Gentle Beast

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu accompanied her mother in the hospital for a day and returned home that night. When she opened the door, out jumped a figure.

Gǔn Gǔn came over to her feet and took advantage of the owner who hadn’t returned in so long, acting spoiled for a long time.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu was stunned and didn’t respond. After such a long time, she had quickly forgotten she had a cat at home.

She stooped and rolled him in her hands, scratching under his chin. “Gǔn Gǔn, did you miss me?”

The cat meowed twice and lolled out his tongue to lick Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu’s palms.

Usually Gǔn Gǔn wasn’t happy when Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu touched his chin, but today, he actually didn’t resist at all.

Probably because his owner had been gone for so long, the proud cat had also been afraid of being abandoned.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu teased him for a while, playing hard before going to take a bath.

Her clothes were wet and sticky, clinging to her body. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror and felt embarrassed. She was dirty and ugly.

This appearance was even unacceptable to her. She did not even know how Gǔn Gǔn had bared with her embrace.

After a long, serious shower, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu dried her hair and took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu originally planned to go back to the hospital to accompany her mother in the evening, but Mrs. Jǐ felt that she had only just returned and had a high fever. She told her to go back home and rest.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu was really tired but was reluctant to agree with her mother and father.

In the end, her father promised to pick her up the next morning, so she was willing to go home.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu drank her warm milk and Gǔn Gǔn was on the table, his eyes staring at her hand. “Meow,” he cried twice.

She startled, “Do you want to drink it?”

He bounced twice, his front paws grabbing her arm.

Because she had been gone for so long, he probably wanted to show their closeness more than ever before.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu hesitated for a bit then took a small bowl from the cupboard and poured in a little milk, pushing it in front of him.

“Don’t drink too much, ” she muttered.

Letting her hand go, he buried his head in the bowl and stuck out his tongue, lapping it up.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu quietly watched him drinking some milk, suddenly remembering another small figure.

Round ears and blue eyes, a dark spotted pattern, and devouring the milk delivered by her hands. So clear even after a long time, every scene was engraved as fresh a memory as yesterday.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu blinked her sore eyes and rubbed at them with her eyes to ease off some of the uncomfortable feeling.

She took away the bowl and said sternly, “No more. It’s not good if you drink too much.”

She looked down at his plaintive amber eyes.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu’s heart was ruthless and she ignored him, washing the bowl clean. She poured some food for the cat then went to her room.

She didn’t have a good rest for two consecutive days and finally laid down early today.

She thought she would fall asleep quickly, but after lying in bed for two hours, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu was still very much awake.

She turned over and looked at the empty bed.

It was only then that she found she had unconsciously slept on the innermost side.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu bent and slowly shrank in on herself, her body trembling.

Why?

She had obviously come back. There was a comfortable bed and warm air conditioning. Why does she feel so unaccustomed to it?

That unpredictable shift from day to night, the rapidly changing weather, the hardwood beds, and the dangerous carnivorous beasts were all far away from her. They could no longer threaten her.

She should be happy, but there was one place in her heart that was empty. Like the missing piece in the middle.

The eternal puzzle that could never be forgotten.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu’s wide awake eyes stared for a long time, until the latter part of the night. Her body gradually became unable to support her and she finally fell asleep.

*

Over the next few days, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu accompanied her mother at the hospital.

Her physical recovery was rather good. There was no other problems except for the right leg that wasn’t healed.

The driver who had caused the crash compensated a certain amount of money and expressed his apology for Mrs. Jǐ.

Mr. and Mrs. Jǐ had just had their daughter returned and were in a cheerful mood. They didn’t give him a hard time.

The matter was happily settled.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu was not bored during her days at the hospital. Sometimes she sat at the bed and talked to her mother, and she could stay there the entire day.

The old lady on the other bed met her and praised, “Teacher Hé, that daughter has great filial piety.”

The old woman was sixty this year and she had both a son and a daughter, but her children were busy at work. They only came to see her once.

Sometimes, since her children weren’t there, when the elderly woman encountered something inconvenient, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu would help her out. During the three months that Mrs. Jǐ had been in the hospital, the old lady rather liked her very much.

When she was discharged from the hospital, Mr. Jǐ drove by and picked them up.

On the way her father told Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu, “I’ve already gotten in touch with your school. You’ve fallen too far behind with your homework so you may not be able to understand your original classes. You may as well go back a level. These basic skill can be learned solidly.”

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu sat in the backseat, silent, then she nodded.

She returned to her school life again, attending classes daily and leaving class like all the other busy high school students.

She studied much more diligently than before, seemed to devote her entire energy to it. There was no time to think of the other world.

At the end of her fist semester of sophomore year, her grade was ranked third in the grade.

Her father took her out especially to celebrate, and in the restaurant, they happened to meet Lù Qí Chāng’s family.

The two parents gathered together to talk, and Lù Qí Chāng and Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu were sat to the side.

Lù Qí Chāng asked her, “Are you free the day after tomorrow?”

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu blinked and turned in confusion.

He explained, “My birthday, I want to invite you to go out and play.”

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu smiled a little and pretended to not know why, “Why do you want to go out and play for your birthday?”

“. . .” Lù Qí Chāng glanced at her and stopped talking.

On the day after the next, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu went out. Not with Lù Qí Chāng, but by herself.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu went to the city’s largest zoo and bought tickets, following the flow of people.

She did not have a clear purpose, walking and stopping here and there, seeing the animals and taking photos of the ones she liked.

She walked to the front of a reindeer herd.

Through the gauze net, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu looked at the slapstick reindeer and watched them collide into each other with their huge antlers. She unconsciously remembered Eric.

He was the first one on the continent to shoe her friendship. Now she didn’t know how he was doing.

After Laurence appeared, she and Táo Táo disappeared for seemingly no reason. Was he worried about them?

Did he succeed in returning to his race?

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu stood in front of the herd and raised her camera to take several pictures then she went on to the next place.

The Tibetan antelope, foxes, brown bears, gray wolves. . . Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu one at a time was able to see individuals of the past and there was an inexplicable feeling in her.

In the past, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu looked at these as “animals,” and could only see the eyes of animals.

Now though, she looked at them and felt that they would change at any moment into a human shape.

Unfortunately, they didn’t.

Regardless of how many times she looked at them, they were still standing behind an isolation net and didn’t even look at her.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu picked up her mood and was finally ready to leave.

She approached the area for the wild beasts. Where the tiger enclosures were. There were lions and other large beasts, and leopards were among them.

Two leopards were basking in the sun under a tree, one was covered in black markings lying in a tree. His tail hung freely behind him and it shook slightly.

He was probably sleepy. He yawned his large mouth and revealed sharp teeth. His eyes turned slightly and looked in Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu’s direction.

His eyes were sharp and straightforward, and without warning. In a flash, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu almost thought that she saw Ryan again.

Unfortunately, his eyes were amber, and Ryan’s were the same blue as the deep sea.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu’s heart had risen high and was sunk quickly. She didn’t stay long and left in a hurry.

After returning home, her father asked where she went and Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu answered truthfully.

Her mother and father didn’t think much of it. They thought that the pressures of her study were too strong and she wanted to relax, so they didn’t detain her.

After that incident, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu’s life continued on as usual.

She didn’t seem to have any life-changing events in her life quite like the other continent.

On her third year, her studies became even heavier.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu buried herself in her studies and her results were stable and she at the very top.

On the day of college entrance examinations, the sky that had been overcast for two full days finally cleared. The sun shone through the black clouds and onto the earth.

*

When Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu applied for university, she didn’t report to a local school and instead chose T University that was closest to S City.

T University had a long history and was rich in teacher resources. Most importantly, their physics department was famous throughout the country.

At the beginning of the year, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu specifically selected two minor courses, the restricted sense of general relativity and the parallel universe theory.

College life was much easier than high school, and she had a lot more leisure time. However, Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu never allowed herself to be idle. In addition to studying, she also joined several organizations.

Yoga club, dance club, music club. . .  every day was busy.

At the same time, she was growing up at a rate everyone could see.

Like a blooming flower, experiencing wind and rain, she finally bloomed on a sunny morning.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu looked lovely when she was a child, but as her childhood features faded, she became even more beautiful. She also grew a few centimeters taller. The pair of small peaches on her chest also grew with her height. She had become so beautiful that people couldn’t shift their eyes away.

In the physics department, the ratio of men to women was even more out of balance than in the leopard tribe, and Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu was without a doubt a flower.

One day, when Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu and her roommate were returning from the library, there was a boy with a blushing red face that walked over. He said, “Elder sister, can I have a few words with you?”

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu had just become a sophomore that year and it was just after her nineteenth birthday.

Her roommate was accustomed to this, so she winked at Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu and retired to the side.

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu stood still and looked at the boy before her.

When she was working with them, she was always professional and she had helped this one several times.

The boy was thin-faced and when he saw Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu, the words he had prepared in advance were forgotten, and he said incoherently, “Sister, I . . . thank you for helping me the other day, I. . . I wanted to ask, do you have a boyfriend?”

This question was very abrupt and Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu originally didn’t want to answer, but the boy’s anxiety infected her and she shook her head.

The boy’s face was happy and he asked anxiously, “That. . . Can I confess to you? Sister, I like you. . . you, could you be my girlfriend?”

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu still shook her head and broke the boy’s fragile heart.

He didn’t give up, “Can you tell me why?”

Why?

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu thought for a moment, then her eyelashes drooped slightly. The dimly lit streetlight shined over her cheek.

After a long time, she raised her eyes and smiled slightly. She said to him, “I’m sorry, I have someone I like.”

He finally gave up and left, dejected.

Her roommate heard the conversation from the side and caught Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu to gossip as they went up the stairs, “Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu, you have someone you like? Who is it? How come you haven’t ever said?”

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu said: “You don’t know him, he isn’t from our school.”

“Not our school. Then does he work already?”

Jǐ Xiǎo Ōu’s eyes curved and she said mysteriously, “Not at all.”

Later, her roommate asked again but she was tight-lipped and said nothing.

In addition to knowing they wouldn’t believe her, there was another, more important reason.

She didn’t want to tell anyone.

About her experiences, about her Ryan.

That was a secret she hid deep in her heart. Where no one could touch it.