Zheng Tan still remembers what it feels like to walk on two legs, which honestly makes his current situation harder to accept.
By the time he fully regains consciousness, he is already lying inside a trash pile somewhere near Chuhua University, soaked from the cold and trapped inside the body of a black cat. Not a mythical beast, not some overpowered creature from fantasy stories, just… a cat. Small paws, sharp hearing, inconvenient instincts, and absolutely no way to explain to anyone that there is still a human mind stuck underneath all that fur.
The people who eventually take him in know nothing about this, of course.
To the Jiao family, he is simply a clever stray cat their children become attached to during autumn of 2003. They give him the name Charcoal, feed him leftovers, complain when he scratches furniture, and slowly make space for him inside their cramped but strangely warm apartment. Zheng Tan spends an embarrassing amount of time trying to adjust to basic things, figuring out how to move naturally as a cat without accidentally behaving too human around people.
That turns out to be harder than expected.
Papa Jiao, a university professor buried beneath research work and academic pressure, quickly notices that Charcoal behaves differently from ordinary pets. Maybe too differently sometimes. The cat listens during conversations, reacts to specific names, remembers routines, and seems far more aware of his surroundings than he should be. Thankfully, most people explain it away as intelligence rather than something impossible.
Meanwhile, Zheng Tan starts observing the world around him from an entirely different perspective, literally closer to the ground than before.
Chuhua University looks peaceful on the surface, full of lectures, busy students, research buildings, and professors arguing over papers like their lives depend on citations. But the longer Zheng Tan watches, the more he notices the quieter details most people ignore, exhaustion hidden behind academic success, competition disguised as professionalism, researchers slowly losing themselves chasing recognition they may never fully receive.
Oddly enough, becoming a cat makes him understand humans better.
Outside campus, the city feels equally alive, pet shops crowded with university staff, late-night food stalls, stray animals surviving in alleys, and laboratories operating long after midnight. Some parts of that world leave Zheng Tan deeply uncomfortable, especially the research labs connected to animal studies, places where curiosity and morality don’t always sit comfortably beside each other.
Still, life does not become miserable.
There are small moments he begins treasuring unexpectedly, sunny windowsills, quiet companionship, strange friendships with other animals, even the comfort of simply belonging somewhere again.
The unsettling part is that Zheng Tan slowly stops asking how he became a cat, and starts wondering whether returning to his old life is even possible anymore.
