Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I went home with a head full of worries.

In truth, the signs had been there ever since I moved into this place.

At first, Director stopped eating cat food, yet somehow kept putting on weight.

This Fat Orange was clearly much sturdier than he had been half a year ago. His cheeks had filled out, his belly was almost dragging on the floor, and he was getting less and less inclined to move around.

After that, I would occasionally find a few crumbs of fried little fish caught in his whiskers, along with oily smears that looked suspiciously like nutritional paste.

Then yesterday, that vest had suddenly appeared on him.

By now, that impossible-to-ignore patent leather vest had already been tossed into a corner by me. Paired with the unsolved mystery, it felt more like some sort of declaration of war.

Which raised the question.

What kind of person would spend a fortune buying a designer vest for a fat, hefty orange alley cat?

And when I thought of that fresh, non-greasy cucumber fragrance, plus the cost-is-no-object feeding of nutritional paste, there was a very good chance the other party was a young woman who was either rich, noble, or both, with a bit of bourgeois taste to boot.

So I looked coldly at Director, who was sprawled on the sofa, and said, “Is she younger than me? And richer than me too?”

Director completely ignored my sour tone. His eyes were three parts indifference, three parts wicked charm, and four parts cool detachment.

His whole face said one thing: Woman, you’re overthinking it.

I wanted to find out who the other person was, but unfortunately, I had only moved here recently and wasn’t familiar with the tenants nearby. I had no idea where to even begin.

Besides, even if she was my next-door neighbor, I went to work during the day and kept the cat locked at home most of the time. How on earth had she managed to fatten him up?

Confusing.

Terrifying.

Utterly inexplicable.

Then I looked at Director again. Because he had gained so much weight, his old flea collar was cutting tightly into his flesh.

I had just taken out a pair of scissors when inspiration suddenly struck. I quickly tore off a sticky note and wrote a sentence on it.

“Thank you for the vest, but this cat already has an owner.”

Quite satisfied with that passive-aggressive tone, I rolled the sticky note into a long strip and tied it in a knot around the flea collar.

Next, all I had to do was wait for the other party’s reply.

Life was full of trivialities, and I soon pushed the matter to the back of my mind.

After all, aside from this arrogant orange alley cat, I also had a hamster that couldn’t run fast and a parrot that couldn’t fly. With my current income, keeping them fed wasn’t exactly easy. In fact, by the end of every month, money was always tight.

I was a violinist. Most of the time, I earned money by playing at weddings. But business had been bad lately. Not only were people not having babies, they weren’t even getting married. With no gigs coming in, I could only survive by working part-time at a training center.

Even more terrifying was that I was about to lose that bit of income too.

Just now, I had received a notice from the center asking me to come settle my pay for the first half of the year. After that, classes would be suspended indefinitely. I asked Finance when lessons would resume, only for the person on the other end to pour out even more bitterness than I had.

“Teacher Bai, haven’t you heard about the policies from above?”

“What policies?”

“The pandemic’s already hit us hard, and now with the Double Reduction policy on top of that? Isn’t that just making things worse?”

Seeing my blank expression, the other person quickly changed the subject. “But it’s fine. You’re an arts teacher, so these kinds of policies won’t affect you much.”

Whether the impact was big or small was hard to measure, but I was, in fact, already unemployed.

There was nothing I could do. I took my pay and went home in low spirits.

It was evening now. The sunset outside the window was beautiful. Scarlet-rose cirrus clouds looked like schools of carp surging down from the edge of the sky. Through layer upon layer of golden light, it seemed as if, with one light leap, they could transform into dragons.

My cat was sitting in the middle of that otherworldly scene, his posture seductive, his expression languid.

I was just about to walk over when I caught a strange, subtle scent in the air.

I had clearly washed him with citrus shampoo, yet there was another peculiar smell mixed in with it, like mint white tea that was bitter at first and sweet afterward, diluting that fresh, sweet fragrance.

Clearly, the smell was coming from my cat. Looking at his neck, I saw something glittering there.

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.

This time, they had even replaced the flea collar for me.

It had been swapped for a golden nameplate collar, complete with an 18K certification stamp inside. One glance was enough to tell it was worth a lot.

Now this was going too far.