068: Someone Who Really Understands Cats
Director Li had never seemed this good at understanding cats before.
Wasn’t she supposed to be the big final boss in his heart? The kind of big boss who would use a two-kuai Mixue Bingcheng ice cream to trick small animals into going to work for her?
She clearly wasn’t the type to sit in her office and slack off.
What she loved most at the Yao Bureau was wandering around, especially dropping in on the little yaoguai when they were in class.
According to the ones who had already gone to school, Director Li was basically the same as the discipline director or the homeroom teacher at a human school.
Sometimes she would poke her head in from the back door just to catch the little yaoguai who were secretly zoning out, playing with their phones, or chatting in class.
This clearly wasn’t in her job description, but she really liked doing it.
She said it was fun, really satisfying, especially when she caught a whole row of fluffy heads and could rap on them one by one. That would have her so delighted she could barely keep the corners of her mouth down.
Sang Zhao totally didn’t get this particular hobby.
But one thing was obvious: Director Li was genuinely kind of scary.
Yet this very scary human had caught him in the middle of messing up and then just… lightly lifted the corner of that page and let it go.
Even Sang Zhao himself felt it was almost unbelievable.
Where was this? Was this still Earth? Was this still human society? How had Director Li’s temper gotten so good?
He felt like his mood today had gone from big drop to big rise in one swing.
When Director Li first came looking for him, he’d been sure she’d be furious.
But she really was Director Li. She saw things from a big picture. After so many years in frontline intake, she’d seen way too much.
Compared to all the weird cases and bizarre stories she’d gone through, Sang Zhao and Tang Yu peacefully falling in love honestly seemed fresh and almost wholesome.
So she didn’t react with the anger or shock the little cat had imagined.
It really was like she had just come over on a normal inspection, checked the basic situation, did a bit of emotional counseling, soothed everyone’s nerves, and then could calmly leave.
She hadn’t even taken Tang Yu’s earlier threat seriously. On the contrary, she had found it kind of cute.
She’d seen very clearly just how determined Tang Yu was to protect his little cat.
When an unknown world suddenly cracks open someone’s worldview and all their logic, reveals itself right in front of them so openly, not every human can even accept it, let alone accept it and then turn around and try to protect the beloved person from that world.
Well, not beloved person. Beloved cat.
But same difference. His beloved little cat.
Director Li’s impression of Tang Yu was actually pretty good.
When Sang Zhao walked her out of the building, they did a full loop around the plaza out front.
In the past, nothing good had ever happened when he ran into Director Li…
Either she had caught him when he had just faked his death and turned human, or she was there to bail him out after he’d hit someone and been taken to the police station.
This was probably the most peaceful time he’d ever spent alone with her.
He glanced over at Director Li’s face, where there was still a trace of tiredness, and the little cat’s heart felt a bit guilty, a bit curious.
“So, I can just keep being with him like this, right?” he asked.
Li Zhuren didn’t look all that worried about Sang Zhao.
If anything, she seemed a little more worried about his boss, Tang Yu.
“I’ve met him a few times before when we were talking cooperation,” she said, “but never had it get as tense as it did just now.”
She was very blunt.
“He’s a little bit of a romance-brain, did you notice? It’s like nothing I say really matters to him, but the second anything touches on you, his eyes get sharp.”
“It’s weird,” she muttered, thinking hard, but still failing to make sense of it.
“What’s weird?” Sang Zhao asked.
“What’s weird,” she said, “is that he’s really out here dating a dumb little cat. Isn’t that a kind of bullying?”
She did understand why Tang Yu liked him, which only made it feel more curious.
Falling for Sang Zhao was absolutely normal.
He was beautiful, sincere, lively, greedy for fun, and loved life. He could get happy over a clump of grass by the roadside. Dating someone like that, you’d be dragged into his bright mood, bathed in a ridiculous amount of emotional value.
The little yaoguai really were good at loving people.
And little cats even more so.
He just wasn’t good at school, that was all. At heart, he was a very good little cat.
Seeing Tang Yu topple right into this little cat’s paws, she really couldn’t help thinking: wow, so CEOs these days don’t like pure little white flowers anymore, huh? They now like sexy little cats. That’s honestly kind of hilarious.
Sang Zhao scratched his head and waved his hand dismissively.
“No way, Corn Bean’s not bullying me at all! I’m the one bullying him, and he doesn’t fight back.”
“Feels like whatever I do, he thinks it’s cute… Before he knew I was a cat, he was looking at me with this ‘aww what a sweet little idiot’ filter. Now that he knows I’m a cat, he switched to a ‘aww cute little cat’ filter. So whatever I do, in his eyes it’s cute. It’s so annoying, seriously, it makes me mad.”
The more he talked, the sulkier he sounded.
Director Li lowered her head, smoothing down the hem of her jacket, listening with a smile in her eyes.
She would never forget the day she took this little cat in.
She’d already gotten off work that day, and she was driving to a restaurant where she’d made a reservation. When she parked and was crossing the road toward the place, she spotted a little orange cat on the curb.
The little orange cat looked pretty smart, actually. It was watching the stream of people very cautiously, head tipped up, looking at each person as they passed like it was picking someone.
Even though she was technically off the clock, her overtime instincts kicked in.
She carefully walked closer, stopping a short distance away to watch.
She watched for a while, then decided she must be seeing things. She shook her head and turned to go eat, but just before she left she glanced back at the little cat one more time…
And discovered the cat was gone.
On the bench, there was only a boy left, sitting there staring dazedly at the pedestrians.
She walked quickly over and took a look at him, discovered he wasn’t naked, but dressed in a one-piece light brown garment with a huge pouch on the front. It was like a robe, but also a bit like a giant foot-bath cover.
When yaoguai transform, half of them are completely naked, and the other half have stronger cultivation, so they can manifest the outfit that’s stuck deepest in their subconscious for themselves.
Once they put on real human clothes, the manifested clothes disappear.
…So essentially, they’re still naked, only nobody can see their bare butts.
Li Zhuren had seen plenty of normal and not-so-normal outfits, but this kind of thing that looked fine at a glance, yet somehow wrong when you really looked at it… this was a first.
What kind of robe was that? What even was this clothing?
Later, when she tried to make him wear a normal T-shirt with a little white cat face on it, he’d refused.
“When my mom picked me up, she didn’t have a cat bed for me,” he’d said. “She raised me rolled up in a brown towel, right next to her pillow.”
“This outfit is good. It really feels like the towel Mom let me sleep in.”
Now, recalling the early days, she said, “Remember? You absolutely refused to wear clothes. You kept saying that robe was the towel your mom raised you in, and you liked wearing your towel.”
“Mhm, I remember.”
He still remembered very clearly. Back then he had just faked his death and left his mom.
“She asked me to turn human so I wouldn’t be running around naked. That was great. Mom good, cat good. But then the humans who made me wear proper clothes and made my towel robe disappear were bad.”
He looked at her and sighed in a low voice.
“You’re the bad one.”
Li Zhuren coughed. “Spend a little less time online. What kind of phrases are you picking up out there? You internet-addicted cat.”
Sang Zhao twisted his body a little, then muttered quietly, “I thought you’d be mad at me. You know, for… dating a human.”
“I’m not,” she said. “But you did fall in love pretty fast.”
She sighed.
“Feels like I only picked you up a moment ago, and in less than half a year, you’re already dating.”
Under the deep blue sky, with its endless clear horizon, she met the little cat’s honey-amber eyes.
“Back then, I hoped you’d be happy. I hope every single one of you will be happy,” she said.
She let out another soft breath.
“Love really is beautiful, but humans’ love changes in an instant.”
Just then, she thought of all the ugly sides of people she’d seen.
Back when they first accepted a little yaoguai’s love, they had also enjoyed that yaoguai’s sincerity and devotion.
But as conflicts piled up and the moral capital they owed each other was slowly ground down, in the end it was almost always the humans who broke first, yelling:
“You’re not even human.”
You’re not even human, I know all this about you now, and I can’t even break up with you easily. If I’d known it would be like this, I’d rather never have loved you.
So they broke up. And almost every time, it was Director Li who had once watched over the yaoguai’s happiness, who had to go in and erase the human’s memories.
The same person who had refused to have their memories wiped when they were in love, saying they wanted to remember this love forever, now scrambled to have it erased so they could break up and go back to a “normal” life.
The human returned to their old routine.
In the story of that couple, there was only one side left still remembering.
The yaoguai kept living on, carrying scars from those memories. That kind of thing… there were way too many cases.
Director Li never wanted to see them hurt.
“Mhm,” Sang Zhao answered, then thought for a bit, and said cheerfully, “He won’t do that.”
She had heard that line countless times. She didn’t really take it to heart. She listened politely, but inside she was already prepared.
Because she could already see the phrases coming:
“He won’t do that, because he loves me.”
“He won’t do that, because he promised me.”
“He won’t do that, because he’s different from other people.”
But to her surprise, what Sang Zhao actually said was:
“Because he’s a very good person.”
He looked at her seriously, his gaze clear.
The moment he thought of Tang Yu and started talking about him, his eyes grew bright, his expression relaxed, and his whole mood turned light and happy.
“He’s very gentle, very responsible, very compassionate, and very patient.”
The little cat’s vocabulary was limited, so he dragged out every good adjective he knew and stuck them all on Tang Yu.
Then he summed it up.
“What I mean is, he himself is a really good person.”
“So even if love changes, I still trust him,” Sang Zhao said.
“I trust that the love he feels for me right now is real and firm. And if one day he really stops loving me, I trust he’ll still handle things decently, that he’ll break up with me properly, and won’t hurt me.”
Looking at him now, she felt like she wasn’t looking at a little cat at all.
She felt like she was looking at a grown tiger.
Good grief. Who said he was dumb? How was this dumb? This was called clear-eyed.
With a complicated mood, Li Zhuren came, and with a complicated mood, she left.
She left Sang Zhao to take the elevator back up, pass by the secretariat, throw An Tihu a “don’t worry, it’s fine” kind of look, then slip into the CEO’s office and finish his now-cold bowl of oden.
Tang Yu was a bit awkward.
He felt like he’d performed badly just now and hadn’t left a good impression on Sang Zhao’s superior.
“I should’ve made a better impression on your boss… My attitude was too hard. I was just scared she’d take you away and then I wouldn’t have my little cat anymore,” he said quietly.
“She’s not going to carry me off,” Sang Zhao said through a bite of radish. “At most she’ll walk me away on a leash.”
He grumbled, “She’s really intimidating, we’re all scared of her. She’s not like you. You’re nice to me.”
Then he munched his radish, lips shiny with oden broth, and grinned foolishly at Tang Yu.
Seeing Tang Yu still uneasy and a bit down, he quickly changed the subject.
“Didn’t you say you were saving my fur to make me a blanket? Where are we at now? Is it still in the ‘saving fur’ stage, or the ‘spinning yarn’ stage, or the ‘weaving blanket’ stage?”
“Not enough fur for a blanket,” Tang Yu admitted. “So…”
“So I don’t get a blanket?” Sang Zhao instantly put on a pitiful face. “So I have to shiver myself to sleep, is that it, gege?”
Tang Yu really couldn’t stand it when he acted pitiful.
“No, no, we’ll keep saving, you’ll definitely get one,” he said quickly.
“But with what I’ve got for now, I actually… crocheted a pair of little slippers.”
The moment he heard “a pair,” Sang Zhao didn’t even ask what they looked like or why they were slippers of all things.
He only stared at him wide-eyed.
“A pair? A pair of slippers? But gege, I have four feet!”
Tang Yu sounded helpless. “I know, but I ran out of fur.”
Sang Zhao really wanted to see fur slippers, so he made a huge fuss until Tang Yu had no choice but to bring him home after work and show him the little cat slippers.
On the way, he discovered another of Tang Yu’s good points.
“Mhm,” he thought, “he never leaves early without reason, and only goes home after work is done.”
Such a very busy, very responsible CEO.
In the passenger seat, he wasn’t behaving himself at all.
He pestered Tang Yu to play music, so Tang Yu clipped his phone on the mount next to the dash screen, turned on the Bluetooth, and put music on for him.
After listening for a bit, Sang Zhao got bored and flopped against the seat to play on his own phone.
He scrolled two videos and hit one that was really funny, so he forwarded it to Ye Ye on WeChat without thinking.
Ye Ye was already out of school for the day, so he replied in seconds.
【HAHAHAHAHAHA this has Ye Ye barking out loud!】
“…What else would you do?” Sang Zhao thought. “Of course you bark ‘woof woof’.”
He wanted to hold his phone up and show the video to Tang Yu, but Tang Yu was driving and couldn’t watch it.
But it was really funny!
After thinking about it, he just forwarded it to Tang Yu on WeChat too.
Tang Yu’s phone was right there on the mount. The moment he forwarded it, the phone chimed twice.
The sound grabbed the little cat’s attention immediately. He leaned over to peek, and saw the notification banner pop up on Tang Yu’s lockscreen.
But what grabbed him wasn’t the content he’d just sent since he knew what that said.
What grabbed him was the name Tang Yu had set for his WeChat contact.
He figured Tang Yu must have changed it. It definitely wasn’t this before.
And this… this was a bit…
It was only two characters, and Sang Zhao could read them. Those two characters made up the carefully chosen note Tang Yu had set for him:
【坏咪】: “Naughty kitty.”
The phrasing had a flirty, slightly indecent flavor, not something serious people would say.
Well, Tang Yu was a very serious person, but also… not. And sure, he wasn’t exactly a serious person either, but he was a very proper little cat, okay?
So if he and “serious” didn’t match, who was the improper one here? Clearly someone else.
It was Tang Yu. Corn Bean was the one who wasn’t serious. He’d given his boyfriend a WeChat note that basically called him a bad cat.
Not “bad cat,” either, but “bad miao.”
He pictured Tang Yu actually calling him that out loud…
Sang Zhao shrank back into his seat, silently leaned against the backrest, and stopped talking.
Tang Yu cleared his throat, realizing that Sang Zhao must have seen it.
He’d leveled up a bit; he wasn’t as easily flustered as before.
Even caught in the act by his little boyfriend, he didn’t feel quite as guilty as at the beginning. His ears were still a bit hot, though.
And now, he could even use his words to tease him.
“Do you like it? Your new nickname?” he asked.
“If you’d called me ‘Little Orange Bean’ I could’ve accepted it,” Sang Zhao complained. “How did it become that?”
He deliberately sighed and put on a low, lost tone.
“I used to be a pet cat twice. After I started pretending to be human, I picked out my own name from the characters my previous mom knew, so I got Sang and Zhao.”
He gave a little laugh.
“And now I’ve picked up two more characters from you. They’re ‘Bad’ and ‘Miao’.”
Now it wasn’t just Tang Yu’s ears that were red; even his face was running hot.
“I really don’t like studying,” Sang Zhao went on. “How did I end up worse off than when I was completely illiterate? How am I learning more words but getting more lost?”
That left Tang Yu unusually quiet for the rest of the drive.
Even though he was older than the little cat and had far more experience in the world, he still couldn’t beat him in a fight like this.
Humans, utterly defeated.
Once they got to Tang Yu’s place, the first thing Sang Zhao wanted to see was the fur slippers.
Tang Yu went to fetch them and passed them over.
They really were a tiny pair of slippers, just a thin sole with a single strap over the top, light as air, clearly not made from much fur.
Sang Zhao wanted to try them on.
There was only one pair, and he had four feet. But the little cat was optimistic. One pair, four paws, whatever. Not a problem.
He comforted the guilty-looking Tang Yu.
“Look, a pair, two shoes, that’s already great!” he said.
“Two shoes and four paws gives you lots of ways to wear them. I could wear them on my front paws, that would be like my hands wearing slippers. Or I could wear them on my back paws, that would be my feet wearing slippers.”
Once he got going, his creativity practically zoomed out of him.
“I could put them on both paws on one side, that way I’d be practicing my balance. And from the side, it’d kind of look like all four paws are wearing shoes. What’s that called? That’s called the Emperor’s Cat’s New Shoes.”
Tang Yu was already covering his face.
But Sang Zhao wasn’t done.
“Or I could do left front paw with right back paw, or right front paw with left back paw, crisscross like that. From a diagonal angle, it’d look really special, you know? Special how? Special as in ‘the cat performing a talent show’ kind of special. Uh, a ‘cat wearing shoes’ kind of special.”
“Stop, stop,” Tang Yu said, voice muffled behind his hand.
He was laughing so hard his stomach hurt, his abdominal muscles cramping.
“I’ll make you more, I’ll make you two more, I definitely will.”
But right now, there were only this one pair of slippers.
Sang Zhao really wanted to try them.
He set the slippers on the floor and turned back into a cat, lifted his paws, and slipped his two front paws into them.
His paws were already fluffy and bright orange. Unlike other cats, he didn’t have white “gloves.” Every single strand of fur on him was orange, the only difference being that some patches were lighter and others deeper.
The fur that shed was also orange. The slippers crocheted from that fur were orange too.
Well, pale orange, almost leaning toward a light yellow, but you could still call it orange.
So now what they had was orange cat paws slipped into orange slippers.
Sang Zhao shook his paws and the little slippers slid down.
He hurried to catch them with his other paw.
But his paws weren’t human hands. Human hands were flexible and could pick things up, catch things. Cat paws were round and padded.
When a cat tried to catch something, it really did look more like scooping or swatting.
Not very nimble, but he just barely managed to pin the slipper in place.
Pressing down on it, he shoved his paw deeper inside so it would be more secure and less likely to fall off.
Once you put new shoes on, you had to walk a few steps.
But the nerves in a cat’s paws are actually very sensitive, and their paw pads are delicate, really not designed for shoes.
Taking a few steps in slippers meant constantly fighting the urge to shake his paws and fling the things off.
So he was walking while suppressing his instincts, while also admiring his new shoes.
His expression was twisted and complicated, a little frowny and miserable.
But honestly, he was really happy.
These were handmade slippers Corn Kernel had made for him. Handmade slippers were rare enough these days, and these were handmade slippers made from his own fur by the one he loved.
The little cat felt honored. The little cat liked them.
They were pretty cute too.
Especially when he crouched there, propping up his paws to check out his own feet.
He even lifted them one at a time, tilting his head to examine the fur slippers.
Mmm. Honestly, it still felt kind of weird… because right now, he was using his hands to wear slippers.
Calling them “feet” didn’t quite feel right. They were more like his hands.
And making your hands wear slippers was definitely a unique experience.
He carefully toddled over to Tang Yu’s ankles, showing off his cat paws and cat slippers.
In that moment, Tang Yu couldn’t say a single word.
He had no idea what to say.
He was so overwhelmed by the cuteness his brain basically stopped working.
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