tongue and grinning, he chased after him. “Is it you, then, Tang Seedling? Are you the ‘target’? Are you seducing that twenty-year-old, fresh, tender little kid?”
“What kind of adjectives are those…” Tang Yu muttered.
Then he fell silent, sitting there, lost in thought.
It was only when the VP told him about the part-time work that he found out Sang Zhao had been doing in-home cat care.
At first he thought it was cute.
Then he felt worried.
Working a regular job and running a business himself, he knew perfectly well how tiring work was.
Working all day and then going off to do a side hustle… it felt like a lot for Sang Zhao.
And it was tiring… but today he was still very happy.
Because his good news had arrived.
An Tihu had finished her vacation and returned to work, coming back full of motivation.
Samoyeds were unreliable, Samoyed thoughts were all idiotic, but Sister An was solid.
She’d been human longer and seen more.
She was bound to be able to help him.
At least that was what he believed.
Back at work, An Tihu was clearly much improved, remembering her getting caught the last time.
Now she was all business, fully human, working briskly and efficiently, “ku-ku-ku-a-kua” everywhere she went.
At lunch, he carried his baked cheese rice over and sat by her desk.
He wanted to talk to her, especially about the whole chain of messy events from “I thought he wanted to court me, then the dog said he wanted to be my mom, now I’ve found out he still wants to court me.”
But he wasn’t as familiar with her as with the Samoyed.
So he hid about seventy or eighty percent of the details and mainly said the other person was human.
When he got to his connection with Tang Yu, the unspoken meaning lurking behind all of their unsaid words, he mumbled, “But, Sister An, I think I’m… really willing.”
And that’s where his trouble started again.
“If he were a yaoguai it’d be great,” he said, “but he’s human, and he’s not very brave. So what should I do?”
An Tihu took a sip of flower tea and cleared her throat. “I don’t understand your relationship problems. I’m just a big water bird with a giant mouth.”
He didn’t believe that.
Clinging to her, he insisted that even a big water bird had to worry about a little cat’s issues once in a while.
Her thoughts were immediately clearer and more fearless than his.
“Really, how are we any different from humans?” she said. “We’ve got what we should have, we don’t have what we shouldn’t. As long as you treat yourself like a person, who wouldn’t treat you like a person?”
This was her new, hard-earned understanding.
She was no longer the An Tihu from before.
She’d already forgotten what her pelican body looked like and was fully in “urban white-collar human” mode.
“So you’re saying you support me?” he asked.
She quickly held out her hand like a stop sign, indicating she hadn’t said that.
She hadn’t said it… but that didn’t mean she couldn’t imply it.
Her words were vague, but her attitude said plenty.
The things hinted at in her tone were more telling than any direct statement.
She gave him an encouraging look, signaling that he should just treat himself as human and charge forward.
Yaoguai were pretending to be people anyway.
He thought it over.
That made sense.
If Corn Bean wasn’t going to be his mom… then why couldn’t he be his boyfriend?
He was already twenty.
He’d originally wanted to start dating early, and now it was too late for youth romance.
So why not start dating soon, instead.
Once he’d made up his mind, he didn’t rush blindly.
He wasn’t going to fling himself at Tang Yu and say, “Okay, I don’t want you to be my mom anymore, be my boyfriend instead, let’s do love.”
He really did like sticking to Corn Bean, but he also really liked going out to play.
So talking to An Tihu about feelings was one thing, and asking if she wanted to hang out with them was another.
Brightly, he said, “A big cat friend said he’s found a reservoir. We can rent the place on the weekend for camping, and once you’ve paid the entrance fee you can fish and eat as much as you want.”
“But we only have six or seven people at most. The reservoir says they only rent out the whole place to groups of ten or more. Sister An, you must have your bird friends’ circle, right? Can you help us ask and see if any birds are interested?”
For fish-eaters who could travel together, the only options he could think of were cats and birds.
Big fish-loving water birds, specifically.
Smaller birds that ate bugs and millet were out, and so were those who hunted field mice.
An Tihu took a napkin from her desk and daintily wiped her mouth, patting the corners of her lips.
She acted uninterested, but her eyes were already locked onto the key word as she asked, “Fishing?”
If you mentioned catching and eating fish, you would absolutely get her attention.
He pulled up the poster the black panther had sent, pointing at it for her.
“Looks like they mostly have crucian carp and silver carp, with some black carp, white bream, and pike. It’s a pretty big reservoir.”
She wiped the corners of her mouth again, the powerful career woman secretly swallowing her own saliva.
In her head, she was already savoring the scene.
A massive pelican planted by the water, trash-bag-sized mouth, one fish per scoop, scoop and swallow, scoop and swallow.
What a perfect weekend that would be.
“I’ll ask around,” she said, very reserved.
But her mouth was the only reserved thing about her.
Whether her friends went or not, she was clearly already planning to go.
What was wrong with going out with cats?
If she couldn’t quite play with them, she’d just not play with the cats.
She’d stuff herself with fish and be more than satisfied.
Seeing that she’d already half-planned the trip before anything was confirmed, she added, “If we go, I’ll drive to your building to pick you up. You can follow my car. I’ll pull you along and you can navigate.”
He actually didn’t know how to navigate, but he kept that to himself.
Something else had caught his attention.
She’d said she would come pick him up.
“Doesn’t Sister An live in the loft apartments?” he asked.
He’d thought all the monsters around him lived in that building.
That place was the housing the Yao Management Bureau arranged for them.
“I used to,” she said, “but once I made enough money, I moved out. There are too many units on each floor and the soundproofing is terrible.”
Just mentioning it made her temples throb.
“Don’t you think the loft apartments are kind of like fancy college dorms?” she said. “Oh, wait, you never went to college. Anyway, it really tests your neighbors’ quality.”
Her expression creased up.
“My neighbors were all loud,” she said.
“My neighbor on the left was an African elephant, and upstairs there was a howler monkey. Whenever they had nothing better to do, they liked to yell.”
“I can’t beat the elephant, and the monkey has a lot of friends, so I couldn’t mess with anyone. It made me want to curse the whole building out.”
…that sounded like a hell-tier start to life.
A good neighbor was one whose existence you barely noticed.
Thinking of his own neighbors, he realized the apartments on either side seemed empty.
He was pretty lucky.
The floor above was very quiet too.
Ye Ye downstairs was occasionally a little loud, but not enough to bother him.
Anyway, the trip was basically decided.
He waited for her to get back to him on how many friends she’d bring along.
In his good mood, his spirits were soaring.
While he was running errands between departments, he practically wanted to jog laps downstairs too.
He was barely walking, mostly half-running and half-hopping.
All that rushing around left him with a light sheen of sweat.
Afterward, back at his desk under the AC, he cooled off quickly, but he shivered once.
After work, he went straight to two house calls for cat feeding and didn’t get home until after eight.
His mouth started craving something again, so on the way back he bought a milk tea and two sundae cups.
He finished them all in no time.
He went to bed late.
Half-asleep and half-awake, he felt himself shiver again.
He still didn’t think much of it.
The next morning, his alarm rang to get him up for work…
He rolled around in bed a few times and realized he just couldn’t get up.
His throat felt tight.
When he tried to open his mouth, what came out wasn’t human speech, just broken fits of coughing.
Once they started, they wouldn’t stop.
He sat there coughing and coughing until he panicked and turned into a cat, only to find he was still coughing.
His little orange-dandelion body coughed so hard he toppled over on the bed in a full backward roll.
…What was this.
He might look like a dandelion puff, but under that he was a little orange cat with pure muscle.
Panicking, he turned back into a human and touched his own face.
It felt hot.
He still didn’t take it seriously and tried to get up for work.
But when he turned over, he ended up lying right back down.
He thought he’d already gotten up to wash, take the subway, buy breakfast, and clock in…
But the whole time he hadn’t moved from the bed at all.
It had all been a dream.
He never showed up to work.
His coworkers obviously noticed his empty desk.
But they couldn’t reach him by WeChat or phone.
Tang Yu was worried sick.
When the secretariat director went to HR for his emergency contact info to try other avenues, Tang Yu couldn’t stand it anymore.
He didn’t even grab his briefcase.
With just his phone and keys in hand, he headed straight downstairs.
The director only heard him toss out one line. “I’m going to his place.”
Tang Yu had been to his place before, so he still remembered the address.
He drove straight to the loft apartments.
In the lobby and in the elevator, the people he ran into seemed a little strange.
But he didn’t spare them a glance, just stared at the time on his phone.
He hadn’t been able to reach Sang Zhao for two hours already.
What had happened to him?
Was there a gas leak at home or food poisoning?
He rushed to his front door and stared at the fingerprint lock, then raised his hand and hammered on the door.
After a while, he heard faint rustling inside.
He let out a small breath.
Staring at the door, he watched it slowly crack open.
Sang Zhao clung to the edge, hair a total bird’s nest, voice hoarse and eyes dazed like he was still dreaming.
“Mm, Corn Bean’s here?” he mumbled.
Seeing that he was alive but obviously sick, Tang Yu was both relieved and anxious.
Then he heard that line and burst into angry laughter.
“Who’s Corn Bean? You’re calling me Corn Bean?”
He shoved his hand into the gap and yanked the door open.
“So you don’t call me gege anymore. You call me Corn Bean now?”
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