Charcoal has really been kidnapped

The news that there was a cat thief in the eastern courtyard spread like wildfire.

No one would have thought that there would be someone stealing cats on campus, especially at eight to nine o'clock during the night and not midnight.

They had to admit that the cat thief who set down the cat traps had guts.

At once, everyone on the Chuhua University campus, including the residents that owned cats in the western courtyard, locked their cats inside when it was night time, even if they bawled their hearts out. If they really annoyed, they would sent their cats over to Guo's place to be neutered, it was told that the cats that were castrated wouldn't be as rowdy. Anyhow, it was better this way than to be kidnapped, if they got kidnapped they would become the dish on the menu for some stranger.

This was why for the past few days, business at Guo's pet center was exceptionally great. Those who didn't plan for their cats to undergo the operation would still go and enquire to see if there was a way to keep their cat quietly at home.

As for the cat thief that got caught, the staff at the security post found a motorcycle on the other end of the wall in the eastern courtyard. On the motorcycle were some large knitted sacks, one containing some live sparrows. Aside from that there were also things like cat lures. Just by the sight of it, this person had done this many times.

According to what the person explained, he said he heard there were cats over here and came to steal those cats out of sudden interest. Initially he planned to go to a nearby micro-district that was his main target.

Those words were what Zheng Tan overheard in Papa Jiao and Mama Jiao's conversation. However, Zheng Tan didn't trust a single word from the statements from the cat thief, feeling that the person had come just for him.

Too coincidental. Someone coming here to steal right after the careful surveillance of a cat had ended? Moreover in the eastern staff courtyard? In comparison, there weren't many cats in the eastern yard, much less than those residential areas where cats were kept. Why would this person bear the risk to come and steal cats at around eight to nine? A period when Zheng Tan happened to usually go out ?

In the bedroom, Papa Jiao held a textbook in his hands, but his attention was not on the book. He felt something fishy, an unexplainable restlessness. No matter what, it was best not to let the cat out.

Zheng Tan and Papa Jiao shared the same thought, since many things were unsure and doubtful, he may as well be content and stay home. Besides, these days even Fatty was locked at home and not allowed to lie on the balcony. The old lady cared greatly for Fatty, scared that the cat that took a her a lot of effort to raise and feed would be stolen.

And just like this, after a week at home Zheng Tan became restrained again, so one morning when Mama Jiao went out with Jiao Yuan and Youzi, Zheng Tan followed them out.

To be safe, Mama Jiao asked Zheng Tan to follow her until she sent the two kids to school. Mama Jiao needed to go to the market, Zheng Tan obviously won't go with her but she was also anxious about him running around, so she instructed him to stay on the lawn in front of the primary school and wait for her there.

The morning sun had just rose above the horizon. Recently the weather had warmed up, many flowers in the school was blooming, chirping birds were everywhere, clamoring and pooping.

The bell rang signifying the beginning of the class, those who had classes all attended regardless of whether they were primary school students or university students. The road quietened up again.

Zheng Tan lay on a landscape stone and yawned. Just as he expected it's better to occasionally breathe in fresh air.

Before he could finish a yawn, Zheng Tan suddenly had a feeling of foreboding. It was similar to what he felt when he was stalked last time, but this time with a strong sense of crisis. This was the first time that Zheng Tan had felt this as a cat.

He cautiously surveyed the surrounding, his sight finally falling onto a young man wearing a gray gym suit. The young man wore a backpack and a sanitary mask, his hands tucked inside his pockets just like an ordinary student.

Due to last year's SARS incident, many people would leave their houses wearing sanitary masks, there weren't many people that wear the mask now but some still do. Even those that rode their electric motorcycle for work at the city center would sometimes wear it . The air condition in Chuhua city center wasn't good as many places were under construction causing there to be a lot of dust and debris, so no one would pay special attention to you if you wore a mask.

Despite the mask, Zheng Tan recognized him.

It was the guy that had stalked him last time!

Now that he identified him, Zheng Tan had to remain cautious. Seeing that the person was walking towards him, Zheng Tan didn't prepare to directly clash with him. There were not many people around him, a disadvantage to himself.

However, just as Zheng Tan prepared to flee the scene, he felt a sharp pain on his back.

"Aw---"

His cry was cut short as he lost all his energy.

A numbing sensation quickly traveled through his body, blurring his sight and causing his consciousness to begin to fade.

Zheng Tan rolled off the rock to the opposite side of where the man was standing, pulling the pet tag off his neck with great difficulty. At this moment he was tremendously grateful that the string of his cat tag was elastic.

Even if he got caught, Zheng Tan needed to inform Papa Jiao and others that this was where it happened.

Pulling off the cat tag and threw it in the bottom corner of the rock, Zheng Tan did his most to dive into the bush on the other side but there was nothing he could do. The sedative was too strong, his limbs were giving away. He fell to the ground in less than two steps, and a needle was stuck on his back.

Sh*t! Catching a cat with tranquilizer gun!

In a daze, Zheng Tan felt someone closing in, lifting him up by a leg and stuffing him inside a backpack. Then, his surrounding became pitch black...

The young man was a little hurried and tensed up, seeing that a cycler was riding past. He quickly ran over, stuffed the cat into his backpack, and then left, causing him to miss the cat tag left beneath the rock.

Mama Jiao had returned from her grocery shopping with a few large bags in her hands. She bought pork ribs and planned to make a feast tonight for everyone as nourishment. However, when she returned her cat was nowhere to be seen on the lawn. When she left her cat was still lying on the rock, did he go to play?

"Charcoal--"

Mama Jiao yelled, she looked around the lawn and when she came behind the landscape rock she found the cat tag that fell there.

Mama Jiao asked those around the scene but no one had noticed what happened over here. Although there was a teacher from the primary school that said when he came out from his office he saw a masked guy walking over to the lawn, but the angle from where he was standing he couldn't see the situation on the lawn clearly.

No longer caring about the groceries in her hands, Mama Jiao took her phone out and dialed Papa Jiao's number in a hurry. From what she knew about her cat, he wouldn't leave without any reason if you asked him to wait there, not to mention throwing the cat tag over there. Her cat was that intelligent...

Recalling the cat theft a few days ago, Mama Jiao became extremely worried. Could it be that he was really being kidnapped?

Over by the classroom building, Papa Jiao was teaching a class when he felt the phone vibrate in his pocket. He looked at the incoming caller ID on the phone screen and walked out of the classroom with his brows knit together.

Usually teachers were not allowed to answer phone calls during class except for an emergency. When Papa Jiao saw that it was Mama Jiao's phone number he knew immediately that it was a matter of urgency, otherwise she wouldn't call him knowing that he had two classes in the morning.

The students sitting in the classroom saw assistant professor Jiao walk out to answer a call. Not long later, he returned with great seriousness on his face, turned the projector off, and asked everyone to have a free-study period before hurrying off again.

The young fellow that kidnapped Zheng Tan dashed out of the campus perimeter of the Chuhua University. Originally he had intended to find a place to get rid of the cat but at that moment the phone in his pocket rang.

"Uncle, what's up?"

"I am leaving in one hours time, if you want to come with me then hurry over here!" The voice on the receiver end seemed uneasy.

"Why the hurry? Didn't you say that we'll leave at night?"

"Can't do, it's urgent, just get over here!" The other end hung up as soon as he stopped speaking.

The young man hesitated for a while and gritted his teeth. Leave first and then see from there, a cat can be disposed of at anytime! But trying to get the money would be a little troublesome.

An hour later, the young man appeared in a warehouse at the outskirts of the city. Inside the warehouse was a small truck and leaning next to the truck was a man around forty or fifty years of age who was smoking.

When he caught the sight of the young man, he said impatiently: "What took you so long!"

"Did another haul." The youngster didn't say too much, passing the backpack to the person.

The person inhaled a mouthful of cigarette smoke deeply, then threw the cigarette butt away . He took the bag and unzipped it. Seeing that there was a black cat inside, he lifted it up by the hind leg and examined it. "Not bad, could sell for a great price. The fur's not too shabby either, by the time we processed it someone would definitely buy it."

"What do I do with the cat? The person that hired me said to kill it, I planned to throw it straight into the river when you called, uncle."

"Why throw it away!" The person gave the young man a ferocious stare, "this cat is well-fed. If we are lucky, this meat and lustrous fur would get us a couple hundred dollars. This pure black kind of fur is hard to come by."

"Alright," the young man agreed. Who would say no to money?

The person lifted the cat inside the truck and threw it into a cage.

The compartment of this medium-sized truck contained cages and cages of cats, locked in different cages categorized according to their appearance and the price that they could sell for. Near the exterior of the compartments were some large cardboard boxes, each containing miscellaneous goods. They took these for other people, another way to earn some cash.

Throwing the cat inside the cage on the top layer, the person closed the compartment door, climbed onto the driver's seat and drove away.

The young man sat in the passenger seat, he had some questions he wanted to ask before, but there wasn't much time before so he held it in and waited till now.

" Uncle, why are we leaving in such a hurry?"

"I don't know what has happened for the past few days, someone had been inspecting and the fake licenses of some cat vendors have been found out. Their entire truck has been detained, I'm scared that they would dig deeper, so let's just get away first." They didn't catch many cats this time, the cages in the compartment weren't even full. If it was not for the urgency of this situation he would have stayed for a number of days. Even if there weren't cats to steal, he could drug some dogs, he saw a few robust large breeds yesterday.

"Dig deeper? No way? This never happened before." The young man exclaimed.

"Anyhow we are not going to return to Chuhua city in the next few months, things are tense here. So f*cking unlucky, there's never been a situation like this before. Didn't these people always turn a blind eye to this, why are they suddenly taking this so serious..." The person complained as he drove.

The young man in gym suit took no heed of his relative's complaints. He took his phone out and started calling the employer that he never met before. As long as there's a job and he gets paid , who cares if he sees his face.

"I've got rid of the cat, when are you going to wire me the money?" The young man asked.

"Is the cat dead?" The other end asked.

"It's been tranquilized. If he can't take it then he would be dead as a doornail, even if he survives it's no use. My uncle is heading south with it, it's going to be sold in the markets over there, and when he is he would be dead meat. You don't need to worry."

The man on the other end of the phone fell silent and stopped talking.

The youngster though that he didn't want to pay up, and became anxious," Things are tense in Chuhua city recently, but you were in a rush, that's why I took the risk of being caught to work for you. The tranquilizer that I bought costs thousands of dollars, your deposit has been used on this, you can't be this cold."

"...Ease up, thirty thousand dollars like we agreed upon. I will send it to you in a second, and another thing , don't contact me anymore."

The receiver end hung up as soon as he finished talking.

The young man heard the hang up tone on the phone and swore.

"What? Is that person not going to pay?" The person who was driving asked.

"Who knows!" The young man sniffed with contempt.

"You bought a tranquilizer to steal a cat?" The drive's tone was filled with disdain.

"I heard that the cat had been trained, even the hirer said that the cat was smart. I was very careful when I monitored it."" The young man said, gradually shifting the conversation, he didn't tell him how much the hirer actually paid him. To be honest, he bought the tranquilizer second-hand off a friend, it was only a few hundred dollars, even if the hirer didn't pay up he still earned some money.

The person that went to the eastern courtyard to steal cats was contacted by him, he was trying to probe around. If he had caught the cat then it would have been great, a few ten dollar notes would sent him on his way. But as it turned out, that cat was indeed difficult to catch. As luck would have it, a friend had a tranquilizer in his hands and the young man bought it off him. For the next number of days that cat didn't come out, so he wasn't able to find the opportunity. The time dragged on and he had no choice but to be more radical. He didn't know if there were security cameras around that place, if there was then he needed to hide in the south for some time.

Using a tranquilizer to catch a cat, the young man would have never thought that things would go this way.

In the compartment of this mid-sized truck, Zheng Tan was crowded with other cats in the top cage.

There were many cats in the cage that had been drugged, too sleepy to call out. Those cats that were awake gave an occasional cry, they probably didn't have the energy to cry out.

The unconscious Zheng Tan didn't know that because of his disappearance, a "hurricane" had blown across Chuhua city. Many cat thieves were caught, that night some trucks that transported live dogs and cats were detained.

Papa Jiao used his connections to get a look at the footage of the security camera at the primary school, although the resolutions weren't clear he could vaguely make out that their family cat had been kidnapped on the lawn.

Papa Jiao asked for favors from some friends as well as Wei Ling and He Tao, pleading that they could help and look for the cat. The detained trucks and some cat selling markets were all searched, any black cat that they saw would be sent to one place to Papa Jiao and them to confirm.

Unfortunately, none of them were Zheng Tan.

That night, many people didn't sleep.

There were many conflicting interests that rose out of this incident, the struggle continued both overtly and covertly. Zheng Tan knew none of these.

The tranquilizer dose used by the young man was quite heavy. If he had been a ordinary cat, then he most likely wouldn't make it, even if he did he would be knocked out for a couple of days, but Zheng Tan was special.

After a few hours of unconsciousness, Zheng Tan woke up, but even if he woke up his body had no energy.

There were strange smells, unfamiliar cats all around him, Zheng Tan could sense their fear and confusion. Hungry and thirsty, but they had no choice other than suffer through it. A few cats quietly cried as if they were sobbing.

Zheng Tan looked around the pitch dark compartment. The cage that he was in was quite close to the compartment door, a thin opening between the doors allowed some wind to pass through, clearing Zheng Tan's mind.

Outside of the opening was full of darkness.

'How much longer is the night?'

Zheng Tan lay in the cage, pondering over the plans to deal with what's to come. As he pondered and pondered, Zheng Tan fell asleep again.

In his dream, Zheng Tan saw the city that he lived for twenty years and saw the person that he was....