Weak-Willed
Beep-beep.
The soft click of the door lock disengaging shattered the quiet of the apartment, followed by the gentle swing of the front door opening.
Still sprawled atop the cat tower, I lazily lifted my head and glanced at the wall clock.
Huh?
I tracked the second hand, doing the math, and my brow furrowed. Barely four hours had passed since Yuyeon left for work.
A short-term gig at a logistics warehouse typically meant grinding through a baseline eight-hour shift—twelve if you counted overtime. That was the normal routine. People only ended up aching like they'd been worked over with a baseball bat because they packed that kind of brutal, high-intensity labor into such long stretches in the first place.
So if she'd only put in a half-hearted four hours and already come home, there was no way her body could be that wrecked. The situation defying my expectations put a slight chill of unease in me.
Because everyone, at some point while drifting off to sleep, has imagined it—the scenario where a burglar breaks into the house. Of course, South Korea had some of the safest streets in the world, so actual break-ins were rare.
Sure, decades ago, back in the wilder days, thieves might have been a thing… but in this age of high tech? Unlikely. On top of that, Korea was blanketed in CCTV cameras. If a burglar did strike, the police almost always caught them. Which left me considering other possibilities.
Someone other than Yuyeon coming over?
Then again, if it was someone who knew the door code and strolled in like they owned the place… could it be a secret boyfriend she'd been hiding? But after days of living stuck to her like gum on a shoe, I'd never once caught so much as a whiff of her making affectionate calls or exchanging messages with anyone else.
The questions were still piling up when the door swung fully open and a familiar silhouette trudged inside. The one shuffling in with heavy steps was none other than Yuyeon herself.
Ugh…
I let out a long sigh. I'd grasped the rough shape of the situation in an instant.
Coming home before the shift was even over could mean only one thing.
The infamous runaway—that notorious mid-shift desertion that hit green logistics rookies all the time. The kind of escape drama I'd only ever seen in gallery posts and meme threads, and my own butler had gone and starred in it herself.
"Waaaaah…"
Yuyeon kicked her shoes off in a heap and let out a wail like the world was ending. I looked down at her with pure, undiluted pity.
"It was so hard, Nabiii!"
She flung her bag aside, rushed over, and scooped me into a crushing hug. The second I sank into her soft arms, I honestly wanted to unsheathe the claws on my front paws and slap some sense into her cheek with a nice, crisp smack.
It wasn't even "tough it out for a month"—or a week! Just one day! Hold on for a single day and the day's pay hits your account, and she couldn't even manage that before bolting?
And no matter how demonic and backbreaking warehouse work was supposed to be, any halfway decent company almost never dumped a woman straight into the hell of loading and unloading heavy freight.
Twenty-kilo sacks of rice, waterlogged pickled cabbage, and every kind of oversized, irregular cargo—those weren't weights an ordinary woman could casually hoist. Biologically, physically, it was nearly impossible.
Of course, at a smaller camp handling relatively light stuff like clothing or daily necessities, a woman might end up doing something resembling loading work… and the moment that thought landed, I quietly retracted the claws I'd started to raise.
If I followed the impulse and smacked Yuyeon's face, I could end up as cat stew by nightfall—or get tossed out onto the street.
We hadn't built up nearly enough closeness yet for clawed face-slaps to be laughed off with a cheerful "haha, oh you."
Cute little cotton-paw Cat Punches she might write off as affection, but the second the sharp claws came out, this stopped being friendly WWE and turned into blood-drawing UFC.
"Meow…"
[What a pathetic human…]
I packed the meow with as much brutal honesty as I could, but my language never reached Yuyeon the human. Oblivious to what was going on inside me, she whined on, full of grievance.
"I mean, all I had to do was scan barcodes with some scanner thing… but they made me stand in one spot all day without even straightening my back! It was seriously brutal!"
"Myaak!"
[That's the easy post, you idiot!]
"So I told them I couldn't do it and left halfway through!"
"Aeong!"
[And you're bragging about that?!]
"But get this—they calculated my hourly rate and transferred the two hours' pay straight to my account! A whole twenty thousand won! Heehee, tonight we're having chicken!"
One of the classic hallmarks of broke people was spending money the second any scrap of it came in. Yuyeon was embodying that terrible habit with her entire being.
At this rate, she was going to spend her whole life never holding down a real job, rotting in her room ordering delivery food!
Unless she leveraged that pretty face of hers, miraculously landed a rich guy, and married into money. That was about the only other path I could see.
Then again, judging by how she normally carried herself, Yuyeon didn't seem to have so much as a speck of interest in men…! I had no choice but to heave a deep internal sigh.
The goal of my cat life was to raise my butler into a proper elite butler and live in luxury off the results—but the reality right in front of me was an endless mountain range of obstacles.
If I weren't stuck as a cat right now—if I were still human, even a little—I could at least talk some sense into her… Feeling the solid wall of failed communication, I stared at Yuyeon's back as she grinned over her twenty thousand won, fired up the monitor, and started a game.
"Wooooaaaaaah!"
I have no idea how much time had passed. Yuyeon's ear-splitting, dolphin-pitch scream yanked me bolt upright out of a deep sleep.
Even if you were sleeping soundly, a noise like that left you no choice but to wake up. It was built into the design.
Yuyeon almost never shrieked like that from her corner of the room. The only time I'd ever heard a sound like it was when some multi-hundred-million-won item popped up on her monitor screen.
But this was something else.
"Nabi! Nabi!"
Then she shoved her hands under my armpits and hoisted me up, and just like that I was dangling in a long, tragic feat of feline body engineering.
Hands slipped between my front legs, body floating in midair. Cats don't have lower-body support when you pick them up like that, so the spine just sags and stretches—and my helpless body sadly elongated to match.
"Nyang…"
I asked what was going on. Yuyeon must have read the look on my face, because she answered with her cheeks flushed bright red from excitement.
"I found an insane part-time job! You just take a few photos and send them in, and they pay you! They said it's super easy!"
I flinched.
A bad feeling crawled up my spine the second the words left her mouth.
"No, seriously—three or four photos and they give you two hundred thousand won! There's no way I'm passing up a honey of a job like this!"
"Aeongss."
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
That was an eternal truth of life that held across every age and every culture.
Whether it was work that paid absurdly well for almost no effort, a side hustle that promised high returns with zero risk, or a "sure thing" investment guaranteed to hit it big—in a capitalist society, sweet talk like that was the one thing you must never, under any circumstances, believe.
If the world were littered with legal ways to make money that easily, why would beggars exist? Why would the poor be struggling?
And if someone really had a rare, effortless honey pot that printed money that easily, would they blast it all over internet ads and hand it to complete strangers? That was a fantasy that could never happen.
If a golden-egg side job or investment like that actually existed, you'd hoard it for yourself and suck every last drop of sweetness out of it. You would never share it with some random outsider.
Even giving the benefit of the doubt a hundred times over—maybe you'd tip off a lifelong sworn brother, the kind of friend you'd share family secrets with… but information flowing out of pure goodwill toward a girl lounging in dolphin shorts in her room? Absolutely not.
This had to be a den of crime—identity theft, voice phishing, something in that family. No question.
"Nyang!"
In a panic, I clamped my chubby front paws around Yuyeon's pant leg and held on tight. A desperate plea: please, do not walk straight into that cesspit.
But Yuyeon must have taken it for affection toward her owner, or maybe a send-off. She smiled until her eyes curved into little crescents and stroked my head.
"Nabi! Don't worry. I'll make a ton of money and come back with heaps of delicious Churu and meat treats for my Nabi! Watch the house for me!"
Thud!
Without so much as a backward glance, Yuyeon was gone.
I stared at the empty front entrance where she'd disappeared.
Ah—crap. This was no time to sit there spacing out.
I scrambled into motion and opened the door.
Yuyeon's place had lever-style handles, so a cat could work them just fine.
I slipped out and secretly followed after her.
If she spotted me, I'd get marched straight back home.
And besides—I really wanted to know what kind of "part-time job" this even was.