[Life-preserving disclaimer: This book is set in a parallel alternate world!
Light fantasy!
No animals will ever transform into humans!
Not a strong-female lead story, nor does it focus solely on the female protagonist—every person and little animal in this book shines in their own way! If this bothers you, please steer clear!]
Cold.
The kind of cold that seeps ice crystals into the marrow of your bones.
Tang Miao wanted to move, but her body wouldn’t obey at all.
Her limbs were stiff, and she couldn’t even curl up.
Consciousness returned slowly.
The wind howled loudly, whistling past overhead.
A thick, rank smell mixed with the musty odor of damp cardboard, and… blood.
The scent of blood snapped her fully awake.
Tang Miao opened her eyes.
Something was wrong.
Above her wasn’t the ceiling of her six-square-meter rented room, and around her weren’t the greasy walls of the delivery station.
This wasn’t a hospital either.
She felt like she was inside something shaped like a cardboard box?
Corrugated cardboard formed four walls around her, with a gap torn open at the top, letting gray sky leak through.
A dirty towel lined the bottom of the box, already slightly damp from body heat.
Tang Miao tried to raise her hand to push herself up.
Her hand didn’t rise.
What appeared before her eyes was a paw.
An orange-and-white cat paw, its toes only half the size of her pinky, extending from the front of a furry little body.
The paw pads were pink, with traces of baby fur still clinging between the toes.
Tang Miao stared at that paw for three seconds.
She pulled it back.
Then extended it again.
The paw obeyed her.
She looked down at her body.
A lump of orange fur so thin she could feel her ribs, belly sunken, four legs as slender as chopsticks.
A tail trailed behind her, its tip white.
She was a cat?!
When that realization slammed into her, Tang Miao’s brain briefly short-circuited.
One second ago, she’d been sprinting to deliver an order about to go late, mentally calculating whether she could afford a single room with a window this month.
The next second, she was lying in a cardboard box, turned into an orange kitten that couldn’t even stand steadily.
She instinctively wanted to grit her teeth and curse, but all her throat could squeeze out was a soft, pitiful:
“Meow~”?
She didn’t have time to process this.
Because she found the source of that bloody smell nearby.
On the other side of the box lay an adult orange-and-white mother cat, lying on her side.
The fur beneath her belly was soaked through with blood, her body already stiff.
One hind leg was twisted at an unnatural angle, and a trail of blood stretched from outside the box across the ground.
She’d dragged herself back with a broken leg.
Mother cat.
Tang Miao crept over and touched her body with her paw.
Cold.
She’d been dead for a long time.
There was only one kitten in the box—Tang Miao.
Maybe there had been siblings, but they hadn’t survived, or perhaps she’d been the only one.
Cold wind rushed in again.
Tang Miao shivered, all her fur bristling.
It was a cat’s instinctive bodily reaction.
She curled back onto the dirty towel, trying to ball herself up.
Cold.
Hungry.
Scared.
Hunger was the worst of it—her stomach felt like it was being twisted in a fist, hollow and aching.
She didn’t know how long she’d gone without food, but this small body was at its limit.
Tang Miao forced herself to calm down.
She’d been a delivery rider for three years.
She’d ridden across an icy overpass in a rainstorm, delivered to a remote villa at two in the morning, and had a drunk pour an entire beer on her while she still had to smile and say, “Enjoy your meal.”
Her resilience had been beaten into her by life, one punch at a time.
The fact that she was a cat—set that aside for now.
The priority…
Find food.
She stood up, trembling.
Four legs had a completely different sense of balance than walking on two. She staggered several steps before finding her center of gravity.
There was one advantage to a cat’s body: with four paws on the ground, the center of gravity was low, making it harder to fall.
Tang Miao grabbed the edge of the box and poked her head out.
Outside was an abandoned construction site.
Half-finished building skeletons jutted up against the gray sky. The ground was frozen yellow earth, scattered with a few broken bricks and plastic bags.
Faded slogans were pasted on the corrugated metal fencing around the site, one sheet flapping noisily in the wind.
Winter.
At least minus fifteen degrees.
She wouldn’t survive the night.
That assessment was brutal.
Her current size was about the size of an adult’s palm. No milk, no heat source, and her body temperature was dropping far faster than she’d imagined.
Years of delivery work had taught her one thing:
Don’t wallow in self-pity. Survive first.
Tang Miao pulled her head back in and pricked up her ears.
A cat’s senses were far sharper than a human’s.
The abandoned site was quiet, but sounds came from farther away.
The rustle of tires rolling over pavement, someone shouting something, and…
The aroma of food!
That soft, sweet fragrance of flour steamed through, mixed with the savory saltiness of pork-and-scallion filling, drifting into her nose on the wind.
A cat’s sense of smell amplified that signal at least tenfold.
She could even pick out the slightly charred edges of the wrappers just out of the steamer.
Baozi.
Tang Miao’s mouth watered instantly.
Every cell in her body screamed, “I want to eat.”
A cat’s hunger was more direct than a human’s.
Her stomach cramped, nearly sending her collapsing on the spot.
The scent came from the southeast.
Based on the concentration, the distance was no more than two hundred meters.
Tang Miao took a deep breath.
The cold air rushed into her lungs, like swallowing a mouthful of crushed ice.
She climbed out of the cardboard box.
The moment she landed, the chill from the frozen ground seeping through her paw pads made all four of her legs shudder at once.
She gritted her teeth and stepped forward, her claws treading on gravel, each step unsteady.
Passing through a gap in the corrugated iron fence of an abandoned construction site, she found herself in an alley.
The alley led to a street at its end, where the streetlights were already on, casting orange light over the thin layer of ice on the road.
She followed the scent.
Alley, street corner, turn.
At four in the morning, the road was completely empty.
Only a delivery van starting its early rounds drove past her from behind, its headlights sweeping over her body before disappearing ahead.
The bun shop was there.
An old shop on the street corner, its storefront modest, with half of the sign reading “Wang’s Buns” blackened by years of kitchen smoke.
The front entrance wasn’t open yet, but the side kitchen door was half ajar.
Steam billowed out through the gap, condensing into a white mist in the cold air.
After walking this far, Tang Miao’s legs were already going weak.
She crept to the back door and poked her head inside.
The kitchen was lit, and a middle-aged man in a white apron was arranging buns into a steamer basket.
Beside the cutting board sat a metal tray with a few “defective” buns, their skins torn and filling exposed.
Saliva dripped onto the ground.
She was about to take a step forward.
“Ow—!”
A low, threatening growl came from the shadows on the right.
A fully grown black tabby cat rose silently from the darkness.
From Tang Miao’s perspective, it was practically a small mountain.
It was four times her size, radiating a thick, feral stench mixed with sourness. A scar running horizontally across its left eye looked especially vicious in the dim light.
It arched its back, its tail puffing up like a club, staring intently at Tang Miao.
This was its territory.
Tang Miao froze in place.
Her feline instincts made every hair on her body stand on end, and her hind legs began to tremble.
Facing an adult feral cat so much larger than herself, with her kitten-sized frame, one swipe could send her flying.
The black cat took another step forward, a continuous guttural growl rumbling from its throat.
The scent of buns still drifted on the wind.
Tang Miao took half a step back.
Then she suddenly remembered something.
She knew this street.
Wang’s Buns, at the corner of University City South Road.
She had run this route in her past life.
To be precise, she had picked up no fewer than three hundred orders on this street.
Wang’s Buns, the beef noodle shop next door, the braised chicken place across the street…
She remembered that Wang’s Buns had a back door facing east, but a side door facing south.
That side door led to a narrow ventilation shaft, a gap only a cat could squeeze through.
Tang Miao stared at the black cat, then glanced at the torn buns on the metal tray by the kitchen door.
She turned decisively and ran.