054: Where Did That Dog and Penguin Come From?!
After hugging Sang Zhao with all his might, Xia Moye finally went to blow out the candles.
The cake was huge, and there were a lot of candles. With that many, there was no way one puff would take them all out.
“Hu——”
He blew once, but he couldn’t blow them all out, and about half of them were still burning.
Big cakes came with this kind of problem.
“Hu——!”
He took another deep breath and blew again. The candles he had just blown out got lit back up by the flames next to them, and in the blink of an eye, most of the candles were flickering again.
“...How can this be?!”
Flustered and indignant, Xia Moye started running in circles around the cake, doing laps as he blew, puffing as he ran.
Covering his mouth, Sang Zhao leaned toward Tang Yu and muttered, “Honestly… so stupid.”
But Xia Moye just could not blow them all out.
So it wasn’t just him blowing anymore. His classmates all rushed in to help, mouths to candles, and the whole room filled with huffing and puffing.
“Hu—— happy birthday, Xia Moye!”
“Hu hu hu—— cough, cough, cough!”
“Let me blow too, leave me one to blow!!”
At last, the candles went out.
His classmates immediately rushed in with their little party poppers, surrounding Xia Moye and showering him in colorful streamers as they yelled and cheered, shouting happy birthday at the top of their lungs.
Watching the kid being squeezed into the center of the crowd, one arm sticking out as he waved hard in his direction, Sang Zhao folded his arms. His brows and eyes were lit with energy, and his smile was bright with pride.
“Hmph,” he sniffed, and muttered under his breath, “Little kid dog.”
Definitely not a big dog, not the kind of big dog that loved to fight and make a racket. He was that kind of soft, fluffy, white cottony little kid-dog, the kind who did stupid… yet sincere, sweet, and ridiculously devoted things like this.
That was what Sang Zhao thought.
Tang Yu, who had been watching the herd of elementary schoolers tumbling around together, went to grab the present he’d prepared, planning to give it to Xia Moye later.
When he came back, Sang Zhao was bent down whispering something to Xia Moye.
Tang Yu walked over, and the kid immediately looked up nicely and smiled at him.
“Uncle,” he called first.
Then he glanced at Sang Zhao’s expression, then peeked at Tang Yu’s face.
Little dogs were not good at hiding anything, and when they were happy, they were even worse at keeping it in.
He wanted to dump every single drop of his blessing onto the best cat in the whole world and the cat’s gentlemanly, softhearted, gentle boyfriend.
“Uncle,” he called, then took three steps in two, ran up to Tang Yu, and leaned in to whisper in his ear.
“Jiuma”
Tang Yu jolted.
Then he stared down at his small frame and those clear, wet puppy eyes, and all the shame slowly turned his neck and cheeks red.
He flushed bright red, said nothing, and simply opened the gift box in front of Xia Moye.
“I had a gold pendant made for you, with a longevity-lock chain,” Tang Yu said.
As he spoke, he took the gold chain and the very solid gold pendant out of the box, and reached toward the boy’s neck to put it on him.
Sang Zhao and Xia Moye were yaoguai.
They did not have a lot of “oh my god, he bought gold, that’s so expensive, how can I possibly accept this” type thoughts.
They had no clear sense of just how pricey gold was, so they both crowded in curiously to look.
Back when he’d been a cat, Sang Zhao had once received a pair of little gold peanuts his owner had scraped savings together to buy.
They were threaded on a red cord and worn inside his kitty scarf at his chest.
But this was the first time Xia Moye had ever received gold.
He puffed out his chest, happily accepted the gift, and waited for Tang Yu to put the pendant around his neck.
Just as Tang Yu was about to fasten it, he glanced at Xia Moye’s collar and narrowed his eyes.
His hand stopped moving.
His eyes widened as he stared, something like disbelief rushing into his expression.
He reached out, pushed aside the boy’s collar, and grabbed the dog collar around his neck.
The sudden pull made Xia Moye choke slightly. “Uh?”
“...”
Watching Tang Yu pinch the collar at his throat and inspect it, Sang Zhao felt like his heart nearly stopped.
Oh no oh no oh no help.
Stupid dog! You got a gift and kept wearing it?! You could at least put it away!
Wearing a dog collar as a dog was a sign of being loved.
Wearing it when you were in human form though… how was that okay?!
Things were slowly heading in a direction that was completely outside of what Sang Zhao had prepared for.
Seeing Tang Yu’s baffled, horrified look, Xia Moye even started explaining.
“It’s my birthday present from my jiùjiu,” he said happily.
Tang Yu looked at Sang Zhao, and his entire gaze changed.
Shock turned to suspicion, and suspicion slid into slowly dawning blankness.
He couldn’t comprehend it.
He could not comprehend it. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly, and for a long moment, not even one coherent sentence made it out.
Then Ye Ye suddenly remembered: there was a dog tag on that collar. With his drawn little head on it.
He definitely could not let Tang Yu see that.
So he yanked the collar back quickly.
But what Tang Yu had already seen was enough to stun him for the next hundred years.
Breathing fast, Tang Yu stared at the boy’s neck.
His eyes rolled back slightly, and he almost fainted.
Quick as a flash, Sang Zhao grabbed him by the back of the collar.
“I don’t know what exactly you’re thinking right now, but I’m telling you, every single one of your thoughts is wrong, okay?” he said in a panic.
He dragged Tang Yu away from the crowd and over to a quieter corner.
As they went, he viciously twisted Ye Ye’s cheek.
“Take it off!” he mouthed frantically. “Now!”
He shoved Tang Yu into a corner, and Tang Yu still looked dazed.
He tried to gather his words. “He, you, before I… oh—”
His face slowly took on a look of realization and he raised a hand to cover his eyes.
“There’s not that much to it!” Sang Zhao complained.
“He asked me for it himself. I guess he thought it would be fun. I’m his jiùjiu, of course I said yes. That’s really all there is to it!”
He added, “Calling it a ‘dog collar’ sounds terrible when you’re dealing with humans, but isn’t there another word for it? What was it again? Right. Chouke.”
No choker looked like that, Tang Yu thought resentfully.
What kind of person would give that as a gift, and what kind of person would accept it as a gift?
This was so absurd, and so far outside humanity’s subtle, unspoken rules of normal behavior.
Even lovers giving that to each other would be considered advanced-level testing of boundaries.
How could any uncle give this to a kid?
If that collar were worn in a slightly more questionable place, Tang Yu would be going down to a detention center to bail his boyfriend out right now.
He felt more and more that something was wrong.
Weird things kept happening around him.
And each weird thing broke logic just a little bit.
Stack enough illogical pieces together, and you ended up with what he had now: a mess of events that did not add up.
They went together to get champagne in the bar area, then walked up to check on the screening room on the top floor.
The whole way, Tang Yu was quiet.
His head was full of chaotic thoughts with no clear beginning or end, all snarled together like a ball of yarn.
If you eliminated all the impossible explanations, the one thing left, no matter how unlikely or unbelievable it seemed, would be the truth.
So what was the truth?
What had he ignored, what had he forgotten, that left him feeling that something was off but with nothing solid to grab?
Tang Yu walked a step ahead of Sang Zhao, lost in thought, and pushed open the media room door without thinking.
He did not knock.
He pushed the door in and stepped inside.
The room lights were still on and there was no movie playing.
In front of the row of sofas, a big fluffy white Samoyed was twisting around on the floor, rolling and bouncing as it played with something.
Looking closer, Tang Yu saw the dog’s two front paws wrapped around… a penguin.
“??”
“Am I dreaming?” he murmured, and pinched his own arm.
The jolt of pain told his numb brain, oh. No dream. This was real.
So how was he supposed to explain what he was seeing?
A random snowball of a Samoyed that had appeared out of nowhere, holding and wrestling with a penguin.
What kind of nonsense-core, surreal, bizarre scene was this?
Was this still Earth?
Had he just pushed open a normal door?
Where on earth had this door sent him?
Sang Zhao came in behind him.
One step into the room and one good look later, he wanted to plant a kick squarely on both the Samoyed’s and the night heron’s butts.
What were they doing?
What were they doing?!
Instead of watching the movie they were hiding in the media room to play chase-and-tackle games?
What was so fun about a dog and a bird messing around together?!
In one swift motion, he clapped his hand over Tang Yu’s eyes.
His words flew out uncensored as he tried to patch things up.
“Hey—hey! Wow, those are toys, look, the Samoyed is hugging a toy! There’s no way there’s a real penguin here!”
Tang Yu’s voice sounded like it had gone away for a while already.
When it came back, it had that hollow, echoing quality like it was drifting out of the ground or from inside a temple, every syllable trailing away into empty air—landing on places Sang Zhao absolutely did not want it to land.
Even the way he talked was floating, which said more than enough about his current mental state.
“There being a Samoyed here is already wrong, isn’t it?” he said faintly.
At a nice normal birthday party, where had the dog come from?
He hadn’t seen a single dog hair anywhere before this.
How had a whole Samoyed suddenly appeared upstairs in the media room?
He struggled. “Let me see, let me see.”
Frantically, Sang Zhao shot the Samoyed and the night heron warning looks, his hand glued to Tang Yu’s face.
“Don’t look, gege, don’t. What’s so great about a dog?”
“There’s a penguin too,” Tang Yu said like he was sleep-talking. “I want to see the penguin.”
Now Sang Zhao really was about to break.
“There isn’t! There isn’t!”
He was out of ideas.
Then a flash of inspiration struck.
Right. To calm him down, he just had to give him something better to look at, didn’t he?
He took a deep breath. “Gege, look at me instead. Look at me. I prepared a surprise for you.”
Keeping his hand over Tang Yu’s eyes, he spun him around in place and turned him so his back faced the dog and the bird, giving those two good-for-nothing freeloaders a chance to escape.
Then he slid his hands down to Tang Yu’s shoulders, still controlling his posture, and finally lifted his hand away from his eyes.
As soon as his eyes opened, Tang Yu’s first instinct was to look back at the penguin.
But the moment he opened them, what he saw was Sang Zhao.
The sheer amount of information slammed straight into his brain and stunned it clean.
For a few seconds, he forgot all about the penguin.
He just stared dumbly at Sang Zhao.
Wow.
There, nestled in his orange hair, was a pair of little orange, fluffy cat ears.
Sang Zhao was already beautiful.
But now, with a pair of kitten ears perched on his head…
Tang Yu felt like fainting again.
This time he was in danger of passing out from sheer cuteness.
Spinning his lie out without a blink, Sang Zhao said, “It’s a surprise for you, gege. Look, don’t they look just like cat ears? It’s high tech.”
As he spoke, the little ears twitched and flicked gently.
“So realistic…” Tang Yu breathed.
High tech? What high tech?
He was not thinking about technology anymore.
He only wanted—
Staring at those fluttering kitten ears, Tang Yu cut him off roughly.
“Let me touch them,” he said.
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