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The midnight incident that occurred in an abandoned Russian village that had gone unnoticed by anyone for years sent tremors through both China and Russia.

Because it was close to the border, China interpreted it as a show of force using a new Russian weapon. That was only natural, since a shock on the level of a nuclear test had been detected. An information blackout was imposed, and the intelligence and military departments were thrown into utter chaos for a while.
Meanwhile, Russia at first also interpreted it as a show of force using a new Chinese weapon. After the epicenter was pinpointed, they began to think it was an earthquake, but because it was a region where earthquakes were geologically impossible, geologists and an investigation team were urgently assembled.

What the investigation team, dispatched the following morning, found in the abandoned village that had been reduced largely to level ground were enormous clusters of craters, reaching a maximum diameter of 200 meters, and cat footprints.

If one were to think in a simple way from the craters, the most plausible theory would be that a meteor fell. But astronomers unanimously denied the meteor theory.

Crater diameters are said to be ten times the diameter of the meteor. Therefore, at the center of a 200-meter crater there should be a 20-meter meteor. However, no such structure was found.
Theories such as the meteor being buried deeply underground, or exploding in midair and scattering to pieces, were also denied. The well-known Chelyabinsk meteor that fell in Russian territory in 2013 is estimated to have been several meters to 15 meters in diameter, but during its fall it ignited due to air friction, became a fireball that shone brightly even in the daytime, and the shockwave it generated circled the Earth twice and was detected by instruments in various locations. By contrast, this time there was no sighting of a meteor, and while the earthquake could be detected, the shockwave could not. It could not have been a meteor.

Even if it wasn’t a meteor, something with the power of a nuclear explosion had certainly detonated, and from the scale of the craters and the earthquake, it follows that a large-scale shockwave that would have woken all the residents of the surrounding towns and villages and shattered all their glass should have occurred.
However, in reality, no shockwave was detected.
When experts who arrived later conducted further investigation, it became clear that traces of a shockwave radiating outward from the abandoned village could be seen, and that at a certain distance it suddenly stopped.
The experts puzzled over this mysterious fact, but in the end, the only conclusion that could be reached was the unscientific view that something like a dome-shaped barrier had been deployed around the abandoned village and had contained the damage.

Meanwhile, zoologists estimated that the giant footprints, which looked like they belonged to a cat, were feline footprints if one ignored the size. From the footprints and stride length, it was calculated that a giant cat with a shoulder height around 650 meters had run at above sonic speed. Furthermore, aerial drone footage revealed that the terrain deformation at the center of the crater was a depression shaped like the foreleg of a cat. Countless fresh cat footprints remained in the abandoned village, and from the individual features and the collected shed hairs, it was determined that five to ten normal-sized cats had come and gone.
As for the giant cat, three serious possibilities were put forward: it fell from the sky, it teleported, or there existed a cat capable of freely shrinking and enlarging.

If this had been four years earlier, researchers who made such unrealistic announcements would have been shut out of the academic world. Things were different in the current world. They couldn’t become the mainstream of academia, but had built a certain faction. And through the investigation of this giant cat incident, their influence increased.

If an enormous psychic-powered cat had gone on a rampage, the question was where that cat had come from and where it had disappeared to.
The Russian authorities wanted to secure it at any cost.
Because the border with China was close, the possibility existed that the cat had come from China.
The intelligence bureau obtained information about a cat-shaped UMA that had recently become a rumor in the Chinese Special Economic Zone, Qitaohe City. Linking the cases was only natural.

China, too, obtained information from an amateur astronomer who happened to be looking at the horizon with a telescope, who said he saw something like an enormous cat sticking out from a mountain near the border with Russia.
Russia and China, while keeping each other in check, began cautiously probing one another…

Meanwhile, the Miao Miao San He Hui at the center of the turmoil saw off the homeless old man three days after the battle, as he set out on a journey of self-discovery. Realizing that the mysterious light remaining in his only memories had been the aurora, he decided to head to the polar regions where auroras are often seen in order to search for his own identity.
For cats, who are strongly individualistic by nature, partings are not painful. Wandering off on a journey and returning casually is something cats often do. Declaring that one is going on a journey before leaving is, from a cat’s perspective, unusually dutiful.
Huang-hu seemed somewhat reluctant, but the number of Huang-hu’s friends had greatly increased. If both sides were full and satisfied, then nothing more needed to be said.

Huang-hu and the nameless man pledged to meet again and parted, bringing a period to the incident surrounding psychics in China.

Li Chunyan (26 years old) was a retired fortune-teller living in Qitaohe City. She used to make divination for sailors and foreign tourists.

Until about three years ago, she had boasted that she could see the future and earned small change doing street-corner readings, but the Super Water Sphere Incident triggered a search for psychics, and that was her downfall. She was identified, taken away, examined by government agencies, and given an official stamp of having no abilities.
Because a genuine one had appeared in brilliant splendor, the incompetence of those in the gray zone of the psychic world was brought to light. It was a nuisance. Many colleagues suffered similar misfortunes.

She wasn’t exclusively a fortune-teller as trade was her main occupation, so she didn’t exactly lose her job. But the rumors that she had been raided and disgraced by the government in her side job had a large impact on evaluations. Chunyan fell off the promotion track, and lately she had been thinking of starting a business with the money she had saved.

Chunyan’s hobby, worn out from daily work and socializing, was observing the cat gatherings. The parking lot of Chunyan’s apartment complex served as the meeting place for the gatherings, and in the evenings cats often assembled and meowed at one another. Because Chunyan’s work shift ran from early morning to evening, she frequently ran into them on her way home.
The cats’ cries were like infants throwing tantrums, and not a few nearby residents filed complaints that they were irritating to the ears. On the other hand, they were popular with children, and perhaps knowing this, the cats tolerated a bit of rough play from the children before and after the gatherings. It might simply have been that they were after the little snacks children brought out of the fridge.

Chunyan mostly watched the cat gatherings from her apartment balcony, and sometimes went down to join the children in petting them.
Although the participating cats were fluid, the members were mostly fixed. From white cats to calicos, patched cats, black cats, and tabbies, they were of all sorts, and Chunyan had given names to a few. After Chunyan named them, the children copied her and called them the same.

Among the cats in the gatherings, the most scrawny and shabby was Huang-hu.
Because he was a “yellow” “tiger” cat, he was Huang-hu. Simple. He was the only tabby participating in the gatherings, so there was no overlap of names.
Huang-hu was always injured and bristling with wariness, always several meters outside the circle of children and cats. He also seemed to be bullied by the other cats, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that he sat at the very bottom of the feline caste system.

Chunyan felt sorry for him, but when she once tried giving him a sausage, he bared his fangs in suspicion, snatched it away as if pouncing, fled, and didn’t show a hint of gratitude, so she lost the desire to be kind to him. Pitiful, maybe, but not cute.

At some point, rumors of a giant beast began circulating around Qitaohe City.
At first the information was confused between a bear, a man-eating tiger, a chupacabra, and the like, but after two months the story settled into it apparently being an abnormally huge tiger cat that appeared and disappeared at will.

There was variation in eyewitness accounts: some claimed it was several meters tall, others said several dozen meters.
Online, the leading theory was that it was a tiger cat that had grown abnormally due to chemical contamination. A so-called Kaijuu.
Self-proclaimed experts all stated in unison that it was impossible, that it would collapse under its own weight, that it couldn’t secure enough food to maintain such a body, that it had no place to hide, and so on, but since they were boring, Chunyan didn’t believe them.

The giant tiger cat that seemed to have leapt out of a B-grade special effects movie became extremely popular, and a tabby cat boom erupted throughout Qitaohe City.
According to a friend who worked at a pet shop, not only were tabbies being traded at five times the usual price, they were so popular that reservations were being made up to a year in advance. And as a ripple effect, other coat types also sold well.

It was said that ninety thousand cats lived in Qitaohe City, a Special Economic Zone and one of China’s largest cities. Many tabby cats were among them. Hearing a rumor that illegal dealers had appeared who stole pet (tabby) cats and sold them, Chunyan remembered the Huang-hu from the neighborhood cat gathering.
She wasn’t planning to steal someone’s cat and sell it, but catching a stray should be fine.

When Chunyan went to the cat gathering with a can of cat food and a net, she found Huang-hu, but he was nothing like he had been two months earlier.
He was plump and well-fleshed, with smooth fur. Gone was the Huang-hu who stood away from the circle of cats with bristling tail and tension; he now sat proudly at the center of the cats, licking his foreleg. If not for the fact that he was one-eyed, she wouldn’t have recognized it was Huang-hu.

Chunyan, approaching with a heart full of ulterior motives hoping to earn some pocket money, was stared at all at once by the cats and froze.

Lately the cats had been acting strange. There were even reports that groups of cats had boarded the trade ships Chunyan handled.
Stared at by multiple pairs of gleaming feline eyes, Chunyan felt an indescribable fear and quietly backed away. She told herself that even if he was a tabby, a one-eyed, damaged cat wouldn’t fetch much anyway.

A cat concealed in the shrubbery a little away from the gathering place watched Chunyan as she left.
Once that black cat saw Chunyan enter her apartment, it turned its gaze away, adjusted its grip on a thin book with a raunchy cover wrapped in plastic, and toddled off.