Chapter 15: When You Live With a Cat, Flying Fur Is Just a Fact of Life

Even a healthy little cat like Rendong shed plenty.

All that rolling around had left Tantai Tian covered in fur. Even though the Emperor’s Imperial Ceremonial Robes were mostly dark in color, the hairs stood out easily enough.

Perched on his knees, the cat felt a twinge of guilt and gave the fabric a few perfunctory pats with his paw pads.

The fur only pressed deeper into the cloth.

The cat: ?

Wretched fur!

Hmm, wait a moment. The human’s clothes today were rather magnificent too.

Rendong tilted his little head back, studying the human with grave attention.

He so rarely saw the human dressed this luxuriously… Ah, the bell!

The cat’s attention snapped at once to the bell dangling from the end of the human’s braid. He’d been so busy comforting the human earlier that he’d completely failed to notice such a delicious toy.

Rendong restrained himself.

Rendong failed to restrain himself.

A few light steps forward, and he rose up on his hind legs against Tantai Tian’s thigh, then swatted down hard with his paw. Ding! What a crisp, lovely sound.

The cat was thrilled.

His pupils rounded out, and his whiskers quivered.

Ha!

Bilaterally! He batted from both sides!

More fur went swirling through the air, settling onto those dark ceremonial robes.

Today was the Grand Military Review, and with the Emperor attending in person, he naturally wore the full ceremonial regalia.

To outsiders, Emperor Taichu’s enthronement had been a hasty accident. It had come abruptly and at an inconvenient moment, letting the weakened Eastern Palace snatch the throne by pure luck.

In the eyes of many court officials, this New Emperor simply lacked sufficient majesty.

Still, with the backing of the former Crown Prince’s faction, the legitimate succession of the Eastern Palace, and the Empress Dowager’s firm support, no one truly dared offend the New Emperor. As for those who had once been arrogant and overbearing, after witnessing Fu Yingsheng’s fate, they had all temporarily tucked in their tails and behaved.

Ordinarily, a Grand Military Review, like those held while the Late Emperor still lived, involved all Eight Garrisons participating together.

First came the competition: each division would draw lots for a hundred soldiers to take part, and the victors would naturally earn abundant rewards. Second came the formal drill and parade. Together, the two would take the better part of half a month.

To hone the army and display the nation’s might. That was the purpose of the Grand Military Review.

And this was the first such review since the New Emperor’s enthronement, drawing all the more attention… Yet the man in charge of the Capital Garrison happened to be Dowager Consort Wang’s half-brother.

And so, with everyone harboring their own schemes, the Grand Military Review began.

Amid this gathering storm, the cat felt none of that dreadful pressure.

No, that wasn’t quite true. The cat did have pressure.

Rendong was under the terrible burden of KPIs!

That horrifying thought slowed the swatting of the little bell.

So this was what humans had always meant by KPIs. What a fearsome thing indeed.

At the thought of having to earn 500 Points, Rendong licked his paw pad, feeling glum.

To save up Points, he would need lots and lots of Side Quests.

Completing the Main Quest earned no Points at all. After all, that reward had already been paid out in advance: it was Rendong’s very survival.

The Main Quest was issued by the System, but Side Quests could be actively sought out by the cat himself.

The System had told him that beyond the side quests triggered on the spot, some could be claimed voluntarily by the Host.

“System, why didn’t you tell the cat that from the start?”

[The Host never asked.]

And that was yet another trouble that came with a kitten Host.

A human Host, the moment the System arrived, would have interrogated it about everything from A to Z.

The System resolved to make some improvements tailored to cat Hosts going forward.

Rendong had the System open up that menu.

The cat was illiterate, so the System read each entry aloud to him one by one.

Some were brutally hard, like assassinating so-and-so or stopping some terrible plot. Others were easy, like last time, when saving The Two Qingqings had completed a quest… What!

Sweet whiskers, how had that counted as completed?

[It generally means those characters will have plot developments later. Saving them counts as preserving the storyline.]

The System explained.

Saving Qinglian and Qingyun had actually been worth 100 Points.

It hadn’t been a difficult task, but at 50 Points apiece, one could see that human lives carried considerable weight.

Wasn’t Rendong just amazing!

The happy kitten chased his own tail in circles on the human’s lap, spinning round and round.

Rendong was a cat who didn’t overthink. Once he made a decision, he never once considered regret.

A cat’s day was simple: eat this, drink that. With those two matters secured, he could roll around in the sun and sleep.

Regret? What was that?

Was it prey that went uneaten from the last meal, only to be stolen before the next? Well, a cat’s belly was only so big. If something got stolen, he’d simply steal it back next time.

That was just the sort of pure creature a cat was.

And so, the ambitious and enterprising Rendong was already plotting how to trigger more Side Quests.

Sweet whiskers, and there was still that scheme by Dowager Consort Wang!

What was the System’s purpose in coming to this world again, hmm? The cat thought for a while, then remembered. Oh, right. To keep the main storyline moving forward.

After all, his human was only the Second Male Lead.

But there was still plenty of time before the Male Lead appeared.

And the Side Quests mostly revolved around Tantai Tian.

After all, before the Male Lead showed up, the dynasty couldn’t exactly be torn apart by a deranged monarch.

But wasn’t the human supposed to be a tyrant in the story, eventually overthrown and toppled?

So the System wanted the human to keep being Emperor, keep being a tyrant, but also not be too brutal? Was it trying to slam the brakes on a runaway carriage?

The cat marveled at his own brilliant metaphor and gave a contented little hum.

The System was a dummy too.

Having done his share of serious thinking, the Cat Puree Treat sprawled across Tantai Tian’s knees couldn’t help but resume batting at the dangling bell.

Jingle jingle, without end. Tantai Tian did nothing to stop the cat wreaking havoc on his person. Or rather, the gaze from those deep black eyes had never left him at all.

That faint malice, laced with winter chill, should have registered with Rendong.

But having just faced down a far more violent aura, the cat had tossed such subtle warning signs out of his head.

Without knowing it, he had gradually grown accustomed to the fact that the human was a frightening person.

His human truly wasn’t quite right in the head.

The cat had seen other cats keep humans. He knew what a normal relationship between a normal human and a normal cat looked like.

It was never this paranoid, this cold and brooding.

Humans were always clinging to their cats, cooing in silly voices about hugs from Mama and Papa, calling them baby and demanding kisses. But what did it actually amount to? Unable to understand a word of cat-speak, the meanings they extracted were usually utterly beside the point.

So the long-suffering cats simply had to forgive their humans.

Their life together was noisy and affectionate.

But Tantai Tian wasn’t like that.

He treated the cat as some tighter, inseparable part of himself.

With an iron grip of possessiveness.

Hmph. Don’t think the cat doesn’t know!

Rendong swatted the bell at the end of the braid clean away with a slap.

The cat knew everything!

The cat who knew everything failed to notice one thing: after that earlier outburst, Tantai Tian, aside from a light touch to his ears, had not made skin contact with him once since.

…

Yu Zeming had been standing guard outside the hall, listening anxiously to every sound within.

No screams of agony, no sounds of violent struggle… Most likely that cat was still alive.

That cat really might end up becoming the Little Ancestor of the palace.

It wasn’t that his previous attentiveness to Rendong had been an act. Back then, Yu Zeming had recognized the Emperor’s slight fondness for the cat, but he’d regarded it merely as an object of comfort for His Majesty.

No different from a calming sachet or a soothing medicine.

But today, upon discovering Rendong’s disappearance, His Majesty’s fury had been anything but ordinary.

That horrifying expression on Emperor Taichu’s face, even for just an instant, had dredged up an old memory in Yu Zeming. No doubt the Sixth Prince had felt the same, which was why he’d been so terrified.

Could it be… that His Majesty had all along believed Rendong to be…

Yu Zeming didn’t dare think further.

Nowadays, he and Liang Ze were probably the only two attendants at His Majesty’s side who knew that secret. But if it were true, then the Emperor’s indulgence of Rendong from the very beginning finally had an explanation.

After all, that was precisely the creature from his hallucinations.

Of the same root and origin as His Majesty, bound as one.

After today’s events had erupted, Yu Zeming had even worried for the cat’s life, fearing he’d be put to death by an Emperor who had uncovered the truth. And this had always been a living, breathing cat, after all. Who could have guessed that now, faintly, he could hear little jingling sounds drifting from within.

Those were the very bells Yu Zeming had personally woven into the ends of Emperor Taichu’s braid. There was no mistaking them.

Graceful and refined, dignified in every gesture. The former Crown Prince, the present Emperor, had never once allowed those copper bells to make a single sound.

If they were ringing, who could it be but Rendong?

Only then did Yu Zeming softly let out his breath, feeling an indescribable sense of relief.

Emperor Taichu rarely kept any living creature close, people included.

Not the Late Emperor, not the Empress Dowager, not even his own brothers, nor the palace attendants who served at his side. Almost none of them could bear to touch him.

It was as if it were a quirk the Emperor had been born with.

And in the end, a cat named by Emperor Taichu himself had become the sole exception.

However wrong the beginning had gone, Yu Zeming hoped this singular bond would endure for a long, long time.

So that His Majesty, too, might know a little happiness.