Cats and Foxes

A Black Cat trotted down a woodland path, followed by two short wizards.

The Black Cat was Zheng Qing, of course. The two short wizards were Xiao Xiao and Lin Guo.

A dozen or so minutes earlier, the young wizard from Alpha Academy had rushed into the library, panting, and shouted that "his subordinates" were in trouble. For making a racket in the library, an Alchemy Doll on duty had promptly dragged him off to the office.

Once Zheng Qing had finished the paperwork and bailed the boy out of the library office, Lin Guo gave him a jumbled account of what had happened. Only then did Zheng Qing understand where those so-called "subordinates" had come from: they were the cats he had recruited in the little grove.

Earlier that day, Lin Guo had gone to the lakeside grove for an alchemy experiment. He planned to search the squirrels' tree hollows for a few dried honey mushrooms. The school's little squirrels loved collecting things, and their hollows were always full of strange trophies: broken Feather Pens discarded by students, epidemic pills that pets had found too bitter and hidden in the grass, and all kinds of mushrooms that grew beneath the trees after rain.

After searching four or five hollows, Lin Guo had traded a bag of sugar-roasted chestnuts for three dried honey mushrooms from a Two-Tailed Squirrel. He had intended to return to the castle and start his experiment at once, but at the edge of the grove he ran into two gangs of "thugs" facing off.

For some reason, Zheng Qing's cats had clashed with a group of foxes from the Pet Garden. Perhaps foxes, being canines, naturally disliked cats. Perhaps both sides had spotted the same unmarked mouse. Or perhaps one cat had simply stepped on one