Ficorpio
Chapter 1
I had only one rule for living: stay alive, and depend on yourself.
But now, my cat had suddenly turned into a human being.
First, I had to teach her how to be human.
…And how to stop climbing into my bed.
I never dreamed something like this could happen to me.
A storm was coming. Thick black clouds crowded the sky.
I had planned to finish my homework at school, as usual, before heading home. Using the school’s lights and air-conditioning saved a little electricity at home.
But the sky had grown frighteningly dark, and thunder rolled overhead. Rain was about to pour.
I was afraid the clothes hanging on the balcony would get soaked if I got home too late. I was worried my cat would be frightened by the thunder.
And I hadn’t brought an umbrella.
Perfect.
I set down my pen, rolled up my books, zipped my backpack, and hurried home beneath the rumbling thunder.
After cutting through several alleys, I reached the old corridor apartments in the Urban Village.
The trash cans reeked. The streets were narrow. The lights were out. Dust and cheap advertisements covered the stairwell, and the neighbors were loud, shamelessly casual people who treated privacy as an optional concept.
My home.
A place that perfectly embodied the gritty character of the working poor.
There was nothing extraordinary about it.
Ignoring the filth and disorder I had long since grown used to, I took the stairs two at a time. In the darkness, I fumbled out my keys and unlocked the door.
The apartment’s layout was immediately clear: one bedroom, one living room, one kitchen, and one bathroom.
Tiny, but complete.
“Lulu? Lulu?”
I called her name as I walked inside.
That was my cat’s name.
Normally, the moment she heard me at the door, she would come bounding over to welcome me, then leap into my arms and demand to be petted.
What was wrong today?
Had I forgotten to close the window, and had she slipped outside?
Or was she hiding somewhere, trembling because of the thunder?
Lulu was a very timid cat.
I shut the door and changed into my slippers while thinking it over.
I tossed my backpack onto the floor and searched the living room for her first.
Nothing.
So I went to the bedroom.
Just before I pushed the door open, I heard a faint whimper.
It sounded like a cat.
But not quite.
The moment I opened the door, I froze.
A completely naked young woman was lying on my bed.
Her hair spilled down like a waterfall. Her skin was pale as moonlight, and her slender frame looked almost too delicate to be real.
Her back was arched, her body curled slightly inward. One leg lay weakly bent while the other stretched straight, shifting restlessly from side to side. She rubbed her exquisite cheek against my sheets.
The movement wasn’t human.
It was more like a cat.
Chapter 2
I frowned and studied her carefully.
Two fluffy white ears rose from the top of her head.
And from beneath the blanket, a long, slender tail curled into view, swaying gently from side to side.
My gaze moved upward, and my heart clenched.
Her face was beautiful in an almost otherworldly way.
Her features were too fine to belong to an ordinary person, with a delicate pointed chin and a straight, elegant nose.
But her eyes were the most arresting of all.
They were impossibly beautiful, a clear amber-gold in the dim light. At that moment, weakness and confusion had left her pupils slightly dilated, their surfaces gleaming with moisture. She looked utterly bewildered and dependent, like an animal.
There was no trace of the embarrassment or panic a human being should have felt while lying naked in someone else’s bedroom.
The fluffy tail. The upright ears. The color of her eyes. The expression on her face.
She was unmistakably my Lulu.
A bizarre thought exploded through my mind like a crack of thunder.
This… couldn’t be possible.
The idea was absurd.
And yet, standing there in that moment, I couldn’t find another explanation.
I cautiously called out to her.
“Lulu?”
The fragile, beautiful, inhuman girl looked like a spirit drenched by rain and accidentally dropped into the mortal world.
With the dull, innocent bewilderment of someone who had never known anything beyond her own little world, she slowly raised her head.
Then she answered,
“Owner?”
I was an utterly ordinary, impoverished high-school student.
I had never read those hot-blooded comics where a cat owner and her kitten saved the world, or those beautiful novels where a cat spirit took human form to repay a debt of gratitude.
So I had never imagined it.
I had certainly never fantasized about my own cat turning into a human being.
If there was anything unusual about me, it was my luck.
Or rather, my complete and utter lack of it.
When I was little, my family wasn’t quite so poor. Both my parents worked for companies. Our standard of living was ordinary, but we never went hungry.
Then my terrible luck caught up with us.
Just as I started elementary school, a wave of layoffs swept through the country. Both my parents lost their jobs and became unemployed.
From that point on, our family began its steady slide downhill.
My mother was clever, sharp-tongued, and tough. After she was laid off, she got a job driving a freight truck and started hauling cargo across the country. She could be gone for an entire month at a time.
My father couldn’t find work. Instead, he set up a small roadside stall.
He earned less than my mother and had no useful skills to speak of, which made him feel humiliated as a man.
So he began looking for other ways to prove he mattered.
Card games. Drinking. Chasing women.
Chapter 3
Whatever little money he made at the stall disappeared almost immediately. Sometimes he even had to borrow against future earnings.
He was too busy drinking and fooling around to spare any attention for his unwanted daughter.
So I learned to take care of myself from an early age.
I did everything on my own. By the time I was in first or second grade, I could cook and do my own laundry.
Seeing me like that made my mother feel guilty.
Whenever she came home, she and my father erupted into vicious arguments.
My mother would scream at him, “You useless coward! You never come home, and all you know how to do is waste money!”
At the time, she didn’t even know he was paying other women for sex.
That man would fire back, “If you gave me a son, I’d settle down! Do you even have what it takes?”
Yes. I was a daughter.
In a place where sons were valued above everything else, that was treated as an original sin.
It could even be used as an excuse to keep a mistress.
My mother would shout back, “So what if she’s a girl? Isn’t she your child too?”
Then she’d turn to me and yell, “From now on, don’t ever call him Dad again. Let his son call him that!”
I never called that man my father again.
Eventually, the fighting escalated.
They started hitting each other, smashing everything in the house: thermoses, glasses, whatever they could get their hands on.
For a while, I was afraid to walk barefoot through our own home. I worried that a shard of glass someone had missed would pierce my foot.
Whenever they fought, I hid in my room and read.
With all that shouting and crashing going on outside, I could somehow sit calmly and study.
There was no special reason for it. I was simply used to it.
I had grown accustomed to hearing my mother call that man a useless coward over and over again.
I never expected him to prove her right by doing something truly “big.”
By “big,” I mean he got another woman pregnant.
I still remember when that woman came to our door. It was morning. She was carrying a pregnancy test and claimed the baby was a boy.
At the time, my mother and father were already in the middle of a furious argument over some trivial matter, throwing things around the house.
When the pregnant woman showed up, both of them froze.
My mother most of all.
The solution was simple, swift, and practical.
That very afternoon, they got divorced.
There was no hesitation and no drawn-out struggle. It suited my mother’s decisive, take-charge nature perfectly.
It also suited my father’s desperate longing for a son.
Without question, I went with my mother.
When we walked out of the courthouse that afternoon, the sunlight was painfully bright.
I stood there in the glare and took one last look at my biological father. As I watched him walk away, I somehow knew that he and I would never have anything to do with each other again.
I watched them leave.
I was nine years old, in the third grade.
Truth be told, I felt a secret thrill when that man left.