The rats of the Wizarding World were not essentially different from the mammals, rodents, and murids Zheng Qing had seen growing up—they all had gray fur, long tails, could burrow, climb trees, and swim, possessed vigorous vitality and extraordinary breeding rates, and liked living in sewers, gutters, grave mounds, and similar places. At most, rats in the Wizarding World were a little bigger, a little smarter, and a little more capable of survival.
That was only natural for rats surviving in the Wizarding World. After all, this was a world inhabited by wizards. Other creatures wandering along its edges inevitably needed stronger adaptability than their distant relatives, or they would have long since been hunted to extinction by other predators.
After hearing Old Yao assign the task, the classroom erupted in cries of misery.
The delicate young witches in particular made no effort to hide the disgust on their faces—Zheng Qing had every reason to believe that this task assigned by the school would surely spark a wave of trading in rats and other creatures on the underground black market among the students.
Wealthy young wizards had never begrudged spending silver horns and Gold Beans to buy precious time for things they considered more important. A magical experiment, a hunting match, pursuing a witch, and so on.
Wizards without money, meanwhile, could only trade their time for limited funds to support their simple, dreary academic lives.
For some reason, when he thought of those transactions, the image of a burly Fat Wizard immediately surfaced in the young publicly funded student's mind—Zheng Qing remembered that Sephrano and his Xiangqi Society seemed to have been conducting similar "gray magic" dealings at school all along. Even so, that did not mean Zheng Qing would go to Sephrano to buy rats to turn in.