Ch. 18 A Cat That Manages The Fishing Grounds (1)

I knew that if I let him get injured, I would have regretted it.

“Haa?!” A cry of astonishment came from Si-yul. The cat turned into a human?! His head spun. The exhaustion from the fight with the Persian cat coupled with the shock of the revelation caused his body to tip backwards.

Right where I was supporting him.

He was around 180 cm tall, much taller than I was, and I grunted underneath his weight. We almost toppled over, and I stepped backwards to balance myself.

My foot landed right onto the shard of glass.

“Ahhh!” I cried out in pain as the glass sliced through my skin.

Si-yul stared wide-eyed at me while I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Are you a substitute?” he said dumbly.

“…Pay attention!” I yelled at the frozen Si-yul, but he was still unable to comprehend the scene before him. I knew I couldn’t expect too much from him at the moment. A cat that turned into a human was even more shocking than a cat that could talk. I had turned into a person to save him, and the result was a cut on my foot.

“You…” Si-yul was rooted on the spot as he stared at me. I was Bow Meow. With my voice, attitude, and eyes, it slowly dawned on him that the cat and I were one and the same.

“…Ah…” I groaned as I bit my lip. Did this vet really deserve for me to bleed so much for him? I had simply acted on impulse, but I couldn’t stand anyone getting anyone hurt in front of me. A bolt of pain shot through my foot. I knew that even if I was given another chance, I would likely make the same choice, despite my initial bad feelings about him.

“What…are you…” Si-yul stammered.

“Well, what does it look like?” I bit back.

Si-yul surveyed the scene before him. A pale woman stood in the middle of a gray-colored examination room. She had a small body and sparkling eyes,and her jet-black hair tumbled down her shoulders as she protectively covered herself. His eyes couldn’t help but dip towards her chest. He realized that if the woman had not grabbed him from behind, injuring herself in the process, he himself would have been injured more seriously. His expression, which had been strained by surprise, soon loosened up.

“Hurts…” I moaned. I lifted my bleeding foot slightly and squeezed my eyes shut.

I imagined that Si-yul would become horrified and think of me as a monster. It would only be natural if you saw an animal change into a person in front of you. I didn’t want to him to look at me like a freak, and so I turned away.

“You’re Bow Meow, aren’t you?”

I felt something warm cover my shoulders and I opened my eyes. Si-yul had belatedly removed his light blue coat and placed it around me.

“Don’t call me a Bow Meow!” I whined.

“… So you are Bow Meow.”

“Don’t call me that, alright?”

I glowered at him, but Si-yul’s attention now turned towards my bleeding foot. He went down to his knees and tried to lift my calf.

“Let’s take a look,” he murmured.

His warm hand touched my skin. I was horribly aware that I was naked underneath his coat, and I yelped and reflexively kicked him.

“You pervert!” I yelled, my face burning.

“You know you’re bleeding,” he said matter-of-factly.

“So?!”

Didn’t he know not to look at the feet of a naked woman? Si-yul was acting more like a rude animal than a person.

He touched my calf again. I wasn’t even wearing any underwear, for God’s sake!

“No!”

“You’re hurt!” he insisted.

He had gone into doctor mode, and was now treating me with the same attitude as he did with animals. If there was a difference between us, it was that I saw myself as “human”, while Si-yul still saw me as “cat”.

From his point of view, something that wasn’t a person had turned into a person. The image of an arrogant, talking black cat was too strong in his head for him to be flustered around a nude woman.

There was a knock on the doctor.

“Doctor? Do you need any help?” a voice outside asked.

“Oh! No, not now—” Si-yul said hurriedly.

In a moment of surprise, his head turned automatically towards the door. After the nurse, left he turned back towards me, only to see a black cat again.

The only thing he felt was the disappearance of my foot.

“…”

He didn’t say a word. What he saw before him now was a cat shrouded by a light blue coat and licking its hind paw. It was almost as if the frantic, dark-haired woman he had seen had merely been a hallucination.

“Remember your promise!” I reminded him.

“What?” He jolted as he realized that what happened earlier was indeed part of reality.

“What happened a little while ago, that’s a secret! Do you understand?!”

The volume of my voice seemed to snap Si-yul back to his senses, and he shook his head to recover himself. I shrugged off the oversized coat and jumped onto the examination table.

Si-yul picked up the coat from the floor and found it spotted with blood. His eyes raked around the room and he took in the glass fragments, the bloodstains, and the Persian cat making strange growling noises on the cupboard. It was as if a hurricane had passed through the room. For a brief moment, his brain short-circuited from the overwhelming amount of information.

Meanwhile, I busied myself by licking the blood off my hind paw. It was the same leg he had tried to lift so vulgarly.

No matter how hard Si-yul thought, there was only one answer. He hadn’t gone crazy. The cat was the woman.

Although it would take a massive effort to clean up this mess, his immediate concern was treating the leg first.

He approached me slowly and gently patted my thigh. He struggled for a moment on what to say, and then decided on two phrases.

“I’m sorry. Thank you.”

“…”

I turned my head away and kept my mouth shut.

I did not say a word until Tae-il came back.

Si-yul had a million questions, but he was too confused to say anything either.

He needed time to understand.