“Owww—hooowl—”
That sound was completely different from the lazy grunts of Third Brother and Old Six.
It was high-pitched, piercing, full of penetrating power—as if it would slice through the cold wind, carrying a primitive, hair-raising bloodlust and the oppressive might of a king.
Third Brother and Old Six’s snoring stopped abruptly.
A drone rose from the distance, dangling a mesh bag that held a live chicken still flapping inside.
The drone flew over the dense forest and released the bag.
Just as the live chicken was still three or four meters from the ground, a lithe, lean figure rippling with explosive muscle shot out from the underbrush like a yellow-black bolt of lightning.
It didn’t wait for its prey to hit the ground.
It leaped into the air, carving a breathtaking arc mid-flight, its tiger jaws opening wide to snap the chicken’s neck in one bite.
Crack.
The crisp sound of bone breaking—Tang Miao could hear it even from this distance.
The entire motion was clean, swift, brutal—filled with the raw beauty of primal strength.
Third Brother stopped chewing the snow in his mouth, his golden pupils filled with awe and confusion.
“That’s Big Sister!”
Tata whispered in Tang Miao’s ear.
“Big Sister is the only tiger in the park who refuses all artificial feeding. She only eats live prey from the rewilding training.”
“Deep in her bones, she still remembers the mountains. Lots of tigers in the park laugh at her for being foolish—why not live the easy life instead of putting herself through all that suffering?”
Tang Miao stood behind the chain-link fence, watching Big Sister from afar as she finished her hunt.
She held her prey in her jaws but didn’t eat right away. Instead, she raised her blood-stained head and gazed into the far distance—at the snow-covered mountain silhouettes.
The direction of Changbai Mountain.
The next second, Big Sister turned her head without warning.
Those golden pupils, burning with wild flames, locked onto the insignificant little orange cat outside the fence—across a hundred meters, through wind and snow.
The instant those eyes fixed on her, Tang Miao’s small body froze by instinct.
From the base of her tail to the nape of her neck, every hair stood on end.
It was a fear born from the depths of her bloodline—the terror of being targeted by an apex predator.
Her mind went blank, her limbs refused to obey, and all she wanted was to find a crack in the earth to crawl into.
But she didn’t run.
Because in those eyes, she saw something exactly like what was in her own.
A nearly obsessive longing for the world beyond the cage.
Big Sister began to walk.
She dropped her prey, stepped through snow that buried her ankles, and advanced toward the fence step by step.
Her gait was steady and silent, her plum-blossom paws landing on the snow without a sound.
As she drew closer, the mountain-like pressure grew stronger and stronger.
Third Brother and Old Six were stunned speechless in the distance.
Big Sister—usually aloof and irritable, someone even the keepers dared not approach—was voluntarily walking toward a tiny stray cat.
Big Sister stopped two meters from the fence.
Her tiger body stood like a small mountain, her shadow completely engulfing Tang Miao.
She didn’t let out a threatening roar. Instead, she lowered her head and, through the chain-link fence, gently sniffed at Tang Miao.
Wind and snow, dust, the fishy smell of the market, the smoke of the human world, and…
“You carry,” Big Sister spoke, “the scent of the wind.”
Tang Miao craned her neck, looking up at those golden eyes bigger than her own head. Her feline instinct made her four thin legs tremble uncontrollably.
But the resentment of her past life, trapped in a small county town, stubbornly held her spine straight.
She swallowed hard and summoned the greatest courage of her life.
“I’m going south.”
She told Big Sister her dream without hesitation. “I’m going to walk through every city on the map and eat all the delicious food there is.”
“I don’t want my cat life to end with regrets.”
“Naive!” Third Brother couldn’t help but interject, dousing cold water on her. “Little Orange, how dangerous is the outside world? Stray dogs, car accidents, bad people who catch cats…”
“Any one of those and you’re dead!”
“Listen to your big brother—go back to your market, or just stay here. That’s how a smart cat lives!”
Big Sister turned her head and let out a suppressed growl from her throat.
Third Brother immediately shut his mouth and buried his head in his front paws.
Big Sister looked back at Tang Miao, her gaze filled with resolve.
“Comfort will eat away your bones. It will eat away your instinct to run.”
“Once you get used to opening your mouth and waiting for meat to fall from the sky, you’ll never be able to jump over that fence again.”
With that, Big Sister picked up the still-dripping chicken, turned, and walked into the deepest part of the wind and snow.
That silhouette was lonely, defiant—yet carried a power that made Tang Miao feel reverence: the power of freedom itself.
Tang Miao lowered her head and looked at her paws.
They were a size rounder than when she’d first been reborn, fluffy, with tiny scratches from the market on her pink paw pads, along with fresh wounds from today’s ice.
She looked up at the gray-blue, boundless sky beyond the walls.
“Third Brother, living well here—that’s your choice.”
“Big Sister wanting to leave—that’s her choice.”
“And me wanting to go—that’s my choice.”
She paused, her voice soft, murmuring to herself:
“In my last life, I had already spent a lifetime in a cage.”
Third Brother and Old Six both fell silent.
The two massive tigers simply lay quietly in the snow, watching the little orange cat that was smaller than their own paws.
After a long while, Third Brother’s deep voice finally sounded.
“Then go.”
“Go far away. Don’t end up like us—waiting until the very end, until you no longer even have the strength to want to leave.”
Old Six opened his mouth as if to say something, but in the end, he only let out an impatient “hmph,” rolled over, and turned his massive back toward Tang Miao.
But Tang Miao saw it—the tip of Old Six’s thick tail gave a faint, barely perceptible tremor in the snow.
…
After leaving the Tiger Forest Park, Tata was unusually quiet.
It didn’t unleash its usual stream of sharp-tongued remarks, but simply led the way in silence, guiding Tang Miao onto the broad, frozen surface of the Songhua River.
Dusk fell, and night descended.
On the opposite bank, the Ice and Snow World lit up all its lights at once in a single instant.
Multicolored beams of light pierced through the ice—red, blue, green, purple…
The entire ice-carved castle seemed to burst forth from the darkness, floating in midair, dreamlike and surreal.
Tang Miao lay on the mirror-smooth ice, gazing at the equally brilliant, colorful reflections shimmering beneath her in the frozen layer.
In that moment, the delivery rider from her past life—the one who had clutched her phone in a six-square-meter rented room, scrolling enviously through travel videos—and the little orange cat now lying on the frozen Songhua River, two souls separated by an entire lifetime, merged perfectly together in this dazzling display of light and shadow.
So this was it. The real world was something no phone screen could ever contain.
She was even more certain now that giving up the comfort of the vegetable market had been the right choice.