Chapter Text
The third time Kai got the same math problem wrong, something dark oozed out of the corner behind him.
It was about the size of a palm. At first it spread across the floor like melting asphalt, then slowly rose and stretched, as if someone was molding a human shape out of black play‑dough in the dark. Finally, two pea‑sized green dots flickered on where its eyes should be.
Lloyd yawned a silently.
Here we go again.
This human kid was producing way too much irritation and frustration—the taste was like cold, leftover bitter melon juice. Awfully astringent. Lloyd had been born three months ago, popping into existence right after Kai bombed his third practice exam. He was pure black, with only those two greenish eyes to prove he wasn’t just a flying rag.
The first thing he did after being born was instinctively float closer and take a deep breath—
Mm. Bitter, but kind of addictive.
From then on, he became Kai’s personal negative‑emotion processor.
Kai got called out by the teacher? Lloyd had a meal.
Kai had a fight with a classmate? Lloyd had a snack.
Kai stayed up until 1 AM wrestling with his homework? Lloyd would eat from ten until midnight, getting so stuffed that his eyes glowed two shades brighter than usual.
To be honest, the job was pretty stable.
The only problem was that Lloyd, like every other Gloomlets in existence, had a major flaw:
He was painfully shy. Gloomlets had been around since the beginning of time, feeding on human negative emotions and keeping some subtle mental balance in check. But they were born introverts, absolutely terrible at being seen.
According to the elders in the Gloomlet realm, there was once a Gloomlet who got caught in the act by its host, got so scared that it literally shattered into pieces, that it took a whole year to put itself back together.
Lloyd did not want to shatter.
So he’d always been careful, only moving around when Kai was at school or fast asleep in the middle of the night. Besides eating, he’d gradually developed a side hobby—tidying up Kai’s room. The reason was purely professional: Kai’s room was a disaster zone, and a messy environment bred more negative emotions, which meant more overtime for Lloyd. It was an efficiency thing. Nothing to do with caring about that human kid.
Definitely nothing.
Today was no different. Kai had been gently pulled aside by his math teacher for a talk at school, and he came home radiating that I’m probably worthless kind of gloom. Lloyd hid in the shadows on top of the wardrobe, quietly absorbing it all afternoon. He ate his fill, his green eyes flickering like two little traffic lights in the dark.
Kai had dinner and went to evening study hall.
9:23 PM. The sound of the key in the lock didn’t come.
Lloyd slid silently down from the wardrobe, like a drop of ink falling into clear water. He checked the desk first—test papers everywhere, eraser shavings scattered like snow, three uncapped pens, one of which had already drawn a long, desperate black arc across the desk.
Lloyd hovered in mid‑air, his green eyes narrowing slightly.
He got to work.
The test papers were sorted into three piles by subject, the corners smoothed one by one. The pens found their caps and lined up neatly in the pen holder. The eraser shavings were gathered into a ball by a precise little whirlwind and tossed into the trash. The blanket and pillow were fluffed up and folded into neat blocks. The curtains were drawn. The glass of water by the bed—the one that had been poured that morning—was emptied and refilled with warm water.
Wait, that might be overdoing it. Lloyd stared at the glass for two seconds, then silently put it back on the nightstand.
Just as he was using telekinesis to drag a slipper out from under the bed—the one that had somehow gotten kicked way underneath—the door lock clicked.
Lloyd’s green eyes went perfectly round.
No. Wasn’t there study hall tonight? Wasn’t he supposed to come back at 10:30? What’s going on? WHAT’S GOING ON?
In 0.3 seconds, Lloyd’s brain ran the full spectrum from shock to panic.
He instinctively drifted toward the window, but it was locked. He tried the wardrobe, but the door had closed when he tidied up. Finally, he chose a spectacularly stupid option: he stuck himself to the ceiling, trying to pass himself off as a weirdly shaped water stain.
The door opened.
Kai had his school jacket slung over one shoulder and a bottle of iced tea he’d bought on the way. He had that special kind of calm that comes after three hours of math torture—the calm of finally accepting your fate. He walked in, and his first instinct was to flip the light switch where it always was. Click.
The light came on.
Lloyd was plastered to the ceiling, and their eyes met.
To be precise: Kai’s two amber eyes and Lloyd’s two pea‑sized green eyes, about two meters apart, had just made history.
The air went dead quiet for three full seconds.
Kai blinked.
Lloyd couldn’t blink—he had no eyelids. He just stared at Kai, his two green dots perfectly still, like a GIF on pause.
“…Is my light broken?” Kai muttered to himself.
He reached up and clicked the switch again—off. Click—on. Click—off.
Lloyd, in the flashing dark, was frantically contemplating the meaning of Gloomlets’ existence.
By the fourth click, Lloyd finally moved. Right in front of Kai, at an extremely slow pace, he slid down from the ceiling, floated into mid‑air, and did the one thing any Gloomlets would do under extreme duress—
No they wouldn’t.
He closed his green eyes.
In the darkness, Kai heard a very soft thump, like something bumping into the desk corner.
Then an even softer, almost inaudible sound that might have been a curse word—if a gloomlet could curse.
Kai took a deep breath and turned the light back on.
Lloyd was lying under the desk, clutching his head with his hands, his body flattened into an unnatural shape, as if trying to press himself into the cracks of the floor. His green eyes had come back on and were now peeking up at Kai through his fingers with an expression that screamed you can’t see me you can’t see me you can’t see me.
Kai crouched down, eye‑level with those green eyes.
“What are you?”
Lloyd was silent for a long time. Then he did something even more embarrassing—he tried to turn himself into a ball.
A pitch‑black humanoid creature, hugging his knees, desperately attempting to curl into a perfect geometric sphere, but not quite managing it. His knees kept poking out. His green eyes would peek through a tiny gap in the sphere and then quickly shut again.
Kai watched him struggle for thirty seconds, and finally couldn’t hold it in. He burst out laughing.
Laughter was one of the things Gloomlets were most afraid of. But Lloyd noticed that this laugh was different from Kai’s usual bitter, frustrated laugh. This one was warm. It had a strange kind of infectiousness that made Lloyd’s body involuntarily brighten just a tiny bit.
Oh no. He’d been spotted.
“Stop it. You’re going to cramp yourself.”
Lloyd wanted to say that Gloomlets don’t get cramps, but he didn’t have a mouth. Gloomlets communicated mainly through direct emotional projection and very little telepathy. But he was too nervous, and the emotions he was projecting were all over the place. Kai was probably receiving something like:
anxiety – fear – shame – anxiety – so embarrassing – but he still hasn’t fixed that math problem – I’m worried – shame – sh#t it’s so embarrassing.
Kai’s expression changed.
“You’re worried about my math problem?”
Lloyd immediately stopped all emotional projection, shrank back into a dark little lump, and turned off his green eyes again.
But this time Kai didn’t let him escape. Kai simply sat down at the desk, pulled out the math test from the neatly stacked pile, flipped to the last problem, stared at it for a few seconds, then held the paper up in front of Lloyd.
“Can you teach me?”
Lloyd’s green eyes slowly came back on. He stared at the dense formulas and diagrams for three seconds, then extended a tiny, darker tentacle‑thing from his shapeless black body and pointed precisely at one intermediate step on the paper.
Kai looked down.
Lloyd had pointed to a spot where he’d copied a plus sign as a minus.
“That’s the only mistake?” Kai looked closer. “…That’s all it was?!”
Lloyd’s green eyes bobbed up and down, like a nod.
Kai recalculated that step, then worked through the next three steps, and the whole problem clicked into place. He looked up to say thank you, but Lloyd had already drifted to the highest corner of the room, sticking to the ceiling, his green eyes peeking down cautiously, ready to turn off and flee at any moment.
“You don’t have to run,” Kai said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Lloyd hesitated for a second. Then his whole body shifted from pure black to a slightly lighter shade of black—a gloomlet’s way of saying “?”
“Really,” Kai said. Then he added, “Hey, my room used to get mysteriously tidy. Was that you?”
Lloyd’s body went from slightly‑lighter black back to pure black, and then even darker—so dark it was almost glowing.
That was the gloomlet’s equivalent of a facepalm‑level blush.
Kai looked at the little black figure in the corner and suddenly felt it resembled one of those people who wave their hands frantically saying no no no when complimented.
“Thank you,” Kai said. “And thanks for teaching me that problem just now.”
This time, Lloyd didn’t run. He slowly floated down from the corner and hovered about a meter away. He tilted his head—a gesture he’d picked up from watching cat videos with Kai—and his two green eyes glowed softly, like two little night‑lights that wouldn’t burn you.
Then Kai reached out and touched him.
Lloyd froze solid. In the three months he’d existed, he’d eaten Kai’s negative emotions countless times, but he’d never been touched before. Kai’s fingers slid over where Lloyd’s “shoulder” would be. It felt cool and soft, like touching a piece of solidified night air.
“You’re so squishy,” Kai said.
- - -
Lloyd decided, right then, that he hated this human kid.
The decision lasted less than 0.3 seconds.
Because Kai then asked, “Do you usually stay in my room? Want me to make you a place to sleep?”
Lloyd spent the whole night curled up in an empty desk drawer, a tiny black sphere with his green eyes closed to two thin slits. He told himself he couldn’t sleep because he was feeling complicated about being discovered. Absolutely not because the steady rhythm of breathing from the bed next to him made him feel, for once, a rare kind of peace.
The next morning, Kai woke up to find the desk tidied again—the pens he’d left scattered after fixing the problem were back in place, the papers resorted by subject, even the school jacket he’d draped over the chair last night was folded and laid at the foot of the bed.
The drawer was open.
Inside, nothing but a dark smudge, as if someone had rubbed a pencil into a small circular shadow on the drawer bottom.
Kai smiled, closed the drawer, grabbed his bag, and left for school.
Inside the drawer, the dark shadow slowly rose and took shape—a small, fuzzy black cat, with only its green eyes shining.
The cat blinked. Then it lay down, rested its chin on a charging cable, and began to wonder if, tonight, it should turn into cat form and sleep right next to the pillow.
Probably won’t get noticed.
After all, when a gloomlet turned into a cat, it looked like it wasn’t quite in the same visual layer. Kai probably wouldn’t notice.
Probably.
- - -
Kai finally noticed three days later.
A black cat.
Well, more precisely, he noticed that the cat was off.
He came home early that afternoon, pushed open his bedroom door, and saw a dark lump on his bed.
The lump was curled up next to the pillow. At first glance, it looked like a normal‑sized black cat. But its blackness was different—it was a black that didn’t belong in this room, like someone had cut a cat shape out of a pure black screen and pasted it onto the quilt.
Kai stared for two seconds. The cat slowly opened its eyes—two round, emerald‑green dots.
The cat’s entire movement noticeably stuttered.
Then, with extremely slow and highly suspicious deliberation, it turned its head to face the wall, pretending to be a cat‑shaped decoration.
Kai walked over, crouched, and examined the cat’s outline closely. The edges were fuzzy, like a pencil sketch that hadn’t been inked yet. And part of the cat’s body overlapped with the pillow—not pressing on it, but passing through it. The cat’s belly and the pillow fabric occupied the same space.
“Lloyd?” Kai whispered.
The cat’s ears—if those two tiny black protrusions counted as ears—twitched.
Then, with a I’ve‑been‑caught‑but‑I‑will‑never‑admit‑it attitude, the cat continued facing the wall, and its body color shifted from pure black to a slightly lighter black. Lloyd’s classic shyness response.
Kai scooped the cat up.
The cat weighed almost nothing in his hands, like holding a handful of cool air. Its green eyes were huge. Its whiskers—if those barely‑visible lines counted as whiskers—trembled slightly. The whole cat radiated I am about to evaporate on the spot panic.
“Don’t run,” Kai said. “If you run, I’ll have to solve math problems by myself again.”
The cat immediately stopped moving.
Turns out, academic pressure was the strongest method for keeping a gloomlet around.
- - -
From that day on, Lloyd appeared in Kai’s life in two forms.
The everyday form was a little black humanoid drifting around the room, green‑eyed, fond of perching on top of the bookshelf and looking down at Kai doing homework, occasionally extending a tiny tentacle to tap a mistake on the page.
The relaxed form was a little black cat not quite in the same layer as the rest of the world, fond of curling up on Kai’s lap. It was so light Kai could barely feel the weight, but he could sense a strange coolness seeping through his school pants—like someone brushing his skin with a mint leaf.
When Kai’s mom came in with fruit, the cat would instantly flatten into something that looked a lot like a black dishrag on the table, perfectly still, perfectly inconspicuous.
Kai bit into an apple and asked, “Can you turn into something else?”
The black dishrag hesitated for a moment, then turned into a… black cup.
A cup with two little green dots for eyes.
The cup even tried to give itself a handle, but got it wrong—the handle was attached to the inside of the cup, making it a completely useless decorative feature.
Kai laughed for thirty seconds straight.
The cup turned an even deeper black. The whole cup felt hot—even though Lloyd didn’t really have body temperature, Kai just felt like the cup was undergoing a world‑class embarrassment and heating up accordingly.
“Okay, okay,” Kai said, still suppressing laughter. “Turn back into a cat. Cats are cuter.”
The cup instantly became a cat. The cat adopted a you‑are‑forgiven haughty posture, rested its chin on Kai’s wrist, and half‑closed its green eyes, looking extremely pleased.
Kai got used to having Lloyd around.
So used to it that he would mutter his problem‑solving steps out loud while doing homework, because he knew Lloyd couldn’t talk but could understand. Last time he said, “I keep forgetting this formula,” a little slip of paper appeared on his desk the next day with that formula written in wobbly handwriting. It was written with a pen, but the ink hadn’t seeped quite right—as if someone had been controlling the pen with telekinesis, pressing too hard on some strokes and too light on others .
Kai taped that slip to his lamp.
More slips followed. Their contents ranged from “time to sleep” to “pen out of ink” to “you ate three packs of spicy sticks today, your throat will hurt.” The last note was clearly written by a cat’s paw—the whole line slanted, and at the end was a round black paw print.
Kai taped that one to the lamp too.
The black cat nodded in satisfaction, then found the coziest spot next to Kai’s pillow, curled into a ball, and slowly closed its green eyes. Halfway through, it opened them again for a second, checking to make sure Kai wasn’t about to shoo it away. Only then did it close them again, its whole body becoming a patch of quiet darkness.
Kai reached out and touched the dark.
Its temperature was slightly lower than body heat, but it felt soft—like touching a small, breathing piece of starry sky. For a moment, Kai thought he saw something flowing slowly across the cat’s surface, like an aurora or the nebulas in astronomy photos.
He remembered when Lloyd had first been born—just a rough, agitated lump of black, like a crumpled plastic bag. Now this cat’s blackness was even and warm, carrying a kind of stillness, as if the bitter, negative things had somehow been digested into a peaceful undertone.
Kai felt the unexpected move.
Then the cat sneezed, blasting pillow fuzz right into his face.
“Lloyd!”
The cat opened its eyes, blinked them with innocent pea‑sized innocence, then quickly scrambled up, used its front paws to fluff the pillow back up, picked off every last speck of fuzz, and finally—apologetically—rested its chin on the tip of Kai’s nose.
Kai’s whole face cooled down, but it was a pleasant cool, like burying your face in a silk pillowcase fresh out of the fridge on a summer day.
“Are you apologizing?” Kai’s voice came out muffled because the cat was squishing his nose.
The cat’s green eyes curved.
That was Lloyd’s first smile.
Kai thought that a gloomlet’s smile probably worked like this: no sound, but the whole body brightened just a little. Not an actual glow—a perceptual brightness, like a patch of sunlight breaking through an overcast sky.
Kai closed his eyes, still smiling.
The cat lay quietly beside his pillow, its two green eyes glowing softly in the dark like two little night‑watch lamps. Slowly, slowly, their flickering synchronized with the rhythm of Kai’s breathing.
Outside, the wind moved the curtains.
The room was quiet, except for the sound of one person breathing and the extremely faint, bubble‑like crackle of a gloomlet digesting negative emotions.
A sound you could only hear if you were close enough.