The Little Black Cat Striving to Be Elegant
By the time Ji Xiao logged off, his fingers were almost cramping. After a whole night of wheel battles, people kept popping out to ambush him no matter where he went. He had killed so many that his gear durability was almost gone.
Husband, log off. We’re getting gang-fucked.
Hiding in town, Tang Paopao sent Ji Xiao a message through the couple channel. Ji Xiao was on his way to buy medicinal herbs for Tang Paopao when several people blocked his path. He fought for ages before finally breaking free and running into a safe zone, then took the chance to send back a reply: Gang-fucked your ass. What the hell did you do to them to make them hate you this much?
Fuck, that guy openly flirted with this empress. What he said was way too disgusting. Who could stand that? I cursed him out on world chat for two whole hours.
What blind idiot actually flirted with you? That’s some serious desperation…
Get lost!
In the end, Ji Xiao got blocked so badly he had no choice but to log off. Before quitting, he glanced at world chat. It was packed with spam from the other side. Every time it looked like things were finally about to die down, Tang Paopao would jump out at exactly the right moment and throw in another jab, and then the spam would explode all over again. The content was always the same:
Qi Xiaobai and Tang Paopao, adulterous whore and bastard, go die!
The insults were really low-level. They did rhyme, at least. As Ji Xiao hit exit, he had a powerful urge to suggest that they all go study under Tang Paopao. After all, Tang Paopao could curse people continuously for two hours without repeating a single line.
He had only been lying in bed for less than two minutes when Lin Zi came in with a grin, pushing the door open with a bag of sugar-roasted chestnuts in hand.
Ji Xiao lived in the fire brigade dorms. At night, on their floor, only the two bachelors, Ji Xiao and Lin Zi, were left. As long as they were not on duty, the married coworkers usually went home.
“What now?” Ji Xiao pulled the blanket over himself.
“I’m borrowing your computer.” Lin Zi used his toe to poke Ji Xiao’s computer, which had just been shut down, back on. “I still haven’t fed Maomao today.”
“You’ve got something wrong with you…”
Maomao was Lin Zi’s computer pet, a little white cat. Every day it had to be fed, taken for walks, bathed, and scratched. Ji Xiao could not understand what was so interesting about a grown man sitting there all day fussing over a fake cat on a computer. That was the kind of thing teenage girls did.
“You’ve got no compassion at all.” Lin Zi stuffed a peeled chestnut into Ji Xiao’s mouth. “Men who don’t like little animals aren’t good men.”
“Oh? Says the great humanitarian, the one who insisted I throw away that injured cat.” Ji Xiao slanted a look at him. “And you had all these reasons too. Stray cats aren’t close to people, stray cats run away…”
“I was stating facts. Even if you brought that cat back today, it still would’ve run off. It didn’t even want you touching it, and you’re still shamelessly trying to offer it your compassion.” With a face full of disdain, Lin Zi sneered at him for a while, then started concentrating on checking Maomao for fleas.
Ji Xiao smiled and said nothing. He thought of the little black cat from today. Only after he had pulled it out of the sewer did he realize that a piece of wire had pierced into its hind leg, leaving it stuck there and unable to move.
“Do you think… a cat that dumb… can even grow up?”
“Stop worrying. That cat wasn’t some nursing kitten anymore. It managed to grow this big on its own already. Even without you, it’ll grow up just fine.” Lin Zi stopped what he was doing, leaned in front of Ji Xiao, and stared at him for a while. “You don’t even usually like animals. Why are you so hung up on this cat? Is it because it’s spring, the season for melancholy?”
“That’s autumn, okay? Spring is your mating season.” Ji Xiao waved him off. “Go feed your Maomao. I’m going to sleep. Shut the door properly when you leave.”
“I’m sleeping in your room tonight.” Staring at the screen, Lin Zi suddenly tossed out that line.
“Why the hell should you!” Ji Xiao had just closed his eyes to go to sleep.
The moment he heard that, he sprang straight up from the bed. He tossed around a lot in his sleep, and what he hated most was having somebody beside him getting in the way. His mother had always worried that after he got married, he would end up kicking his wife off the bed in the middle of the night.
“Such a long spring night. Aren’t you lonely?” Lin Zi turned and smiled at him, then leaned closer and threw him a flirtatious wink.
“Quit the crap.” Ji Xiao grabbed him by the collar. “Out with it. What happened to your room?”
“I was eating noodles just now… and I spilled them…”
“Spilled them where?”
“On the bed.” Lin Zi scratched his hair. “Otherwise why would I come crash in your room? You think I want to? Hugging a grown man to sleep is worse than hugging a pillow. There’s not even any room for imagination…”
Lin Zi was no more well-behaved in his sleep than Ji Xiao. He did not snore or grind his teeth, but halfway through the night he would always end up wrapping himself around Ji Xiao. Ji Xiao spent the whole night shoving him away. Every time he pushed him off, within a few minutes Lin Zi would roll over and hug him again.
“Lin Zi, I’m gonna screw your uncle,” Ji Xiao cursed. In the middle of the night, being tormented by all that repeated pushing back and forth as if he were doing calisthenics had gotten him pretty fired up. He kicked one leg straight into Lin Zi’s stomach. “What the hell is wrong with you!”
Lin Zi rolled right off the bed. The instant he hit the floor, he woke up. Then he sprang up with startling agility, grabbed the clothes hanging over the chair, and started yanking them on while running outside, yelling, “Fuck, a nighttime fire call…”
Ji Xiao was left stunned. Still groggy in bed, he listened to Lin Zi running all the way toward the fire pole for emergency dispatch, wondering whether the idiot had to slide halfway down before his brain would fully wake up.
“Ji Xiao, are you fucking sick in the head?” Not long after, Lin Zi came back looking deeply aggrieved, hitching up his pants. From the look of it, he had regained his senses before reaching the pole. “What the hell was that for? You scared me so bad I thought we had a fire call!”
“Quit the crap. Sleep on the floor for me, got it? You’re a full-grown man and you’ve got zero sleep manners. Didn’t you say hugging a grown man to sleep leaves no room for imagination? Then why the hell were you hugging me like your life depended on it? Am I supposed to sleep or not…” Ji Xiao wrapped the blanket around himself into a long cocoon, lay down in the exact middle of the bed, and faced the wall without moving.
Lin Zi stood by the bed for several seconds, considering whether he should just jump straight into the inner side of the bed or settle for squeezing in right behind Ji Xiao’s back. In the end, he finally decided to crowd his way inside. Staying on the outside meant he could be kicked off the bed at any moment.
At the exact moment Lin Zi jumped, the alarm in the corridor suddenly blared. Already halfway airborne, he got distracted for a split second. His knee slammed into the edge of the bed, and his body pitched forward, his face crashing into Ji Xiao’s waist.
“Ah…” Ji Xiao was also in the middle of springing upright. The hit nearly brought tears to his eyes. “Fuck, why’d you bite me!”
Lin Zi had no time to bother with him. He scrambled up, clutching his mouth, and bolted outside. Ji Xiao ran after him, pulling on his clothes as he went. He was still a little dazed from sleep, but the whole sequence, running out the door, heading for the pole, going down, all of it was so reflexive it barely had to pass through the brain.
Even though it was the middle of the night, everyone on duty had still changed into protective gear and assembled within three minutes. Just as they were preparing to board the truck and head out, squad leader Wu Zhijun blew his whistle, glanced at the stopwatch in his hand, and barked, “Surprise inspection. Fall in!”
“Fuck.” Lin Zi had already thrown himself at the steering wheel. The moment he heard that, he muttered a curse under his breath. “Boss is really full of energy.”
Ji Xiao did not say anything. This was not the first time they had had one of these surprise inspections. Old Wu always picked sleeping hours for emergency assembly drills to check whether the team’s fire response speed met standards…
Everyone lined up in two rows in front of Wu Zhijun and listened to him lecture in a voice full of force, repeatedly stressing the importance of response speed in fire dispatch and the necessity of improving professional ability… and so on, and so on.
Being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night for a surprise inspection did not make anyone resentful. They had seen too many fire scenes, too many tragedies. Arriving at the scene one minute earlier meant one more sliver of hope.
By the time they got back to the dorm after the lecture, it was already past four in the morning. Ji Xiao sat on the edge of the bed, completely awake now. Lin Zi, on the other hand, stripped off his clothes and dropped straight back into bed. Before long, he had already returned to dreamland.
Ji Xiao was a little bored. Leaning against the headboard, he picked up his phone and started pressing through the numbers in his contacts one by one. At this hour of the night, there was not a single person he could harass. After thinking for a while, he sent a message to Tang Paopao’s number:
Get up and pee.
In less than two minutes, Tang Paopao replied:
You bastard who ought to be chopped into pieces.
Ji Xiao grinned, shoved the phone under his pillow, and lay down, closing his eyes. Lin Zi rolled over beside him, and Ji Xiao immediately shoved out a palm and smacked him back to where he had been.
Ding Wei sat by the balcony, his legs hanging over the outside and swinging gently. He had not gone out wandering tonight. He had been staying on the balcony the whole time, listening to all the sounds in the building.
People arguing, chatting, lecturing children, talking on the phone, fucking, and even people getting the wall pounded from next door while they were fucking…
The moon hung in the sky. He tilted his head up and stared at it for a long time. That thing was the best. Ever since the day he first became aware, it had never changed. Of course, his memory was not that good, so over these past several hundred years, whether the moon had actually changed or not, he could not be completely sure.
Ding Wei drew his legs back, stepped onto the balcony railing, and slowly stood up. He lived on the fifteenth floor. It was not that high, but during that darkest stretch before dawn, looking down from here still gave a very particular feeling, a feeling that was both frightening and seductive, as though it were luring a person to melt into it.
He spread his arms and took a deep breath, then leaped from the balcony.
The wind gave off a low, soft cry by his ears, wrapping around his body. This feeling was simply wonderful. A smile curved at the corner of Ding Wei’s lips.
While suspended in midair, he became a little transparent, as if the night itself could pass through his body.
His body was shrinking, a kind of shrinkage that was both comfortable and full of extension. It was a strange way to describe it, but it could not have been more fitting…
In midair, he turned into a little black cat.
A little black cat with amber eyes.
Amber. That was what a little girl had called them long ago after he had helped her fulfill a wish and lost one tail. She had said, Your eyes are amber-colored. They’re so pretty.
Pleased with that lovely-sounding description, he had once gone to the water’s edge, stretching his neck to look at his reflection and studying his own eyes for a while. But reality had left him a little disappointed. Amber-colored? They were just yellow. Most cats had eyes like that, yellow, with a little black dot in the middle, and sometimes a little black vertical slit.
Carrying along these messy, fragmented scraps of memory, he tucked in his hind legs, preparing to land on the wall downstairs in a light and elegant pose, then lightly and elegantly hop down from the wall, and then take a little walk along the base of it in the beautiful night.
But to his surprise, the first thing to hit the broken bricks on top of the wall was not the soft pads of his front paws, but his chin.
He had misjudged the wall’s position. He came down with his chin smashing into the top of the wall first. Then, while frantically windmilling all four paws, he scraped his chin all the way down the wall, and in the end landed belly-first on the grass.
This unexpected shock infuriated him. He sprang to his feet and let out a loud meow of grief and indignation, and even tried his best to control the sound so that the last note curved off into an ow.
He looked around. The surroundings were quiet. Fortunately, it was the middle of the night. Nobody had seen him land in such a humiliating way. Anyone who did not know better might even have thought he had been thrown from a building by some cat abuser.
He shook himself, getting the grass clippings off his fur, then bounded forward in little hops along the base of the wall with his tail stuck high in the air.
He was not especially familiar with this route. He had not been here very long. The place he used to stay could no longer be lived in because of demolition, and he had spent a long time choosing before finally settling on this place. It was very close to the biggest city park in the area. He liked going there at night and staying for a while, to recover a little of the feeling of being far away from crowds of people.
He had not gone more than a short distance when a person appeared around the bend at the end of the road. The streetlamp stretched the figure’s shadow very long, all the way to his feet. He hopped to the side. Under normal circumstances, he preferred to keep a relatively greater distance from people.
But that person seemed to have seen him. First he froze for a moment, then walked straight toward him.
He stopped moving. His heartbeat slowly began to speed up as he watched this person, somewhat hesitant, yet still steadily and firmly walking toward him step by step.
It was over.
He swished his tail, wanting to sit down on it and hide it under his butt, but if this really was someone who could see his true form, then hiding his tail would be useless anyway. Besides, with that many tails, his butt was not big enough…
“You’re… a…” The man finally reached him. He could very clearly see the expression on the man’s face, shock, delight, and a little disbelief all mixed together. That kind of expression was too familiar to him. Over these past several hundred years, he had no idea how many times he had seen it. He had already forgotten all those faces, but this kind of gaze, filled with intense hope, he had never forgotten.
He did not answer the man’s question. In the very early years, he would meow once as a sort of confirmation, but as time went on, he had grown too lazy to open his mouth. In any case, the eighth tail he had worked so hard to grow was about to be gone. That was already an unavoidable fact.
He sat there quietly. Seeing no response from him, the man crouched down and cautiously asked again, “A nine-tailed cat?”