DILLYH Chapter 26

TL: Hua

Chapter 26: Onlooker

Yu Haozhou raising cats was a huge shock to the group members. Anyone could tell who influenced him, and Han Jin, as the closest person to him, was particularly moved.

He had managed to train his buddy to lose his own principles, doing whatever he was told. If this were in the past, if a kitten were put near Yu Haozhou, he would instantly jump up and push it far away.

How was Zhou Zhizheng so capable?

Xu Laizi, who occasionally popped up in the group, quietly posted a ‘Staring at you from the shadows.jpg’ image and, whether sincerely or not, posted a very awkward message: [Zhou Bao, why do you listen to him so much? Do you really think he’s a good person?]

As soon as this message was posted, the previously lively group instantly quieted down. The latest message remained hers, standing out conspicuously.

Yu Haozhou saw it, but he didn’t know how to respond. Or perhaps he disdained explaining. He could feel what kind of person Zhou Zhizheng was with his heart, so he decided to cold-shoulder the comment and ignored it.

The kind-hearted Han Jin sent a private message to Xu Laizi: [Laizi, delete that message. You’ve seen it; they’re doing well. Zhou Zhizheng has some issues, but everyone can see how he treats Haozi. You’re an outsider; you definitely don’t know him as well as Haozi does. Take it back; don’t upset Haozi.]

Han Jin: [I know you’re not resigned to it, but you can’t force feelings. Haozi is set on Zhou Zhizheng. Even if you were a celestial fairy, it wouldn’t matter.]

Xu Laizi expressionlessly typed out a lot of words, all of them cursing Zhou Zhizheng, but then suddenly felt it was meaningless to send them to Han Jin. She deleted everything, replied “Oh,” and then successfully retracted the message in the last few seconds before the message recall window expired in the group.

The group returned to normal. About half an hour later, Han Jin proactively livened up the atmosphere. The others followed suit, and the little interlude was quietly covered up.

A moment later, Yu Haozhou received a private message from Han Jin: [You’re not mad, are you?]

Yu Haozhou smiled. He could almost guess his friend’s cautious and tentative expression. His right index finger was gently scratching the kitten’s paw, which was very cute. He typed with one hand: [It’s not worth my time.]

Han Jin sighed: [Ugh, I didn’t realize she still had such deep feelings for you. It wasn’t like this before. Could it be that she thought she had completely lost her chance once you married, so she stopped pretending?]

[I don’t know.]

Yu Haozhou didn’t dwell on the matter. It was just a few verbal jabs. He would pretend not to know, as long as it didn’t affect their life: [What about you? How are things with Cheng Qianyu lately?]

Cheng Qianyu was now six or seven months pregnant. Although Han Jin had guaranteed that the baby in her belly was his, Han Jin’s parents didn’t believe him and insisted on dragging Cheng Qianyu to the hospital for a DNA test on the fetus.

This matter was somewhat insulting. Han Jin’s face was flushed, and he refused to take her, afraid of hurting her feelings. Han Jin’s parents were also unyielding: until they confirmed whose child she was carrying, they wouldn’t allow her to enter the house.

Han Jin was cornered. He was planning to take Cheng Qianyu and leave the old house to become self-reliant, but Cheng Qianyu had a private talk with his parents. In the end, she still went to the hospital for the test, and their attitude towards her was no longer as dismissive as before.

Han Jin: [I don’t know why, but I still feel unreal, Haozi. Do you think Chengcheng will truly be willing to marry me?]

Yu Haozhou didn’t have this kind of experience, so he couldn’t say anything for sure. He tried to comfort him from a humanitarian perspective: [You already have a child together, so there shouldn’t be any issues. Maybe Cheng Qianyu still has some feelings for you and wants to settle down; otherwise, she would have aborted the baby long ago.]

Han Jin was quickly reassured by his few words.

…

The kittens changed daily. Every morning upon waking, it felt like they had grown a bit. When they first arrived, they were dirty, their eyes oozing pus, unable to open them. Their frail bodies had weak breaths, and it felt like they wouldn’t survive the next day.

A month passed in a blink of an eye. The kittens were now full of life and started running around the house. Yu Haozhou felt it was stifling for them to stay in one room every day, so he opened the room door, allowing them to roam the entire second floor.

In the past, the house was just furniture and empty space with no decorations. Now, the living room and corridor were filled with colorful scratching posts, dopamine-colored cat trees, cat beds, and so on.

The floor was strewn with countless colorful fuzzy balls and various small toys. The house was completely transformed into a dopamine-filled kindergarten.

Zhou Zhizheng was initially worried that the space was too large and the kittens might accidentally fall into a crack somewhere, making rescue impossible. But he soon realized his concerns were excessive.

Because that group of kittens was Yu Haozhou’s shadow. Wherever Yu Haozhou went, they followed. Wherever Yu Haozhou rested, they would fight for territory on the nearby cat trees. When Zhou Zhizheng deliberately carried them away, they would clatter back. Perhaps because Yu Haozhou spent the most time with them during the day, they seemed to regard him as their mother.

Even at night, the kittens wanted to enter their master bedroom.

Zhou Zhizheng, who was usually soft-hearted towards them, was exceptionally firm on this matter, as he wanted to have a good time with Yu Haozhou and didn’t want to be watched by the kittens.

The master bedroom door was closed, and the kittens clawed at it, meowing heart-wrenchingly. Even with the language barrier, Zhou Zhizheng felt he understood what they were shouting—they were calling for “Mom.”

Zhou Zhizheng deliberately ignored the miserable meowing outside. He bent down and kissed Yu Haozhou’s lips, his sweat dripping onto the sweating chest of the person beneath him. The two of them had been purely focused on saving the kittens and hadn’t had this kind of pure alone time in a long while. Tonight, they were inevitably a little out of control.

“Mmm… Zhou, Zhou Zhizheng, you…” Yu Haozhou pushed him with one hand.

Zhou Zhizheng guessed what he was about to say, pulling away the arm covering his eyes. Yu Haozhou’s eye corners were completely damp and red, making him even more alluring.

Zhou Zhizheng kissed his trembling eyelids, then licked Yu Haozhou’s full bottom lip, sometimes lightly, sometimes not: “Ignore them. They’ll quiet down when they get tired of yelling.”

Looking at it from another perspective, why not treat it as accompanying music to liven things up?

He continued his actions. The noise from the headboard grew louder, and Yu Haozhou’s voice became increasingly fragmented. One of his legs was lifted. In a daze, he saw his foot dangling in mid-air.

So tired, so noisy…

Afterward, Zhou Zhizheng carried him to the bathroom to clean up. Yu Haozhou was so tired he couldn’t lift his eyelids, falling into a deep sleep the moment he hit the bed. Zhou Zhizheng was shirtless and only wore a bath towel around his waist.

He walked towards the door. When the door opened, the kittens’ cries were deafening. They swarmed inside, but Zhou Zhizheng easily scooped them up with his large hands.

Holding the six kittens, he went downstairs to the kitten room. Their voices had clearly become hoarse, but they were still biting his hand with their newly grown canine teeth, as if they were tickling him.

Zhou Zhizheng smiled helplessly: “How can your energy be so boundless? You’ve been meowing for half an hour. Get some rest.”

He put them inside the kitten room, then went back upstairs, burrowed under the covers, and continued to hug Yu Haozhou to sleep. This time, it was genuinely just sleeping. Finally, the silence returned to his ears.

*

When the kittens reached three months old, their energy became even more vigorous, and they grew increasingly mischievous. Every morning, the cleaning lady who came to the house would complain to Yu Haozhou.

She would report where the kittens had peed again. Or how a naughty kitten had climbed to the top of the curtains and couldn’t get down, meowing in fear.

Yu Haozhou started his day like a kindergarten teacher, waiting for the ‘parents’ to complain and then letting him discipline these naughty children. Any kitten that misbehaved would be forbidden from eating delicious freeze-dried food or wet food.

But when they took them for vaccinations, it was the first time Yu Haozhou saw these lawless kittens so terrified. They curled into a ball, refusing to come out of the carrier, their pupils wide, watching the doctors in white coats with vigilance.

At this point, their aggression was very strong.

Yu Haozhou, lacking experience, wanted to reach in and coax them out, but Zhou Zhizheng held his hand down: “They might bite.”

Yu Haozhou was a little sad, thinking, Surely not?

But Zhou Zhizheng’s serious expression indicated he wasn’t joking, so Yu Haozhou honestly stood aside, watching the doctors and nurses, wearing special gloves, tip them out of the carrier.

Several kittens clung desperately to the carrier. The nurse had to use brute force to pull them out. Once they were finally pulled off, they started darting all over the room, up and down, impossible to catch.

Zhou Zhizheng instinctively shielded Yu Haozhou behind him, afraid he might accidentally get scratched. He knew felines were prone to stress, and at times like this, they had no rationality. The kittens instinctively searched for the safest place.

Who knew that in the next second, several kittens would rush forward, all at once, climbing up Yu Haozhou’s pants. Then, they rolled and squeezed in through Yu Haozhou’s collar, hiding inside his clothes. All six of them, not one missing, were inside Yu Haozhou’s shirt.

Yu Haozhou’s upper body was suddenly bulky, and he subconsciously cupped his hands around them.

Zhou Zhizheng: “…”

His motion of taking a step back looked truly ridiculous.

The kittens absolutely refused to come out. In the end, Zhou Zhizheng decided to take them back home and administer the shots themselves. Perhaps because they hadn’t been taught by a cat mother, these kittens were particularly timid and would become severely stressed as soon as they left their familiar environment.

Back home, they were back to playing freely. When Yu Haozhou handed them over one by one to Zhou Zhizheng for the injection, they meowed in pain only for the moment the needle pierced them. Afterward, they were fine, running off to play as if nothing had happened, completely different from their behavior at the clinic.

Zhou Zhizheng watched them, feeling melancholic: “They’ll soon reach the age for spaying and neutering. I can’t possibly perform the surgery myself.”

Yu Haozhou looked at his fatherly expression and found it a little funny: “You still have some time. You can consider learning how.”

Zhou Zhizheng took the matter to heart and decided that he would invite a doctor to come over and get familiar with them beforehand, bringing the equipment to their home for the procedure.

When Xu Laizi sent a message, it was already the third day after the kittens’ vaccinations. The kittens were slightly sickly and listless due to the vaccine’s effects.

Yu Haozhou was worried. Even though Zhou Zhizheng said it was a normal reaction, Yu Haozhou wouldn’t have agreed to let Xu Laizi visit the house if the kittens hadn’t recovered some of their energy today.

As soon as Xu Laizi entered, the first thing she noticed was their living room, decorated like a kindergarten. Everything was colorful. Even the front door had a few small bird toys attached with colorful strings. This was a completely different style from their usual selves. Xu Laizi seemed to see the picture of the owner and the kittens coexisting peacefully in the arrangement of the toys.

“Zhouzhou, it looks like you’re living very happily.”