“This way!”
Tata leaped down and darted into a dense grove of Mongolian pines on the side of the park.
Tang Miao gritted her teeth and followed.
Deep in the pines, the park’s concrete wall had been cracked open by the roots of an old tree.
The gap wasn’t large—just enough for a squirrel and one skinny orange cat to squeeze through.
Inside the wall was a different world.
A thick, overwhelming smell hit them—a mix of wild animal musk, raw meat, and disinfectant.
It was a hundred times more aggressive than the smell of raw meat at Old Liu’s stall in the market. There was a primal pressure to it that made the fur on Tang Miao’s neck stand on end.
Through the chain-link fence, which stood taller than a person, she could see a wide, open enclosure designed to mimic a wild environment.
Rock formations, dead trees, a frozen pond, and several concrete platforms where tigers could shelter from the elements.
Tang Miao’s eyes landed immediately on the platform closest to her.
A Siberian tiger.
No—a puddle of Siberian tiger.
The creature was sprawled flat on its back in the very center of the platform, belly up, its golden fur gleaming slickly in the sunlight.
Its head was wider than Tang Miao’s entire body. Its hind legs were spread shamelessly apart, exposing the softest part of its belly.
Its mouth hung half open, a string of drool stretching from its lip before dripping onto the concrete with a soft plink, instantly freezing into a bead of ice.
Tang Miao was completely stunned.
The king of beasts?
The apex predator of the forest?
That wasn’t what she’d seen in the nature documentaries in her past life.
The tigers in those documentaries had piercing eyes, agile strides, and roars that could shake the mountains.
This one—aside from matching the size—didn’t fit a single one of those descriptions.
This posture, this expression—what difference was there between this and the fat stray orange cat downstairs that waited every day for the old lady to feed it cat food?
No, there was a difference.
The orange cat downstairs slept more gracefully.
As she was silently criticizing, another tiger ambled over from the side.
This one was even more ridiculous—so fat its belly nearly dragged on the ground. It took two steps, then panted three times.
Then it plopped its rear down in the snow, its face clearly saying: I’ve hit my step count for today.
Tang Miao’s worldview was being ground into the dirt.
Tata was completely unfazed by the scene.
It nimbly climbed up to the horizontal bar at the top of the fence, cupped its paws around its mouth, and shouted at the top of its lungs: “Third Brother! Third Brother! Wake up! We’ve got a guest!”
The puddle of “tiger mud” on the concrete platform stirred.
It lazily rolled over, belly down, lifting its head just a crack, squinting toward the fence.
“Oh… Tata…”
The voice was deep and thick, carrying the hoarseness of someone just woken up.
But the tone was lazy to the extreme—every word was squeezed out of its throat with effort, pausing for what felt like two full seconds between each one just to catch its breath.
“Brought… brought… what’s that… thing?”
“A little orange cat! My friend! She’s from the south!” Tata shouted back.
The big tiger called “Third Brother” finally lifted its head all the way.
Those golden eyes, which should have been full of majesty, held only a bleary, drowsy confusion.
It studied the small orange dot outside the fence for a long moment.
“Oh… a little cat…”
Third Brother’s gaze lingered on Tang Miao for a moment, then drifted away. It settled back down onto the concrete platform, resting its head on its front paws, and let out a jaw-cracking yawn.
“That’s nice… come… come lie down… this spot… the sun’s good… warm…”
Tang Miao took a tentative step forward through the fence.
“Third Brother?”
“Mmm…” The big creature on the platform rumbled a response from its throat without even lifting its eyelids.
“You… how are you all…” Tang Miao wanted to ask “how did you all end up like this,” but she was afraid it might be rude.
Third Brother guessed what she wanted to ask. It slowly shifted position, resting its chin on the edge of the platform to make talking easier.
“What do you mean? Just lying here.”
“When I first came to this park, I made a fuss too.”
Third Brother’s voice was unhurried, as if telling someone else’s story. “Rammed the fence, dug tunnels, charged at visitors to roar at them—trying to prove I was a real beast.”
It paused, exhaling a long breath of white mist.
“Then I figured out—whether I make a fuss or not, I still get three meals a day.”
“If you roar too fiercely at the visitors, the keepers complain you’re scaring people and dock you half a chicken leg.”
“But if you just lie here nice and quiet, take a nap, they get happy watching you, and maybe they’ll even throw you an extra bone at night.”
Third Brother yawned again, revealing a row of slightly yellowed fangs.
“Once you get it, lying flat is the way to go. Look at those two-legged beasts all dressed up in their fancy clothes—they travel all this way, spend a few hundred bucks on tickets, just to watch me lie here. Tell me, who’s really performing for who?”
Tang Miao was momentarily speechless.
The belly-dragging tiger from earlier waddled over too, found a comfortable spot beside Third Brother, and settled down, its belly fat spreading out in a wide circle across the snow.
“Little orange,” it said in a deep, muffled voice, “listen to your big brother’s advice. What are you even trying to achieve wandering out there? Wind and rain, never enough to eat or wear, and you still have to watch out for people trying to catch you.”
“Look at us—eat, sleep, sleep, eat. In winter, the floor here is heated; in summer, there’s air conditioning in the cave over there.”
“Tourists take our photos and post them online—we’ve got more fans than a lot of celebrities. Isn’t this life good?”
This fat tiger was called Old Six.
Tata whispered to her, explaining that he was the leader of the “lying-flat faction” in the park.
Tang Miao asked him, “Don’t you want to get out? Don’t you want to run in the mountains?”
Old Six gave her a look like she was an idiot, then laughed.
“The mountains? What’s in the mountains? Minus forty degrees—you run around the mountain all day and it’s hard to say if you’ll even catch one stupid roe deer.”
“Even if you do catch one, it’s not enough to make up for the energy you burned. Here, when mealtime comes, the meat arrives, and the two-legged beasts visiting even coax you to eat.”
Tang Miao looked at these two Siberian tigers who possessed top-tier predator bodies yet had long ago seen through the “survival rules of human society” and chosen to completely lie flat. Her tail unconsciously drooped.
What was the essential difference between this and her flipping onto her back and rubbing against stall owners’ pant legs in the wet market just to survive?
But if she only wanted to be kept and fed by humans, why had she left that warm gap in the wet market? Why had she chosen to set out?
Of course, she understood that humans did this to rescue an endangered species.
She’d seen it while scrolling through the news—back in the 1980s, there were fewer than a hundred wild Siberian tigers left in China.
Now, just this one park alone had over seven hundred purebred Siberian tigers bred in captivity.
To restore their wildness, the park even regularly conducted “wildness training,” using drones to drop live chickens and ducks for them.
But… cats that had gotten used to being fed had already lost their instinct to catch mice.
These tigers, accustomed to having food delivered to their mouths—were they still tigers?
Just then, from the deepest forest in the park, a tiger’s roar suddenly rang out.