The Little Black Cat in the Sewer
“I already called 119. Let’s wait for the firefighters to come save it. The poor little thing…”
The moment it heard that line drifting down from the noisy crowd above the sewer, it felt its luck had reached rock bottom.
It kicked hard with its legs, miserable and annoyed. Its leg hurt badly. Something had snagged it, and it hurt whenever it moved. Something had probably pierced the skin on its leg.
A cat getting trapped in a sewer because it was chasing a mouse, this had to be the most humiliating thing in feline history.
And on top of that, it was a nine-tailed cat.
Well, strictly speaking, it did not quite count yet, because it had not grown its ninth tail. But it had eight already, yes, eight beautiful black tails. It only needed one more…
And yet here it was, trapped in this filthy, stinking, pitch-black place. The flashlight beams that swept across the sewer opening every so often made it extremely uncomfortable.
When another person bent down and shone a flashlight right into its eyes again, it finally could not hold back. It bared its teeth angrily at the man and let out an irritable meow.
“I can’t tell where it’s stuck. Might be the leg…” The man kept flicking the flashlight over it a few more times, then turned his head and said to the person beside him, “Or maybe its belly. This cat looks pretty fat.”
Fat? Where was it fat? It had obviously been hooked on something, not wedged in place. What kind of eyes did this guy have?
It narrowed its eyes in displeasure and caught sight of the bright yellow reflective strips on the man’s orange-red uniform. He was a firefighter.
This was the first call Ji Xiao’s team had gotten today.
Rescuing a cat was pretty dull, especially when it meant fishing one out of a reeking sewer. When Ji Xiao first joined the fire squad, he had not expected their daily duties to include this sort of thing. Still, compared with heading into a fire scene, he would rather fish out cats every day.
Ji Xiao took a look. The distance from the manhole cover to where the cat was trapped was about the same as the distance from the opening. Taking off the cover and trying to reach in from there would not work.
“Just get a stick and poke it out,” Lin Zi suggested after thinking for a while.
“And what if you poke it to death?” Ji Xiao shot him a glance. He knew Lin Zi wanted to head back. Who would want to go to all that trouble for a stray cat?
“Isn’t there a catchpole in the truck? We could loop it and try pulling.”
Ji Xiao visually measured the distance from the sewer opening to the cat. About right. “Let’s try it.”
The “catchpole” Lin Zi meant was the kind many places used for catching dogs, a bamboo pole with a thin steel loop at the end that tightened when you pulled.
Holding the pole, Ji Xiao lay down by the sewer opening again while Lin Zi shone the flashlight for him. In the darkness, he could see the cat’s yellow eyes lit by the beam. They were quite beautiful.
When the loop reached toward the cat, it seemed to panic and shrank back into itself, but in the end, because it could not move away, Ji Xiao still managed to slip the loop around its neck.
“I’m pulling now.” Ji Xiao motioned for Lin Zi to keep the flashlight steady, then gently tugged it toward the opening.
The little black cat inside suddenly let out a loud cry, so loud that its voice even cracked a little. Ji Xiao immediately stopped. He felt an enormous amount of pressure. All the aunties and older women watching nearby were staring at him as though he were about to do something terrible to the cat.
“Take the cover off,” Ji Xiao said, bracing one hand on the concrete around the sewer opening. “The cat has definitely been caught on something. If we pull it backward from that side, we should be able to get it out.”
After more than ten minutes of fussing around, Ji Xiao finally managed to drag the kitten out from the side of the manhole cover by looping the snare around its tail. The crowd of onlookers actually applauded for a while, which left Ji Xiao standing there holding the cat and not knowing whether he should put it down or carry it back to the truck.
“Does this cat belong to anyone?” Ji Xiao pinched the loose skin at the back of the kitten’s neck and lifted it in front of his face for a closer look. All four of the kitten’s legs were stretched stiffly forward, every claw extended. Even its tail was pulled rigid. It looked tense, as though it were facing a mortal enemy. Ji Xiao stared for a moment, then narrowed his eyes. “Huh?”
That one sound made it tense all over at once. It stared at the man holding it. No way… he can’t see, he can’t see, he can’t see… It repeated that over and over to itself, but still could not tell whether this man could see its eight tails. The eighth one had only grown in a few days ago. It absolutely could not lose it just like this.
“This cat is completely black. Look, not a single white hair…” Only after his little sound of surprise and another long look did the man tilt his head toward the person beside him and finally say that.
The moment it heard that, it let out a huge sigh of relief. Its tail was safe.
“It’s just a little stray kitten. Poor thing.” One of the aunties reached out and squeezed its leg lightly. “It’s hurt too. Can you bandage it and take it to a shelter for stray cats?”
“We’ll just let it go by the roadside later,” Lin Zi said from the driver’s seat, glancing at the cat lying on Ji Xiao’s lap. Ji Xiao had already wrapped its injured hind leg, though the bandage looked a bit like a triangular rice dumpling. “What shelter do we even have around here? The old lady says it like it’s real…”
“Fine. The aunties have such high hopes for us, after all.” Ji Xiao looked at the little black cat’s eyes. In the pale yellow irises, the pupils were narrow black slits. Against that all-black fur, it looked a little devilish. He instinctively paused to think about what day it was. Good thing, it was not Friday.
“Stray cats are all wild. They’re not close to people,” Lin Zi said with a laugh. “My grandma used to love picking up cats. She never managed to keep one for more than a few days before they all ran off. Wild cats can’t stand staying in people’s homes. Just let it go.”
Ji Xiao pinched the kitten’s ear and thought for a while, then agreed. Mainly because when he pinched its ear, the kitten had very unwillingly shoved his hand away with a paw, which made him feel that this really was a wild cat that did not want to stay around humans.
By the time they were almost back to the squad compound, Lin Zi pulled the truck over by the roadside. Ji Xiao had just opened the door and had not even gotten out yet when the little black cat kicked off from his hand, shot out like an arrow, scrambled up a tree by the roadside in a few quick bounds, and vanished in the blink of an eye.
By the time they got back to the station, it was already noon. Ji Xiao ate something at random, then dropped onto his bed to sleep, casually picking up his phone to check it. There was a text message from an hour earlier.
Husband, can you come online tonight? Your wife got bullied today.
Ji Xiao knew at a glance who it was from, though for a second he had almost read “wife” as “mother.” He replied: I can get online tonight. Who bullied you? Tell him to scrub himself nice and clean and wait for me tonight.
The reply came back quickly: Are you disgusting or what, darling.
I’m not the one who’s complained that you’re a guy playing a girl.
Screw off. Remember to log in tonight.
This person was called Tang Paopao, Ji Xiao’s in-game wife. They had known each other for a long time. She was an unbelievably sweet, slim-waisted loli archer, but there were rumors that the real person behind the character was actually a man.
At first, Ji Xiao had married Tang Paopao because, not knowing the truth, he had entertained a few rather indecent ideas. After hearing the rumors, he had been badly shaken. Fortunately, Tang Paopao had a pretty good personality, so Ji Xiao could only give up on his dream of flirting with a loli and treat the whole thing like he had made a gaming buddy instead…
They had exchanged phone numbers, but they had never called each other. Tang Paopao had said, “You’d better not call. It’ll ruin the illusion.”
Because of the nature of his job, Ji Xiao usually did not do quests or run dungeons. Tang Paopao did all of that by logging into his account for him. So as repayment, he helped Tang Paopao with PvP. Ji Xiao did not have any hobbies to speak of, and he did not have a girlfriend either, so all his money went into games. His gear was excellent. Tang Paopao, in turn, very professionally went around stirring up trouble, and Ji Xiao handled the cleanup afterward.
Ji Xiao sighed and shoved the phone under his pillow. No telling what kind of mess that guy had gone and caused again.
A nine-tailed cat was still a cat. Even with a triangular rice dumpling wrapped around its hind leg, it did not stop it from quietly sneaking back to the area near that sewer at the first opportunity. Its instincts told it the mouse was still there. That bastard had seen the whole thing when it got stuck in the sewer, so it was definitely waiting for it to come back and get mocked properly.
Sure enough, it saw the little bastard basking in the sun behind a trash can in the corner of the wall.
It quickly jumped down from the top of the wall, circled behind the mouse, and crept closer without a sound. It lifted one paw gently, then set it down gently. Even its breathing was soft. Three, two, one, now!
This time, it did not miss. Its sharp claws landed squarely on the mouse’s back.
The mouse had probably been enjoying the sun too much, because when it got pounced on, it was badly startled and let out a loud squeal. Hearing that sound made it deeply satisfied. Serves you right. Let’s see you sit there all pleased with yourself, pretending to enjoy life…
It loosened its claws a little, and the mouse struggled free and ran off. After darting a short distance, it even turned back to look at it once, its eyes full of defiance.
The tenth time.
It ignored the mouse’s backward glance, lowered its head and licked its paw, then turned away in complete satisfaction.
Two more times, and it could put an end to this boring game. But… It leaped back onto the wall and took a shortcut home. Catching that fellow two more times was not going to be easy.
By the time it got back to the residential complex, it was afternoon. The sunlight was lovely, the kind that made you want to take a nap the moment you saw it…
From far away, he saw the landlord’s wife standing downstairs by the elevator, craning her neck and looking this way. The moment she saw him, she called out, “Ding Wei, you’re finally back. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“I didn’t take it with me. What is it?” He rarely used things like phones, trash full of modern vibes that they were. He hated them.
“The property office just called. The toilet downstairs got clogged, and they only just cleared it. They told everyone upstairs to run a lot of water through. Remember to do that after you get back.”
“Mm.”
“And watch it when you use the toilet too. Don’t clog it up. It’s such a pain,” the landlord’s wife added.
“Mm.”
“You students really are hopeless, even college students are hopeless,” the woman muttered under her breath as she turned away. “That’s why my husband is always saying he doesn’t get why we rent this place to high school kids…”
Why? For the money, obviously.
Ding Wei narrowed his long, slender eyes and smiled, but said nothing. He simply stepped into the elevator.
The moment he opened the apartment door, he knew something was wrong. Someone had been inside his home.
The cup on the coffee table had been moved a few centimeters to the side. The hot-water switch on the dispenser had been turned slightly toward the middle…
“Su Gui.” Frowning, he turned toward the kitchen and said, “What are you doing in my place again?”
“Again? Pretty sure this is my first time here…” Water was running in the kitchen. A boy came out from inside, his not-very-big eyes full of laughter. He lifted his pointy chin at him. “Meow.”
“Get out. I want to sleep.” Ding Wei walked to the floor-to-ceiling window and yanked the curtains open in one sharp motion. Sunlight immediately spilled in, warm and bright.
Standing in the kitchen doorway, Su Gui jumped in fright when the sudden sunlight splashed over his whole body. He raised a hand to shield his eyes. “Hey, Ding Wei, this one doesn’t count, me getting caught today.”
“You say it doesn’t count, and that means it doesn’t count?” Ding Wei stretched lazily. “Trying to weasel out of it?”
“If this one doesn’t count,” Su Gui said as he walked toward the door, casually grabbing an apple from the coffee table and biting into it, “then I won’t tell anyone about how you got stuck in the sewer. Deal?”
His hand had just landed on the doorknob when a gust of wind came up behind him. Before he could even turn around, a cold hand had already clamped around his neck. His center of gravity tipped, and he was slammed against the wall. Ding Wei’s voice came from right by his ear.
“Say it, and I’ll strangle you.”
“Let go, that hurts…” Su Gui twisted twice with a frown. “I said I won’t tell anybody, okay? Let go! Do you know you scratched up my whole back today…?”
“Tch.” Ding Wei let go and sat down in the rocking chair by the floor-to-ceiling window, stretching his legs out long. “From the sound of it, do you want me to put some medicine on it too?”
“I’m going. Aren’t you going to thank your lifesaver? Without him, you’d still be stuck in there right now. Oh wow, how terrifying…” By the second half of that sentence, Su Gui had already darted out the door.
Ding Wei hurled a cushion over. It slammed into the back of the door.
Lifesaver?
He thought of that firefighter at the sewer opening, the one who had said he was a fat cat. He barely remembered him anymore.
He had lived too long and met too many people. He had long since developed the habit of forgetting human faces almost as soon as he saw them. Forgetting was his specialty. Right now, all he remembered was that the man had a fairly gentle face, and that smell of cigarettes on him. Give it another ten days or half a month, and even those little scraps of detail would disappear from his mind.
Ding Wei touched the injury on his leg. The gauze bandage was naturally already gone. The wound still hurt a little, but it was nothing serious.
What “lifesaver” was he supposed to be? Even without that man, could he really have been stuck there forever until he starved to death? And he had pulled so hard when he tugged on his tail too.
Ding Wei instinctively turned sideways and reached a hand behind himself. His fingers met empty air before he remembered that, right now, he had no tail.
He closed his eyes and raised a hand to cover them. Better sleep for a while. He was exhausted. Growing a tail always made him sleepy. Hopefully this time the tail would grow in safely…
Author’s Note:
Forget it, I’ll just put this section down here after all. Ahem. But I still want everyone to take a look at the legend of the nine-tailed cat, because the cat in this story is pretty different from the one in the legend, hehe.
The Buddha once said that any being in this world with seven apertures can cultivate and become immortal.
Cats naturally fall within that category too.
It is said that every twenty years of cultivation, a cat can grow one extra tail. When it reaches nine tails, it can ascend to an incredibly formidable realm, one where even immortals have to give it some room, ahem.
But the ninth tail is not easy to grow. Once a cat spirit has eight tails, it has to help a person fulfill one wish before it can continue cultivating the ninth tail, but the price is losing one tail.
And so the cat spirit keeps helping the fated people it encounters, and keeps losing that eighth tail over and over.
A dead loop.
The latter half of the story goes like this. One day, it met a little boy. The little boy made a wish. That wish was, “I hope you can grow your ninth tail.”
And so… the cat spirit ascended.
That is the story. There are many versions of it, but the differences are not very great.
In this novel, though, the nine-tailed cat may not be as tragic as it is in the legend. I do not like that kind of tone. So this nine-tailed cat will be a little different from the one in the legend.