"Squeak squeak, I told you, there are rats here!"
A little rat in a yellow vest tugged another, slightly smaller rat in a yellow vest out of a Tree hollow. Excitedly, it pointed at the black cat and white cat lying on the bench and squeaked away.
The black cat flicked his tail in surprise.
He recognized these Clothed Rats. His own shop employed two rats in green vests. But as far as Zheng Qing knew, rats in yellow vests were ratfolk young and were ordinarily forbidden from leaving their underground world.
Yet for some reason, two of them had appeared before him.
The Little White Cat seemed to hear the chattering nearby. She twitched her ears but did not move.
The black cat cautiously glanced at her before turning back, his gaze falling once more on the two unexpected visitors.
"Squeak! It really is true!" The smaller yellow-vested rat clutched a crudely bound fairy-tale book with terrible illustrations, rapidly flipping through it. From time to time, it looked up at the two cats on the bench, its voice full of delight.
"This is a cat! It looks exactly like the picture in the book!"
The black cat took one glance and spotted the illustrated cat in the fairy-tale book. It had a square head, huge ears, a round, pudgy body, and a tail as thin as a thread. It did not resemble a real cat in the slightest; instead, it looked more like a mutated Himalayan Yeti.
That discovery left the black cat deeply displeased.
He had seen timid rats and muddleheaded rats, but never rats this blind. Had living underground for too long made their eyes degenerate to such a state? What part of that cat in the illustration resembled him or the Little White Cat? How had