The Missing Cat

After spending two hours processing Dittany in Herbology, the young wizards trudged out of Greenhouse One, exhausted from head to toe.

"How could Herbology be so tiring..." Dragging his weary feet, Mobley practically draped himself over Gomez as he complained about the class that had just ended.

Abu and Xiwen were feeling pretty awful too. It was not just physical exhaustion; the greater fatigue came from endlessly repeating the same task.

The Herbology professor seemed rather inexperienced at teaching and could only follow the textbook word for word. She had the young wizards memorize the steps for processing Dittany, then led them through batch after batch of it without pause.

Whenever the young wizards finished processing one batch of Dittany, the professor repeated the lesson's key points and pointed out the mistakes made by certain students before moving on to the next batch. They were not fully liberated until the bell rang. Xiwen even suspected that every bit of Dittany in the entire school had been processed by them first-years...

"Going to eat?" Abraxas asked weakly.

"If any of you want to bring a meal back for me, I wouldn't mind skipping the Great Hall," Xiwen replied with an annoyed eye roll.

Hearing that, Gomez suddenly spoke up. "If you need me to, I can bring food back for you."

Abu and Mobley both looked tempted.

Seeing that, Xiwen quickly cut them off. He shoved Abu and Mobley on the shoulders. Since Mobley was still hanging off Gomez, Xiwen ended up pushing all three of them at once.

"Come on, let's go," he said. "There's no need to be so lazy that you can't even be bothered to eat."

After dinner, Xiwen relaxed with a bath in the washroom. He had endured the sweat from his morning training all day, and having been pampered since childhood in this world, he had not gone through something like that in a very long time.

Drying his hair with a towel, Xiwen walked back to the dormitory in his pajamas.

Abu was egging Mobley and Gomez on to visit the Quidditch Pitch. When he saw Xiwen come in, he asked, "Xiwen, want to take a stroll around the Quidditch Pitch? If we're lucky, maybe we can borrow a few broomsticks and have some fun!"

"I really don't think that's necessary." Xiwen decisively shook his head. "I'm not in the mood to walk from the southeast corner of the castle all the way to the northwest in the middle of the night."

Mobley and Gomez nodded in agreement, making Abu's expression turn rather sour.

Xiwen casually tossed his towel onto the clothes rack, then glanced back at his cat cage, as if something were wrong...

He silently stopped and looked back at the cat cage again.

The silver cage door was shut tight, and everything inside remained untouched, but the cat was gone...

"Wait, has any of you seen my cat?" He looked at the other three suspiciously.

For two months, the silver-white kitten Xiwen had brought back from the Magical Menagerie had slept with her eyes closed, just as she had in the shop.

After looking through some books, Xiwen learned that ordinary pet cats generally opened their eyes between eight and twenty days after birth. Once a kitten opened its eyes, it usually meant it had gained the ability to survive. Kneazles lived somewhat longer than ordinary house cats, and they took a little longer to open their eyes, but generally no more than a month.

Yet the kitten Xiwen had brought home, which looked remarkably like a silver British Shorthair, had not opened her eyes for a full two months. Sandrine had once suspected that she would not survive and wanted to throw her away. But at Xiwen's insistence, the House-Elf Millie still fed her a small bottle of goat's milk every day, and the kitten stubbornly survived.

Sandrine had even brought in an expert from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures to examine the kitten.

But after observing her for half a day, the expert had only concluded that the kitten possessed the bloodlines of both a house cat and a Kneazle, and that she was in excellent health. He could not determine why she could not open her eyes.

So Xiwen had planned to ask the more professional Care of Magical Creatures professor after arriving at Hogwarts. But before he could find the professor and get an answer, something unexpected happened.

Xiwen looked suspiciously at Abu and the other two. Since the kitten had been asleep all along and the cage door was securely shut, it was unlikely that she had awakened and run away on her own. Therefore, Xiwen had every reason to suspect that the three nearest to him had played a prank on him.

"Hey! Don't look at us like that!" Abu shouted indignantly. "We've never touched your cat!"

Mobley chimed in, "Ever since we got back, Abraxas has been pestering us to go to the Quidditch Pitch. We never had the chance to touch your cat cage."

Xiwen looked at Gomez. The usually quiet boy nodded as well.

After thinking it over, Xiwen decided they were not lying. They had only known each other for a short time, but they got along quite well. It was unlikely that they would play such a prank on him.

Then where had the kitten gone?

"Help me out." After a moment of silence, Xiwen spoke. "Can you help me look for my cat nearby?"

It was the best option he had. With no idea what had happened, getting more people to help was the wisest choice.

Mobley and Gomez had been eager for an excuse to refuse Abu's invitation to suffer at the Quidditch Pitch in the middle of the night, so they quickly got moving. Seeing that no one would accompany him, Abu lost interest as well and joined the search party.

"Little Cat!" Xiwen shouted loudly in the corridor outside the common room.

"So you named your cat Little Cat?" Abraxas, who was slacking off nearby, could not help mocking him.

Xiwen shot him an irritated glare. "Instead of wasting your breath making fun of me, why don't you go search near the stairs?"

"Fine, fine." Abu spread his hands helplessly. "How did I end up with a friend like you?"

Because of Xiwen's dormitory-wide search for the cat, the students in the Slytherin Common Room noticed their strange behavior and curiously asked what they were doing.

After Xiwen and the others explained, many young wizards who had nothing to do after dinner joined the cat-searching party and began their search for Little Cat.

The group grew larger and larger, and its influence spread further and further. Even students resting in their dormitories and older wizards who had just returned from outside joined in. In the end, nearly all of Slytherin House achieved the remarkable feat of searching for one cat!

"Xiwen, haven't you found Little Cat yet? Curfew is almost here!" Elshiona asked worriedly.

After failing to find Little Cat for so long, most of the Slytherin students had lost the enthusiasm they had shown when joining the search. They said goodbye to Xiwen and returned to rest. Elshiona was one of the few who stayed with him until the end.

Xiwen sighed helplessly. "Yeah. If I still can't find her, I guess I'll be breaking school rules on my very first day..."

Elshiona's eyes widened. "What? You're going out for a midnight stroll?"

"Shh—keep it down!" Xiwen hurriedly covered her mouth and lowered his voice.

But plenty of people in the common room had still heard Elshiona's voice and turned to look their way.

Seeing Prefect Ignatius get up and walk over, Xiwen smiled wryly and released his hand, revealing Elshiona's slightly flushed face.

"Xiwen, I heard you're planning to sneak out at night?" Ignatius asked with considerable interest.

Xiwen simply nodded. "Yes, Prefect Pruitt. I still want to find my cat."

Ignatius said, "I told you already, just call me Ig. Wait a moment!"

He then pulled out his wand.

Just as Xiwen wondered what he intended to do, Ignatius touched the tip of his wand to Xiwen's head.

"Disillusion!" he said.

A cool, liquid-like layer of magic then enveloped Xiwen. Looking down at his body, which now seemed as though it did not belong to him at all, he saw that its color and texture had become exactly the same as the background of the common room around him. He seemed to have become a humanoid chameleon.

"The Disillusionment Charm?" he asked softly.

"Looks decent enough." Looking in Xiwen's direction, Ignatius tilted his head. "Go on. It won't fool the professors, but it should be enough to fool that old bastard Pringle."

After turning around and walking away with a flourish, he looked back uneasily and added, "Remember, if you spot a professor, don't worry about anything else. Run back as fast as you can. They'll think you're a Gryffindor!"

Xiwen's mouth twitched.

So you really are a prefect?