Chapter 153 - ...... meow?

It all happened very quickly, with a sharp black blade coming down on the head and a small pink parasol coming from below. Tang Mo had one hand on the ground and the tip of the umbrella pointed upwards, stabbing his opponent sharply in the throat. The scruffy old man hadn't expected Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo to attack out of nowhere, but in the next instant he pulled a twisted piece of wood from his pocket, splitting the parasol before facing Fu Wenduo.

Tang Mo takes two steps backwards, as the old man's rotten wood collides with Fu Wenduo's three-pronged sharpshooter.

The old man was drained, very thin, but his body hid a great deal of strength. Fu Wenduo took a half-step backwards, but the old man stood firm in his place. He gave a surprised "eek" as he saw a shallow gash in the rotten wood he was holding. He looked up at Fu Wenduo's right hand with greed in his eyes: "Hey, cut off your hand and give it to me ... and you can have this bowl of cat food too."

Fu Wenduo and Tang Mo didn't give him a chance to speak again as they attacked in unison.

In the spacious garden, the sound of fierce fighting rumbles on.

Soon, Zhao Xiaofei joins the fray. She pulls a small purple box from her pocket, aims it at the old man and fires a series of thin purple needles. The old man dodges her needles with ease, while still having the strength to fend off the combined efforts of Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo. Gradually, however, he was losing ground.

Seeing this, the old man gritted his teeth and turned to run. Tang Mo raised his right hand and dozens of silver steel needles appeared instantly, with a twist of the needle, flying towards the old man. The old man cursed and dodged the attack, the needles all shot into the soil. The old man was forced to run to his left, but Fu Wenduo attacked him directly from the left, making him unavoidable.

The old man roared with rage as he snapped the rotten wood in his hand, and a stench worse than cat food emanated.

The smell was so overwhelming that Tang Mo's throat squirmed and he almost threw up. Even Fu Wenduo stopped moving for a second at the smell, and the old man took this opportunity to grab the cat food and run away, spitting at some humans as he went: "Yuck! You shameless humans!"

Tang Mo had one hand over his mouth and the other raised again, his eyes red as he stared at the old man and shot out dozens of needles again. Fu Wenduo also took out a thin piece of rope and probed the old man. The old man did not dare to be careless as the two players forced themselves to adapt to the horrible stench and chased after him again.

Fu Wenduo stabbed the old man through the thigh and he staggered towards the door. Tang Mo simply threw away his small parasol and flipped his hand over and took out a large match. He shouted angrily, and the tip of the match sparked on the ground. Just as Tang Mo's match was about to ignite the old man's clothes, a crimson figure came up from behind him and whoosh! The sound of a sharp object piercing flesh and blood rang out and Tang Mo's movements stopped for a moment before he waved the match and set the old man's body alight.

The old man's mouth opened wide, staring incredulously at the three humans in front of him.

Tang Mo withdraws the parasol from his wrist and Fu Wenduo stands still. They turn only to see a tall, thin, elegant blond man raise his hand and gently cover his bowler hat. Grea grinned slightly and pulled his cane from the scruffy old man's chest as he grumbled, "That's an unforgettable smell, my lady, one that really shouldn't exist in this world."

It is not clear what Grea's walking stick was made of, but the old man stopped breathing as soon as it pierced his body. The fire soon engulfed the body and Li Miaomiao ran up to take the cat food from the old man's hand. The flames fade out, leaving a trail of black ashes.

Tang Mo looks thoughtfully at the short staff in Grea's hand and then at the puddle of ashes on the floor, his lips slowly pursing.

Li Miaomiao: "Would a cat really want to eat something so smelly?"

Tang Mo turns his head to look at her.

Zhao Xiaofei came over to look at the shit-like thing and covered her nose: "It still stinks. The old man isn't lying to us, is this really cat food?"

Grea explained very patiently, "He may be deceiving, but The black tower never does. If you defeat the underground man guarding the cat food, you get a bowl of cat food, and lo and behold, we have it now - a very tasty bowl of cat food."

Tang Mo said lightly, "You can have it if you really think it's delicious."

Grea: "..."

Probably because she didn't want to eat the cat food, Grea closed her mouth and stopped talking.

Li Miaomiao, a surgeon who is very receptive to this dirty, smelly 'cat food', carefully enters Schrödinger's castle with the bowl of cat food. The five players follow her and enter the gate in turn, with the butler-like middle-aged man closing the gate at the end. Led by Li Miaomiao, the five players search the castle.

"Meow, meow? It's time to eat." Li Miaomiao called out as she held her cat food.

"Meow?"

"Here's your favourite cat food."

"Meow."

The five men walked with the cat food from the ground floor of the castle to the first floor and finally back to the ground floor again. Every black cat that saw them would turn and run away, even faster than earlier, with no intention of eating the cat food at all. Li Miaomiao gave up: "Sure enough, I told you how a normal cat could eat this kind of stuff. Dogs are the ones who can't change to eat shit, and now that dogs don't eat shit anymore, how can cats eat it."

Zhao Xiaofei: "What should we do? The black tower said that Schrödinger's cat would eat the bowl of cat food, how can we find him if he doesn't come out to eat it?"

Things came to a standstill again.

Suddenly, a stiff male voice rang out from behind Li Miaomiao: "Guests, such smelly things are not to be kept in the castle. If you don't want to get rid of it, I can do it for you."

Li Miaomiao was stunned: "It's cat food, Schrödinger's cats eat it all the time." Cat food can't be kept in the castle?

The middle-aged butler did not reply, but simply repeated, with his head bowed, "Guest, this emits a foul smell ..."

The crowd said a few more words, but the butler didn't seem to hear anything, he just kept repeating the words. Wherever Li Miaomiao went, he followed him, constantly reminding.

Fu Wenduo: "Give it to him."

Li Miaomiao looked at Fu Wenduo with dismay: "But this is the cat food we managed to grab."

Fu Wenduo: "A bowl of cat food will appear every three hours. This bowl of cat food is not of any use for us to leave it now, so we can give it to him. He said he had a way of dealing with it."

Zhao Xiaofei: "But ..."

Li Miaomiao remembered Ruan Wangshu's instructions before she left and said, "Fine, I don't want to take this anyway." With that, she quickly shoved the cat food into the middle-aged housekeeper's hand. As if he could not smell the stench of the shit in his hand, the middle-aged housekeeper took the cat food and walked to the kitchen with no expression on his face.

Fu Wenduo and Tang Mo looked at each other and followed.

Li Miaomiao also understood what they meant: "Eh, is it still possible to follow this butler and find Schrödinger's cat?"

The butler walks slowly to the kitchen with the cat food in his hand, he puts it in the cupboard and locks the door to leave again. The five players waited in the kitchen. The kitchen stank the worst and not a single black cat would come in. After waiting for half an hour, they just gave up and searched for the cat again in the same way as before.

This time the group switched floors, with Tang Mo and Li Miaomiao looking for the ground floor and Fu Wenduo for the second.

Li Miaomiao grabbed a kitten, examined it and then marked it on its hind legs. The two men quickly searched ten rooms and found nothing. And, as Tang Mo said, their efficiency in finding cats was greatly reduced. Only eight out of ten of the cats they caught had been marked and had been found before.

An hour and a half later, the pair had only found two dozen cats.

Li Miaomiao let go of a dirty little black cat and crouched on the ground, her mind very confused: "Do we really have to keep looking like this for this copy? We should have searched for over two hundred cats in total by now, with over a hundred more to go. If that cat isn't here at all, wouldn't we have done the work for nothing?"

"It must be here." Tang Mo said.

Li Miaomiao turns his head to look at him.

One of the remaining black cats is more alert than the other, and before the player can get to it, the kitten blows up and runs away. Tang Mo, pretending not to care, looks straight ahead and walks past a kitten hiding behind a vase of flowers. When the kitten wasn't looking, he swooped in and grabbed the cat.

"Meow!"

The little black cat screamed in anger and scratched Tang Mo's hand with its claws. Unfortunately, its tiny claws couldn't make a mark on Tang Mo's hard skin, so it simply bit it with its teeth. Tang Mo examined the cat, put it down and looked up at Li Miaomiao: "The cat is definitely here. Any of the games given by The black tower can be cleared. If the cat isn't here, we'll never find it and we'll never get through. So, Schrödinger's cat must be in this castle."

Li Miaomiao actually understood this, and she gritted her teeth and said, "If we can't, we can look for every cat, and we can definitely find them by elimination."

Tang Mo is non-committal.

The two men continued their search up.

"What a game this is, how can any cat like that kind of cat food." Li Miaomiao complained. She had a cat before Earth came online, not an expensive breed, but not to mention shit, her cat didn't even like fish and was a very picky eater. There may be cats in the world that don't eat fish, but there can't be cats that love to eat shit. "Is ... Schrödinger's cat so different that it's not like any other normal cat?"

Tang Mo's footsteps suddenly stop.

Li Miaomiao took a few steps and turned her head to look at him: " Tang Mo?"

Tang Mo's eyes widened slightly and his brain thought quickly. He closed his eyes and the next moment he said, "A different kind of cat ... Schrödinger's cat, maybe not a cat?!"

Li Miaomiao was stunned: "Huh?"

Tang Mo: "Do you know the Schrödinger theory?"

Li Miaomiao: "Of course I know, I'm a science student and Schrödinger's cat was an experiment he proposed. If you put a cat into a box containing a radioactive substance, there is a 50% chance that the substance will decay and the cat will die, and a 50% chance that it will not decay and the cat will not die. No one knows whether the cat is alive or dead until the box is opened; it is in a state of both living and dying." After a pause, she asked, "But what does that have to do with this game?"

"Must Schrödinger's cat be a cat?"

Li Miaomiao: "What's a cat if not a cat?"

Tang Mo frowned, but the corners of his mouth slowly curled up. He whispered the three rules of the game given by The black tower, and just as Li Miaomiao looked confused and ready to ask more questions, he looked up with a brush: "Until we find the cat and finish the game, no one knows if the cat is a cat or what. The cat may be a normal cat, or it may not be a cat at all. Your name is Li Miaomiao."

Li Miaomiao had a vague idea of what Tang Mo meant, but she still didn't understand: "My name is Li Miaomiao? What does this have to do with the game?

"Yes, your name is Li Miao ..." A cat suddenly throws itself into Tang Mo's arms and Tang Mo's voice stops. He examined the small black cat that had jumped into his arms and saw the markings on the other's hind legs before letting the kitten go. He looks up and continues, "Your name is Li Miaomiao, so you can't be a cat. But what if ... your name is Cat?"

Li Miaomiao's eyes widened as she exclaimed, "You mean that anything could be the cat? Schrödinger's cat, not necessarily a real cat? The black tower gives three rules of the game: Schrödinger only has one cat, he doesn't get along, he loves cleanliness and he likes cat food ... eh?!!! Can it still be like that?"

"Buzz--"

An hour later, the pendulum clock in the middle of the castle hall chimed out at exactly one o'clock. The five players gathered downstairs and exchanged messages with each other, counting the number of black cats that everyone had checked this time. After making sure that no one has found Schrödinger's cat, the five, led by the butler, walk out of the gate and into the garden, where they wait for the cat food to appear.

Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo are at the end of the line.

Tang Mo lowered his voice: "Well?"

Fu Wenduo lowered his eyes and looked steadily at Tang Mo: "There is nothing unusual about it, it looks like a very ordinary short staff. It should be some kind of prop, no weaker than your big match."

To be able to kill a very strong underground man in a flash, the quality of this prop is at least fine or above.

Tang Mo ponders for a moment, "What about the bowl of cat food?"

Fu Wenduo: "It's still in the cupboard." After a pause, he added, "There is a lock on the cabinet."

At this, Tang Mo's steps suddenly stopped and he looked up at Fu Wenduo in surprise, his eyes falling into the other man's dark eyes. The two men stared at each other in silence, and Tang Mo understood what Fu Wenduo meant. He was quick to think, and in a few moments overturned some of the thoughts he had just had, but before he could say anything, a familiar and unpleasant song rang out from the distance -

"Oh, have you eaten stowaways today?"

"The heart of a stowaway is particularly good for wine."

"Stowaway liver, bursting with no grease."

"A stowaway's thigh, chewy and powerful."

"Oh! my honourable Schrödinger, have you eaten stowaways today?"

At the sound of the song, Li Miaomiao was shocked in place. She gripped her weapon, only to see a black shadow approaching slowly from a distance. It was a short, thin, dirty old man, dressed in tattered grey clothes, his face covered in ash, as if he hadn't washed in days. He walked to the middle of the garden and sat down on his buttocks, pulling out a bowl of something black from that dirty chest.

In the next moment, the familiar stench hit the players, and this time they were prepared for it.

The scruffy old man spat in disappointment at the calm reactions of all, and soon he sniffed his nose and caught a hint of a delicious aroma: "Oh, look what I smell! Stowaways, or two stowaways! Delicious cat food, the most famous top quality royal cat food in the Kingdom of the Underlanders, want to get your hands on it? One stowaway for a bowl of cat food, that's a great deal!"

Zhao Xiaofei hesitates a little as she gives a seemingly casual glance at Tang Mo and the others. Zhao Xiaofei had made it through at least one level of The black tower to get into this game, and was no fool. She could see that Tang Mo was not a stowaway, nor was Fu Wenduo. So the most likely people to be stowaways are Li Miaomiao and the inexplicable Grea.

Zhao Xiaofei is all for sending Grea out for cat food. There's something different about this guy and he seems to have a secret, so a teammate like this could be a ticking time bomb in the team.

But they couldn't have done that.

Zhao Xiaofei holds the purple box tightly, ready to attack. What she didn't expect was for Li Miaomiao to suddenly say, "Does Schrödinger's cat really like your cat food?"

The old man jumped up from the ground as if he had been punched in the gut: "What do you know, you shameless human! His Excellency Schrödinger's cat only eats my cat food, and he loves it!"

Li Miaomiao: "But he didn't eat the bowl of cat food you brought over last time."

The old man immediately roared, "Impossible!"

Li Miaomiao saw his reaction and knew he was not lying. Schrödinger's cat really likes that bowl of shit cat food. In that case ...

"Schrödinger's cat must be in this fortress, he's out of place, very clean, and theoretically loves to eat shit ... eat that bowl of cat food. But he was partial to not eating it. There's only one possibility." Li Miaomiao's gaze swept over everyone in the room, and finally, with a start, she settled on the man: "Who says Schrödinger's cat must be a cat? He didn't eat the bowl of cat food because he didn't have the chance to, he was with us all the time ..."

"Isn't that right, Mr Grea?"

In the bright sunlight, the man in the crimson dress is looking down and playing with the little black cat in his arms. Suddenly being watched by so many people, Grea looks over at everyone in slight surprise, seemingly incredulous. Looking at Li Miaomiao's expression of certainty, Grea blinks: "Me? Schrödinger's cat?My lady, do you think ... I'm Schrödinger's cat?" He let out a laugh and asked, "May I ask, my lady, what made you make such a judgement? If I am the cat, why is he, he, and she, not the cat?"

Grea pointed out Tang Mo, Fu Wenduo and Zhao Xiaofei one by one.

Li Miaomiao certainly couldn't have said she knew Tang Mo and Fu Wenduo, so she knew they were definitely not cats. As for not thinking Zhao Xiaofei is a cat ...

Li Miaomiao's face doesn't change: "A woman's intuition."

"So for you, I'm a lot like a cat?" Grea raised an eyebrow and nodded, pondering for half a day. He seemed to figure something out and grabbed the paws of the kitten in his arms, imitating the beckoning cat as he gently scratched the air and made a soft sound, "Like this-"

"... meow~?"

There was a momentary freeze in the air.

It didn't take The black tower to prove such a reaction, and Li Miaomiao realised that he seemed to have guessed wrong. "How is that possible? If it can eat cat food, it must be a living thing, a living being. There are only a few of us humans in this castle and hundreds of cats, and those hundreds of cats don't eat cat food at all, because they are not Schrödinger cats, and normal cats don't eat cat food. Then it could only be us ..."

Li Miaomiao brushes his head to look at Zhao Xiaofei.

Zhao Xiaofei's eyes turned red: "What's wrong with you? How can I be a cat, I'm human."

A hoarse, unpleasant laugh rang out: "Ha ha ha ha ha, look what I hear, you call him Schrödinger's cat? How can a real Schrödinger's cat be like that. That's the funniest joke of the year in the Kingdom of the Underlanders, and I'll sell it to Peter Pan's gossip paper for a king's gold coin for sure! I've got a name for it, it's ..." The old man suddenly shut up and winked, "I won't say it then. Following the rules of The black tower, so ... hey, you guys want to buy my cat food now?"