Business with a Rat

"Hey, hey, classmate!"

"Hello, classmate! Here, look over here!"

Ding Dang Ear bounced around Xiao Xiao's feet, doing his best to catch the young wizard's attention. "Don't you think we should find some time to discuss the Corpse Beetle trade... How about this Saturday? I can bring samples to the school. You decide the exact time, and we'll decide the exact place. How does that sound?"

Earlier, after Ding Dang Ear suggested trading Corpse Beetles for Little Rats, the black cat and the bespectacled short wizard had slipped aside and whispered to each other for quite a while.

He had thought they were merely discussing the terms of the trade. To his surprise, once the man and cat had finished whispering, they left him behind and went off to busy themselves—the black cat joined the group of cats large and small and began delivering an impassioned speech, occasionally walking up to a cat and stuffing a small pill into its mouth. The bespectacled short wizard was even worse; he simply hid beside a Catalpa Tree and stared blankly ahead, as though he had completely forgotten about discussing a deal with him.

Now that he had finally caught an opportunity to approach the short wizard, Ding Dang Ear was determined to bring up the trade again. In his view, exchanging his family's surplus Corpse Beetles for the wizards' Little Rats was a win-win proposition.

But in Zheng Qing and Xiao Xiao's eyes, that "win-win" needed quotation marks. Selling rats was their main source of income, after all. While there was theoretically a market for Corpse Beetles, they had not conducted any detailed research and had no idea about its size or prevailing prices. Besides, if they traded rats for beetles, no matter how the exchange was arranged, they would lose some