Seeing the Clothed Rat Again

A few weeks earlier, Zheng Qing had encountered a rat wearing a Red Vest in a corner of the Office Building.

At the time, he had been pestering the Door Gods outside Old Yao's office, wanting to ask the professor about the abnormalities in his Transformation Spell. Unexpectedly, that suddenly appearing rat had disrupted everything—Shen Tu Yu Lei had been chatting with him on and off, but from the moment the rat appeared, the Door Gods, including the big white cat at their feet, seemed to have turned mute and never made another sound.

Realizing that there was something unusual about the Clothed Rat, the young government-funded student immediately gave full rein to a cat's curiosity and tailed it. But in the end, he lost its trail in front of a tree hollow.

Even though he had waited at the hollow's entrance for a long time that day, and even though he had returned several times afterward to search around it, he never encountered that Clothed Rat again.

Whenever he thought of it in his spare time, the young government-funded student had even suspected that his eyes had merely deceived him in that moment of confusion. After all, a rat wearing clothes was rare even at Wizard University. If it really had been a school spirit beast, or a wizard from the school in transformed form, there would surely have been some gossip about it among the professors or students.

Yet neither Professor Yao, his classmates, nor his colleagues in the School Labor Committee Patrol Team knew anything about the "Clothed Rat" Zheng Qing mentioned.

Nearly a month passed in the blink of an eye. As his coursework and study assignments grew heavier, Zheng Qing had almost forgotten all about that rat.

Until one of his feline subordinates, a Forest