Chapter 837: Chapter 837
"Hmm, if you plan on holding a criticism session, besides the parrot and the Qingqiu Club, I suggest adding another item." Jiang Yu, who was originally standing to the side, suddenly bent his finger and tapped on the counter, stirring Doctor Xiao from his frustration.
Xiao Xiao looked up, puzzled, at the witch.
Jiang Da Headmaster lowered his finger and pointed at the floor: "It seems our scholarship student didn’t just send an invitation to the parrot... We’ve got new visitors in the shop."
Xiao Xiao was stunned for a few seconds, then realized.
"Dressed-up mice? They aren’t exactly new visitors; they visited before you guys came... They just went back after the previous battle, saying they received some message," Doctor Xiao explained while patting his head and standing up: "I was too busy earlier and forgot to mention this to you all."
"Dressed-up mice?" Jiang Yu raised an eyebrow, clearly unaware of what Doctor Xiao was muttering about.
After standing up, Xiao Xiao leaned out from the counter, glanced downward, and immediately shut his mouth.
The creatures squatting at the witch’s feet weren’t the dressed-up mice he thought, but a group of cats.
Big cats, little cats, tortoiseshells, calicos, long-haired, short-tailed, and so on, a total of more than a dozen neatly lined up sitting at the witch’s feet, in front of the counter, looking upwards with round, wide eyes. The ever-active Little Witch Li Meng had already abandoned the cage and the people around her, delightfully crouching down to pet the cats.
The leading cat, familiar to Xiao Xiao, was the ragdoll cat that often followed the Black Cat. However, compared to before, this ragdoll cat seemed a bit bigger, with a shoulder height of more than a foot now.
"Hey, have you grown bigger?!" Warlock blurted out something nonsensical. Under the counter, the ragdoll cat seemed to catch the hidden meaning behind the Warlock’s words and chuffed a few times from its throat.
"What?" Jiang Yu didn’t quite catch or understand what Xiao Xiao had just said, prompting her to ask curiously, "Do you know these cats?"
While speaking, the witch leaned out to look outside the shop for a moment, worried yet hoping to see a Black Cat.
After the appearance of the cats, the witch immediately confirmed these were the cats from the Lakeside Forest Academy group. Not long ago, transformed into Little White, she had rested with the cat group in a large tree for quite a while. Consequently, the group leader, the Black Cat that could grow larger or smaller and that had protected her, was now a concern for the witch.
However, such matters weren’t something to discuss with outsiders.
Like her, Xiao Xiao didn’t want the witch to know about their relationship with the cat group—acknowledging familiarity would necessitate an explanation, maybe even mention a certain Black Cat, and go through the story of the Warlock turning into a cat, a story not suitable for many to know—thus, a thousand words left unspoken; saying more might lead to mistakes, saying nothing wouldn’t.
Thus, the Warlock laughed it off, skipping over Jiang Yu’s confusion, vaguely saying, "They look very familiar... They must be the group from the academy, often seen strolling by the lake. How did they end up here?"
"They probably received your invitations too," although speculative, the witch spoke with certainty. After all, having already seen a group of parrot guests, the arrival of a few cat guests didn’t seem so far-fetched.
"How could cats read the words on an invitation?" Li Meng, who was petting the cats, suddenly looked up, curiously asking.
"If parrots can read, cats certainly can as well... What’s so strange about that?" Jiang Yu replied with a smile.
Xiao Xiao rubbed his temples, feeling his head swell a bit—he still vividly remembered how much effort the Hunting team had expended communicating with the cats, using drawings and mimicking cat sounds, yet the effects were very limited.
Could it be that Zheng Qing recently started night school for these cats and taught them how to read?
Xiao Xiao sighed lightly, suppressed the violent idea of dragging a certain cost student out from the back of the shop, and simply said, "We should ask our captain about this matter later."
Li Meng muttered and bent down again, happily continuing to groom the Ragdoll cat’s long fur.
Jiang Yu also pressed down his curiosity, did not continue to inquire, but smiled, "Exactly, let’s not fret over it for now. We can just ask Zheng Qing about it later... The question now is, how should we entertain these guests?"
"Yes... I kind of wish we had parrots instead. Though they’re chatty, at least they can speak and communicate." Xiao Xiao felt a bit overwhelmed facing this situation.
The group of cats was here to congratulate, there was no doubt about it. While the two wizards were chatting idly, the cats had already, under the command of the Ragdoll cat leader, placed their gifts one by one in front of the counter.
The gifts were some dried mice, very fitting of what the cats knew about the wizards.
However, these gifts seemed very interesting to Jiang Yu.
The witch looked around thoughtfully, glanced at the mice confined in the cages deep inside the shop, then looked at the Ragdoll cat squatting in front of the counter, wagging its tail, and a peculiar idea emerged in her mind.
"Wow, have you opened a pet shop?" An abrupt voice came from the entrance of the shop, disrupting the subtle atmosphere flowing between the wizards and the cats.
Xiao Xiao breathed a sigh of relief and immediately turned his head toward the source of the voice.
A not-so-tall, rather plump warlock with a baby face stepped over the threshold and casually walked in. He wore a large black robe embroidered with three small silver swords crossed together at the chest.
Doctor Xiao, the acting shopkeeper, immediately turned serious.
He recognized the emblem on the chubby wizard’s robe—or rather, any wizard with a slight understanding of this world would not be unfamiliar with that emblem.
Because that emblem belonged to a powerful law enforcement institution directly under the Wizard Covenant, the Magic Association Investigation Bureau, also casually referred to as ’Trident’.
"Hello? Is there anything we can help you with?" The shop’s acting shopkeeper finally stepped out from behind the counter, hurried over to the side of the ’Trident,’ his tone conveying a mix of confusion and unease.
The baby-faced ’Trident’ didn’t beat around the bush and straightforwardly flashed his badge: "Mage Association Investigation Bureau, Emergency Response Team, Registered Wizard, Commissioner Andrew."
"We received a report from the public that a Fishman appeared on Pedestrian Street and entered your store before disappearing. So we came to check if there’s anything unusual here."