One Clever Cat
"Myaows."
Lunch started once again to the crisp crunch of kibble. I stretched beneath the sunlight pouring in under the blackout curtains. Part of me wanted nothing more than to shove those curtains aside, but unfortunately that was impossible.
Do that, and Yuyeon would get mad and give me a belly blow! The peculiar sensation of a belly blow felt strange no matter how many times I received it. And having a fully grown adult blow a raspberry on your stomach was an experience all its own. Or rather, a not particularly pleasant one.
The orderly biological rhythm I'd kept as a human had long since evaporated. Before I knew it, my sleep pattern had fallen into natural lockstep with Yuyeon's.
Stay up until the small hours of the dawn, sleep, wake at lunchtime. That kind of life.
Oddly enough… it wasn't bad.
Besides, watching Yuyeon click away at her mouse without pause, gaming behind me, was a pretty solid source of entertainment in its own right.
To put it bluntly, Yuyeon showed absolutely zero talent for the game itself. The character on screen kept rolling across the floor, after all. But her dazzling gift of gab went beyond talent and into pure genius.
"Hey, why are you sticking your head out there, oppa?! I literally told you three seconds ago not to get your skull caved in!"
Watching her bicker back and forth with her party members over the headset, it was clear Yuyeon was the kind of person who livened up the room wherever she went. Even from inside this cat body of mine, that charm of hers came through crystal clear.
But that was as far as it went. Yuyeon never took a step beyond it. With talent like that, you'd think she'd fire up a stream or dig in deep — yet she always stopped at a comfortable middle ground.
Today was no different.
"Meow."
"Oh? Nabi!"
I hopped lightly up onto Yuyeon's computer desk and settled in. Right beside the keyboard, where a gentle machine warmth rose from the hardware — for some reason, this spot felt cozy and just right.
At the moment, Yuyeon had a job-hunting page filling her entire monitor, looking for part-time work. Chin propped in her hand, only her eyes moving. The way she'd game for a while and then put on a serious face to search for jobs like this had gone past familiar and into downright tiresome.
She's going to go right back to gaming after this…!
My prediction landed dead on. Watching her heave a long sigh and drop the mouse with a thud, Yuyeon was a classic case of weak willpower.
This whole job-search routine was probably less about actually finding work and more like a compulsive habit she'd forced out of herself to soothe the vague anxiety lurking in a corner of her mind.
"Ugh, I'm exhausted. So exhausted. I wish someone would just toss me three million won for free!"
Whining in a lifeless voice, Yuyeon stood up from her chair. The sound of her footsteps faded as she scratched her messy hair and headed for the bathroom.
This was my chance. I scrambled to grab the mouse with my cotton-ball front paws. Click, click. Putting my weight into it, I nudged the mouse this way and that, scouring the countless listings on the screen for the most suitable part-time job.
What I picked was a job that required no special skills — the most straightforward and surefire way to get cash in hand.
I fixed the screen in place and swished my tail. For a cat of my caliber, moving a mouse around was nothing.
The bathroom door slid open, and Yuyeon came back — only to gape back and forth between me, standing proudly before the monitor, and the screen itself.
"Whoa, no way… Nabi! You know how to use a mouse? Did you just click that?!"
I clicked my tongue inwardly at her awestruck reaction. Yuyeon's mind was pure innocence itself. To put it a little unkindly, instead of any filter for suspicion, her head seemed packed full of nothing but smooth round pebbles.
This was clearly an astonishing, mysterious phenomenon no ordinary cat could ever pull off — and yet Yuyeon breezed right past it with a casual My cat is a genius! kind of admiration and left it at that.
Anyone with even a shred of quick wits would have immediately realized I was far smarter than other cats, that I possessed an almost human-like intelligence, and gotten goosebumps over it.
But Yuyeon never advanced to that next level of suspicion. Well, even I probably wouldn't have taken at face value the absurd fact that a man's mind was stuffed inside a perfectly normal cat's hide.
This world wasn't some fantasy novel full of superpowers or beings from other dimensions popping out of nowhere, after all.
It wasn't the kind of world from those web novels I used to skim for killing time while lying in bed back when I was human.
"A delivery part-time job?"
Yuyeon leaned in close to the monitor and muttered. The job I'd pulled up for her was a listing for a massive logistics center — the kind commonly known as hellish loading-and-unloading work.
You worked the day and got paid the next day in cash, so for a penniless person without a single coin to their name, it was a perfectly suitable job to start with.
I'd actually done it myself once.
Back in my cocky college days when I knew nothing and was overflowing with bravado, I'd signed up for loading work to earn some pocket money — and nearly died, literally.
You had to stack endless waves of delivery boxes pouring off a roaring conveyor belt into a massive truck bed like a game of Tetris, and most of them were heavy things — sacks of rice, pickled cabbage, the works.
After just one day of that, my back felt like it had been snapped clean in half. I still vividly remembered crawling across the floor of my studio apartment, crying from the sheer misery of it.
So why introduce Yuyeon to such a terrible, grueling job? If you asked whether I had a sadistic streak, I'd say that's unfair.
Fortunately, Yuyeon was a woman.
Anyone who knew how logistics centers worked would understand — when a woman showed up for loading work, she was assigned far lighter, easier tasks than the big burly men.
Not hauling cargo with your whole body inside the trucks, but at most standing at a conveyor-belt line with a scanner, going beep-beep, scanning barcodes on boxes for sorting and inspection.
I'd looked at the women doing that kind of work with envious eyes myself.
And even doing that, they got paid the same as the men. Some people might raise their voices and call it blatant gender discrimination.
But it was just how things were. In real-world Korean society, when it came to physical labor, women received accommodations that weren't unfairly stacked against them — purely because of differences in physical condition.
And right now, that situation was actually a stroke of good fortune, if anything.
"Oh, this is awesome! So if I just work one day, the money comes right away?"
As she skimmed through the listing, Yuyeon's eyes began to sparkle in an instant. Whether her conscience had been gnawing at her for rotting away at home playing games every day, the one-day gig condition seemed to strike her as pretty appealing.
"I knew it — our Nabi is a lucky charm, a total lucky charm! You found this so I could go make money, right?"
"Myaow."
With a face lit up with excitement, Yuyeon gently stroked under my chin. In that moment, the tension in my neck melted away of its own accord, and a purr song burst out of me.
As I quietly accepted the warmth of Yuyeon's hand, my brain felt strangely soft and mushy. Was this the irresistible instinct of a cat's body…?
Of course, if you strictly counted our original age difference, the picture of a grown man purring while getting petted by a young girl was pretty grotesque — but…
Given that I was currently a cat, I figured I was in the clear.
Riding the momentum before her mind could change, Yuyeon immediately texted the number on the listing, and given how chronically understaffed delivery gigs always were, she got confirmation to start today.
The biggest advantage of this job was that as long as you had a body, you could show up quickly anytime, anywhere.
That was why countless people who needed emergency cash, even if it meant their bodies falling apart, gritted their teeth and boarded the bus to the logistics center.
"Nabi, I'll be back! Guard the house well and be good, okay? I'll buy you some delicious Churu when I get home!"
With her bag slung over her shoulder, Yuyeon clenched her fist at the front door.
"Nyaong."
I saw her off with a short reply. Yeah, Yuyeon wasn't a completely hopeless case either.
When she truly set her mind to it, she could move. She wasn't some lethargic patient who'd completely shut out the world and done nothing at all.
She was just a kid who didn't know how to row forward across the ocean that was the world — and when I gave her a little push from behind, she walked on boldly on her own.
I quietly lifted the corners of my mouth into a fond little smile of pride as I watched Yuyeon's retreating figure leave. Bang — the door closed, and silence settled over everything.
Left alone in the house like that, I yawned long and wide and flopped down onto the bed. Stretching out my jelly-padded front paws, a lazy languor spread through my whole body.
Until Yuyeon came home exhausted at dawn, there wasn't much I could do in this cat body anyway.
I planned to simply curl up in a doughnut shape right in the middle of the bedcovers that still held Yuyeon's warmth, and while away the time in a pleasant, unhurried sleep.