Cat Garden (Part 3)

"The Correct Character Mastery says: a domestic cat is called a mao, a wild cat a li. There are several kinds of li. Those about the size of a fox, with yellow and black fur, markings like fur, a round head, and a large tail are called maoli. They are skilled at stealing chickens and ducks."

Old Man Chen had started showing off his book learning again.

Zhou Tong blinked and looked at Hu Mang's closely cropped hair, then at his great spear, Shattering Thunder.

Round head and large tail—he really did have a round head and a large tail!

After putting away the "blueprint," Hu Mang finally sized up the "cat dumplings" crawling all over him, somewhat surprised.

How had he never known he was so popular?

Oh, sentient demons were extremely rare in the Heavenly Gate, and they were basically all under special protection. He'd never had a chance to come into contact with them.

Besides, there was something a little off about this welcome. A domestic cat was a mao, a wild cat a li?

So, in the eyes of these cats, he was basically a yellow-hair?

The yellow-hair in the eyes of domestic cats? A biker-punk tomcat?

And was "cat" another name these Ding Fire Demon-Subduing Cats called themselves?

Why did it sound a little improper?

So the ultimate reason was his Crimson Moon Fox bloodline?

"So, what do we do next?" Hu Mang ignored the "purehearted house cats" crawling all over him and looked at Old Man Chen.

Chen Sheng stroked his beard, his expression peculiar.

"From what this old man knows of the Cat Garden, these Ding Fire Demon-Subduing Cats were all transformed from spirit essences. If you can gain the recognition of these demon-subduing cat spirit essences and pass the trial, you can turn the illusory into reality and obtain a spirit pet capable of subduing demons and defending the Dao. Coupled with that 'Heavenly Soldier's Imperial Weapon' in your hand, it will definitely activate your eligibility as a 'Divine Dynasty remnant' in this Demon-Subduing City, and the trial to obtain a cat will merge with the 'Divine Dynasty Heavenly Soldier' trial."

"Of all the steps involved, the most troublesome is gaining these cats' recognition. As the saying goes, creatures differ in intelligence and dullness: the intelligent are extraordinary, the dull commonplace. Among all beasts, cats are truly unique in their intelligence. Though they seldom possess the full virtues of heaven and earth, they do possess Qi in which either yin or yang predominates."

"...Speak plainly."

"Plainly put, cats are eccentric and utterly fickle. No matter how much you dote on one, in its heart you're nothing more than a poop scooper. To grow genuinely close to one, let alone get it to acknowledge you as its master, is a task of a thousand difficulties and ten thousand hardships. But you're different."

"They're illusory cats, but you're a genuine fox. This is what happens when a flirt meets an even bigger flirt. It couldn't get any flirtier."

"..." Hu Mang was speechless.

So he was that much of a flirt?

"So Brother Hu really is a fox spirit." Zhou Tong widened her eyes and examined Hu Mang closely.

"You don't look all that handsome, though."

"..."

Chen Sheng stroked his beard and said:

"Whenever you're ready, you can choose one and enter the trial. But this old man suggests you wait a little longer."

"First, there should be other treasures here besides the cats. You can look around. This place is dangerous to others because cats are fickle and will give people directions at random, but it shouldn't be much of a problem for you."

Looking at Hu Mang, whose body was almost completely covered in cats, Old Man Chen felt envy, jealousy, and resentment.

"Second, you ought to wait for this old man and little Zhou. The two of us haven't chosen suitable cats yet."

Hu Mang casually stroked a cat of some unknown breed as he asked in puzzlement:

"Can the two of you even get chosen? It looks to me like you have no appeal at all to the cats in this Cat Garden."

"..." Zhou Tong was speechless.

Chen Sheng coughed dryly. "That's true. According to the Cat Garden's rules, to take a demon-subduing cat away, there does have to be an acknowledgment of a master. But from another angle, the Cat Garden never stipulated that these Ding Fire Cats have to acknowledge us as masters. We can acknowledge them as masters instead. As long as they accept us as their poop scoopers and accept our offerings, we can enter the trial too."

"...Good idea. You two get on with it, then. I'll have another look around."

Hu Mang left with a bunch of lapdogs—no, lapcats. The Ding Fire Demon-Subduing Cats left behind were the ones who had wanted to fawn over him but hadn't managed to squeeze their way in.

Chen Sheng and Zhou Tong exchanged a glance. For some reason, their hearts both inexplicably ached. Fortunately, Old Man Chen was an old hand at the ways of the world. He quickly coughed dryly and took out a piece of special cat food, handing it to Zhou Tong.

"Little Tong, let's go acknowledge our masters too."

Zhou Tong silently accepted it. She understood all too well that this acknowledgment of a master meant something completely different from what it meant for Hu Mang.

As the saying went, fawn and fawn like a lapdog, and in the end you'd have nothing at all.

Yellow-hair, yellow-hair, keep at it to the end, and you'd be covered in cats.

The facts proved that yellow-hairs were blessed with good fortune.

Hu Mang, that wild fox spirit, was the yellow-hair among yellow-hairs. He was a redhead!

He also soon discovered that the buildings in the Cat Garden were not arranged at random. Their forms and the Qi they gave off faintly echoed the "demon-subduing cats" scattered throughout the grounds, as if every spirit cat guarding this place had a "Dao sanctuary" all its own.

As Hu Mang observed them to himself, he suddenly felt a tug at his robe.

He looked down to see a remarkably intelligent-looking three-tailed cat pulling at its hem.

Its earlier laziness was nowhere to be seen. Its mismatched eyes flashed with an unmistakable urgency, and its three tails wound gently around his wrist like ribbons. Without taking no for an answer, it led him toward a peculiar building deep in the garden.

The building resembled a huge, upside-down woven wicker cat bed, with a rounded archway for an entrance. It was built from some kind of warm, smooth spirit wood, whose surface bore natural cat-paw markings like patterns of clouds. Several strings of tiny wind chimes hung from the corners of the eaves, their clappers jade carvings of curled-up cats.

This number one lapcat had gotten ahead of the others and dragged Hu Mang into its home, while the other lapcats could only gaze at the entrance and sigh.

A light breeze set the wind chimes on the door tinkling and jangling.

But the moment Hu Mang entered, he sensed something was off. Inside this Nine Lives Grotto were nine antique bronze mirrors.

When the bronze mirrors reflected him, Hu Mang's human form vanished, leaving only a "humanoid red-furred fox"-the tailless kind.

"Huh, who would've thought I could reveal my true form too?" Hu Mang was delighted.

Hu Mang had harbored two obsessions ever since he was little. The first was that he had no tail. Every time he took a dump as a child, he wondered whether there was something wrong with his chrysanthemum, like folliculitis or something, that had kept it from developing.

The other was his inability to transform. His Hu Household was a thousand-year-old Aristocratic Clan, yet by the time it reached his generation, he couldn't even take on another form. It was truly a disgrace to the family tradition.

But looking at it now, it wasn't that he couldn't do it. The time simply hadn't come!

"So, is this a trial like the one in the Eight Mansions before? Do I have to follow a certain order of yin, yang, and the four directions, or...?"

As Hu Mang pondered how to solve it, he saw the three-tailed white cat slip into the leftmost bronze mirror and come out of the third, carrying something in its mouth. After doing this several times, it had three shriveled "cat tails" in its mouth.

"That's it?"

Hu Mang was taken aback. He hadn't expected his "yellow-hair identity" to work so well. Just like that, the three-tailed white cat had stolen its own treasures and brought them out.

Hu Mang looked down. The little snow-white cat was charming and lively, its three fluffy tails swaying gently behind it. Its round eyes were clear and bright, and its tails alternately stretched out and curled around one another. It looked lively and utterly endearing.

"Nice, very nice."

Hu Mang squatted down and gave it a full-service massage, stroking it from head to tail, then from its back to its belly. His technique was quite practiced and professional. The three-tailed white cat's eyes curved into slits under his strokes, and it let out seductive meows.

"Meow~ meow meow~~"

"Mm, that felt good, didn't it? Thanks for your patronage. Please come again."

After servicing it, Hu Mang accepted the three shriveled cat tails with a clear conscience. Almost the instant they came into his hands, a thought was transmitted from the mirrors, and Hu Mang immediately learned what they did.

"Life-saving cat tails, huh."

Hu Mang gestured in front of the mirror, muttering to himself.

"Only, how am I supposed to get the tails in? Do I really have to make a sacrifice?"

Fortunately, the way to use the cat tails wasn't quite so twisted. Almost as soon as one touched his body, it vanished.

Then a fluffy tail appeared behind the humanoid red fox in the mirror. It was white, fluffy, and pretty.

A thought stirred in Hu Mang's mind. If one worked, two should be no problem either.

A moment later, Hu Mang wiggled his hips and looked at the three enormous "fox tails" on the demon fox in the mirror, nodding in satisfaction.

Very good. Three more life-saving items.

After leaving the Nine Lives Grotto, Hu Mang was met with warm invitations from a crowd of respectable cats.

The "red-haired fox" swept his gaze over them and finally decided to go home with a "black clouds over snow."

"Black clouds over snow" referred to a cat with a black back and a white belly, legs, feet, and paws.

That wasn't the important part. What mattered was that this black cat's eyes were black too. When their gazes met, Hu Mang's Mysterious Yin Devil Moon State of Mind rippled slightly, a rare occurrence.

And this black cat's house was called the Night Eye Studio.

Hu Mang was quite curious about the Night Eye. His demon fox bloodline already gave him "night vision," so he was very curious what sort of eye this so-called "Night Eye" actually was.

The moment he entered the Night Eye Studio, everything went black before Hu Mang's eyes. It was as if his vision had been cut off all at once.

No, it seemed it wasn't his vision that had been cut off, but the light.

When people closed their eyes, residual points of light still remained on their retinas.

And Hu Mang, with his innate Fox Sight, naturally saw a faint light even at night.

But here, even that faint light had been snuffed out.

In the pure darkness, he couldn't even feel the existence of his own body. It was as though his soul had been stripped away and left hanging alone in this void without light or shadow.

This was no ordinary darkness. It was a "blind domain" in the geomantic configuration.

Hu Mang was horrified. He tried to circulate his Law Power to produce light, only to find that the spiritual power within him vanished like a clay ox sinking into the sea.

This room didn't just devour light—it devoured Qi too!

He instinctively tried to retreat, but discovered that the door behind him had long since disappeared. Suffocating darkness surrounded him on every side.

Suddenly, a piercing pain shot through his eye sockets. It came not from an external blow, but from a tearing inside his eyeballs.

As he perceived it, his pair of murky yellow eyes, which had possessed the ability of Fox Sight, were now being forcibly recast by this pure darkness.

"So that's it... This Night Eye Studio wasn't meant for anyone to live in. It's for 'nurturing Sha.'"

Hu Mang abruptly understood.

The construction of this room was profoundly unnatural. It had no windows, no candleholders, and even the gaps between its bricks were sealed airtight.

In feng shui, this was called "veiling the heavens and blotting out the sun, severing Qi and locking away the soul."

An ordinary person who entered would go blind; a cultivator who entered would be crippled.

But for someone like him, who possessed an unusual eye technique, this was the perfect furnace for tempering a Yin Eye.

The pain intensified, as though an ice pick were carving into his optic nerves.

Gradually, the panic of being unable to see faded.

In its place came an entirely new "sense of touch." Although he couldn't see light, he could "see" the flow of air around him, "see" the death Qi gathering in the damp, shadowy corners, and "see" the wisps of resentment seeping through the cracks in the floor beneath his feet.

His vision returned.

Only, he no longer saw a world of brilliant colors, but its essence: black and white interlaced, yin and yang flowing and changing.

Hu Mang raised his hand and touched his eyes, which were undergoing a transformation.

In the absolute darkness, his pupils no longer reflected any light. Instead, they collapsed inward and spun, finally forming a bottomless pattern for suppressing yin.

"So this is... the Night Eye?"

He murmured to himself, his voice sounding especially eerie in the deathly silent room.

"Or rather, the Night Eye is the Yin Eye."

Then Hu Mang "saw" the black cat standing on a candleholder.

The black cat gave a proud meow, then leaped onto Hu Mang's shoulder, stretching its neck ramrod straight.

It was as if it were saying that only like this was he worthy of it.

Hu Mang stroked its head. The cat maintained its proud air, but tilted its neck slightly to make it easier for him to pet it.

Oh~ this wasn't a flirtatious cat. This was a tsundere cat.