On hearing the Rat Immortal's question, Colma's first instinct was to raise her head and look up. Branches filled the canopy overhead, lush with small, early-spring leaves, but there was no cat riding up there.
So she took "riding" to mean "seven," since the two sounded alike in Chinese, which also seemed to fit the logic of a brainteaser.
The witch secretly counted on the fingers she held behind her back, did a little mental arithmetic, then ventured an answer. "Seven cats in the tree, no cats on the ground, so there might be seven cats altogether, or one? As for whose cat it is... a cat in the Silent Forest might have been born and raised in the wild."
It was a conventional answer, with a little cleverness thrown in.
"Do you think that cat's surname is Sun? Born and raised in the wild, indeed..." The Rat Immortal scoffed at the witch's answer and shook his head. "I'll just tell you. There are zero cats altogether, and that cat belongs to Schrödinger."
"Zero cats? Schrödinger?" Colma blinked.
Colma had some faint recollection of this Grand Wizard, who had made outstanding contributions to spell formulas for low-speed motion within a psionic field. Just as memorable was the Grand Wizard's peculiar interest in felines.
Legend had it that Schrödinger had once turned himself into a stray cat and lived in the wild, solely to better understand feline habits and thus better serve his Egyptian Cat, Erwin. Supposedly, that Egyptian Cat often played hide-and-seek with Schrödinger: whenever Schrödinger looked for him, he could never find him, yet whenever he stopped looking, Erwin would be sitting beside his feet.
So when she heard that the cat belonged to Schrödinger, Colma could just about follow along, and felt she had grasped the essence of