Chapter 5

Chapter 5

I hurriedly picked up the cat and took a closer look. The note around his neck had already been swapped out.

When I opened it, it was the same familiar sheet of staff paper. Across the top half, someone had written a flamboyant line of text.

“Do you have a receipt? Come find me for reimbursement.”

Ha. Ha. Ha.

This guy was really asking for it.

I unfolded the lower half. As if afraid I wouldn’t come, they had written out a detailed address in careful, deliberate strokes.

“Room 404, Building 12, Zhaohua Community, Chaozhou City?”

Building 12, Zhaohua Residential Area?

Wasn’t that the very building I lived in?

The answer seemed ready to burst out.

Unlike the polite knock I’d given Room 403 earlier, this time I went straight in with a hammering blow, pounding the security door hard enough to shake the whole hallway.

And yet no matter how hard I hammered, the door across from me simply wouldn’t open.

Heh. Got scared, did you?

I rested my hand for a moment and was just about to keep going when a voice sounded behind me.

“No one lives there.”

I turned and saw that it was the landlord.

He was carrying a black plastic bag in one hand, stuffed so full it bulged. Maybe because he’d seen me tirelessly knocking on someone else’s door, he was eyeing me with a guarded expression.

I felt a little awkward. “But I clearly saw my cat come out of here.”

“Told you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

He didn’t waste any more words. Lowering his head, he rummaged around in the bag for a while and pulled out an old bronze key.

Then he walked straight up and opened the door.

Room 404 was a large apartment. Unlike my small two-bedroom place, this unit was big, and very empty.

“Someone did live here once, but that was years ago.”

The landlord led me through several empty rooms. A layer of dust was visible on the floor; there really were no signs that anyone lived here.

I was about to leave when I noticed a photograph that had fallen by the leg of a table.

In the photo, a man sat in a wheelchair. His white shirt seemed to glow. His eyelids were as thin as rice paper, and he was smiling reservedly at the camera.

In his arms, he was holding my cat.

Director was different from other cats. One of his ears had a notch in it, three whiskers on the left side were white while four on the right were black, and there was a very obvious bald patch on one of his front paws.

I was certain that the cat in the photo was mine.

I turned the photo over. In one corner were a few words written in familiar handwriting-

“Jiang Boguang, photographed September 2017.”

2017?

Wasn’t that three years ago?

But my cat wasn’t even two years old yet…

The more I thought about it, the more my scalp prickled.

Director circled around my feet, the big gold ring around his neck gleaming brightly.

I took a picture with my phone and did an image search. The first result was a custom order link for that collar. When I looked at the price…

3,888 yuan.

Great. Painfully mundane.

This absolutely could not be some supernatural encounter. It had to be a goddamn prank!

I looked over that note again. Aside from the joke of an address, there were actually a few messy handwritten words on the back, as if the paper had been torn off unintentionally.

Put together, they formed a fragmented sentence.

“Sometimes we live, and sometimes we die.”