The competition ended, and as expected, Chu Tingwu took first place.
Almost no one thought it was strange that she won first place, as her athletic prowess was already well-known. It would have been more surprising if she hadn't finished first.
However, before the sports school teachers could approach her, Chu Tingwu slipped away.
The balloon had already become a tiny speck in the sky. Aunt Mei tied a new balloon to Shikuai's neck, and the black cat and the glossy crow danced around the new balloon.
Chu Tingwu strolled over, picked up Shikuai by the neck, and gave his bottom a little bounce: "..."
He's gotten chubby.
Aunt Mei, after watching her hold the cat, reached out and hugged Chu Tingwu: "You don't feel any heavier, but have you grown taller?"
When she first bonded with the system, Chu Tingwu's weight and height changed rapidly due to her changing physique. But now, over a year later, her growth has stabilized, and the changes have become gradual.
She recalled the measurements she took a few days ago: "Actually, I've gained half a pound. As for height, I'm now 168.4 cm."
So, she's now taller than Aunt Mei—
It feels a bit strange.
She suddenly realized: I'm already taller than my elder...
Aunt Mei didn't seem to notice. When she saw Chu Tingwu's classmates approaching in the distance, she wanted to call her over to collect her prize—Aunt Mei raised her hand to pat Chu Tingwu on the shoulder to remind her, but Chu Tingwu had already turned around on her own, waving to her classmates before they could even speak, indicating she knew. Then she said, "I'll go over now!"
Aunt Mei: "Mm."
Teacher Zhang separated the cat and the crow, shook hands with Sanwulu, and then asked, "What's up?"
Aunt Mei looked into her clouded eyes.
It's strange. Although Teacher Zhang can't see, sometimes her perception is so sharp that it gives Aunt Mei a sense of similarity to Chu Tingwu. But she can't quite put her finger on what exactly is the same—
Aunt Mei shook her head: "Should we take Chu Tingwu with us to spend the New Year in another place this year?"
Since six years ago, when Teacher Zhang lost her sight, her lifestyle has changed significantly. Losing her vision seemed to make her realize that she shouldn't fully immerse herself in her academic work, as human bodies are fragile.
"Before I can't move anymore and can't hear or feel anything, I should see more of the world."
But in fact, due to her work, she has seen more of the world than most people. She has traveled to various countries, but the more she knows about how vast the world is, the more she regrets how short human life is... So, regardless of the holidays, Teacher Zhang always goes out to explore.
After adopting Shikuai, the frequency of her travels decreased a bit: "It's like having a child."
When she's away, she always worries about whether the cat is doing well at home.
Now there's another child.
Teacher Zhang: "Let's see what her school schedule is like?"
Chu Tingwu doesn't seem to have seen much snow. Shannan Province rarely has knee-deep snow. If possible, this year they could spend the New Year at the foot of a snow-covered mountain.
-
Teacher Zhang said she couldn't stand the bells near the school, so the two found a place to stay on their own.
After collecting her prize, Chu Tingwu was forced to attend a "award ceremony" within her class.
—When her classmates were about to spray her with confetti, she jumped onto the windowsill and, using it as a springboard, leaped over their heads and landed on the podium, dodging the confetti attack.
Teacher Shi, who was standing behind the podium: "=="
"Ahem."
Chu Tingwu jumped down and, while at it, picked up a nearby rag to wipe off her footprints.
Teacher Shi: You're quite polite.
Teacher Shi: "Let me summarize. Everyone performed exceptionally well in this sports meet, exceeding my expectations. Our class won three first places, five second places, and five third places in twenty-eight events, and we even broke the school record in the three-thousand-meter race, earning extra points—"
Everyone applauded.
Teacher Shi: "In short, the sports meet is over. After returning home, remember to relax your muscles and give yourself a massage. Otherwise, you might wake up sore and cramped tomorrow. We still have classes tomorrow, and I don't want to see anyone taking leave because of the sports meet!"
"And then," Teacher Shi clapped her hands, "we have a full day of classes tomorrow, followed by a monthly exam with the entire grade the day after. After the grade-wide test, we'll have our individual competition papers to complete. Everyone, get focused. You chose the competition route, so that's great, but your monthly exam scores can't be too low! I'll be talking to your parents if you drop out of the top fifty in the grade."
Chu Tingwu listened quietly. Her "parent" had already secretly brought over the monthly exam papers and, without showing them to her, calculated some predicted data, concluding that her performance was stable.
Both regretful and relieved.
Teacher Shi: "Of course, after the competition paper test results come out, I'll still be talking to each parent. We'll have a parent-teacher meeting on October 15th."
"Make sure to inform your parents in advance and have them try to make time."
This parent-teacher meeting seemed to be mandatory. There had been two during the first year of high school, both before the final exams, but Chu Tingwu's parent's seat had always been empty.
The first time, she didn't let Teacher Yuan notify Lu Cenying, and her seat was occupied by a tabby cat.
That evening, Chu Tingwu went to Teacher Yuan's house for dinner and learned:
"During the meeting, everyone was looking at Sanwulu. Maybe we shouldn't let the cat come next time."
The next day, An Shiyan shared the meat floss rice balls Chu Tingwu brought and said, "It's fine, I have an idea."
...Later, An Shiyan gave Chu Tingwu a life-sized standee of Sanwulu.
And it was in a posture with its hind legs on the ground and its front paws raised.
Chu Tingwu: "Thanks, the system will definitely like it."
Not only did the system like it, but it also wanted to make a version of Chu Tingwu to put at home.
An Shiyan: "?"
This year, they could still send Sanwulu to the meeting, but Teacher Shi doesn't understand cat language, so she probably couldn't discuss Chu Tingwu's academic future with the cat.
Chu Tingwu: Maybe it's time to ask Teacher Zhang for help?
They would be staying in Jin City for a few days, exploring the area, and probably wouldn't mind staying a couple more days.
Chu Tingwu made this decision in her mind but didn't immediately contact Teacher Zhang—because she noticed the system's attitude was a bit strange.
After pressing for answers, the system hesitantly said:
"Can I go to your parent-teacher meeting for you?"
Chu Tingwu blinked: "Sure."
But how... are you going to do that?
Are you going to assemble a humanoid robot and wrap it in a trench coat?
The system doesn't read minds, ensuring the child's privacy, so it didn't know what Chu Tingwu was imagining:
"I'll have Lian Tong wear an earpiece and go to the meeting to help communicate with the teacher."
Chu Tingwu: So it's like the King of Cooking.
Lian Tong, the CEO of a drone company, is a high-ranking executive who is always busy at the company, but even so, he has to arrange time to attend the parent-teacher meeting for the boss's daughter.
—All tasks are postponed, and those that can't be postponed are canceled or reassigned.
Of course, he wasn't unhappy, because attending the parent-teacher meeting for the boss's daughter definitely signifies closeness... even though the boss's tone of voice was completely robotic, showing no sign of affection.
Lian Tong even asked: Should we prepare a bigger event? Should we donate to the school to get a bigger venue (like we did with the sports meet, since once you start, you keep going, and the relationships are already established)? Should we contact the homeroom teacher in advance to build a good relationship?
The system: "..."
The system turned to ask Chu Tingwu, who rejected the idea.
The system: "She said no."
Lian Tong: .
Got it, the boss is a "daughter slave," everything is decided by the daughter, and there are no major decisions made in the family.
With the parent-teacher meeting arrangements settled, Chu Tingwu sat in the study and continued editing videos.
The comprehensive "Jin City No.5 Senior High School Sports Day" collection video had already been scheduled for broadcast on the local television station at 8 PM tonight, the day after their sports day had just ended.
Chu Tingwu certainly didn't turn on the TV to watch it...
But her exceptional hearing allowed her to catch the sound of her neighbor's TV.
【"Next, coming towards us is Class 1, Grade 11..."】
Chu Tingwu: "..."
Plugging her ears.
It was said that this video would be replayed twice on TV and also uploaded to the official account of Jin City No.5 Senior High School, with some ten-minute highlight videos being posted on the official website of the Middle School Sports Games as promotional material.
It was foreseeable that this video would be stored on the internet for decades... Chu Tingwu opened her computer, her gaze sliding to her bookmarks, where she saw the movie "Tiger Head" she had saved.
The way she had once brought "Three Five Five" to the big screen, the system had now brought her to the TV screen. It seemed the cat had gotten its revenge.
With a face full of resignation and numbness, Chu Tingwu finished the final part of the documentary "Jin City Police Cats" and then gathered her spirits to stare at the footage she had edited for a while before pressing the play button.
-
Wei Li usually liked to browse videos in the activity section of Fenghua Network.
She didn't like the website's recommendation mechanism, which seemed to assume that once she had watched a certain type of video, she would only like that kind in the future. The website would then keep pushing similar videos to her—
Her tastes were quite eclectic, and she found that as long as the content was interesting, she could keep watching. However, once she accepted this kind of big data recommendation, her tastes might become fixed.
Fenghua Network held events every month, with special competitions to encourage new creators, as well as innovative contests with various themes, and both the newest and hottest submissions were cyclically recommended. In addition to cash prizes, there were also rewards for prioritized homepage promotion.
Wei Li: "Hmm? A new event? Documentary?"
The website usually didn't launch events in the middle of the month, so Wei Li was a bit puzzled as she clicked in. The video, which took up half the page, automatically started playing the beginning when she clicked into it.
The picture was clear and stable, sweeping over mountains and the city below from a bird's-eye view. In the next second, from the same angle, the mountains turned into ruins.
Then, a cat appeared in the shot, clearly a kitten, poking its head out, its eyes closed, sniffing around. In the next moment, the kitten's eyes opened, and the camera pulled back, showing the kitten had grown into an adult cat, running on the training field.
Wei Li let out a "hmm" sound, adjusted to a more comfortable position, and instinctively reached for the mouse to check if she had switched to the wrong webpage.
—No, it was indeed the homepage of the "Documentary" themed video competition.
If she hadn't confirmed it, she would have thought the homepage was playing a movie!
But after watching, Wei Li realized: "Oh, it's just a trailer..."
And this wasn't a competing documentary but one that the website wanted to promote, as there was a link to the full set below, with the trailer being just over a minute long and the full set being sixty-eight minutes.
Many people who clicked in might not have the patience to watch the full set directly, but if they were attracted by the trailer, they might click to save it.
Perhaps this competition was held to promote this documentary?
Wei Li happened to be free, so she clicked into the documentary titled "Jin City Police Cats," opened a bag of chips, and turned on the bullet screen.
"Hmm?"
The danmu was so lively, was this really a documentary? Or was the website's promotional effort just too strong?
Seeing how lively the bullet screen was, Wei Li felt a bit helpless, as if she couldn't keep up with the jokes, so she didn't watch immediately but first searched what they were talking about:
"Ah Chu and Three Five Five... oh, so it's you who's been trending lately!"
It turned out that the "outdoor sports" videos that the big data had been pushing to her recently were actually related to this UP master? She had recently been involved in some gossip, as whenever someone becomes popular, there will always be people who imitate them, and the boundaries of imitation are also quite vague—Chu Tingwu was still a high school student, and she always completed her live broadcast tasks just before the deadline each month, so her fan base would actually look for "substitutes" to fill the gap.
Calling it a "substitute" might be a bit disrespectful, but indeed, some people imitated her live broadcast style and content, taking their pets along for outdoor sports like skateboarding, cat walking, and parkour.
During this period, some people did become slightly popular, but after a while, those UPs without real substance saw their data drop to a half-dead state... The only one who broke through a million followers was an UP who climbed mountains with his dog.
The person was quite clear about it, saying "after watching Ah Chu's videos, I wanted to film my daily life with Big Black," the UP considered himself and his dog's life to be ordinary, but watching him take his dog climbing, tiring the dog out, carrying the dog down the mountain while the dog was carried up... everyone was silent.
This, should it be called ordinary?
The UP had retired from the army, ran a small business, climbed the mountain a few times a week, and otherwise took the dog running.
Later, maybe the fans couldn't stand seeing him tire out his black back every time, suggesting: "Next time you take the dog out, you can bring a stroller."
The UP accepted.
Then, with the black back sitting in the stroller, the UP's training task wasn't finished, so he continued running while pulling the stroller.
The fans: "..."
Somehow, it felt strange: was this person walking the dog, or was the dog walking the person?
Oh, maybe it was the dog walking the dog.
So, although the way he became popular was a bit strange, the UP still became popular.
Occasionally, the fans could catch him in Chu Tingwu's live broadcast room.
Wei Li enjoyed the gossip, learning most of Chu Tingwu's experiences, before returning to watch the documentary... This time, she could finally understand the fans' sarcastic "urge to update" in the bullet screen!
However, soon, Wei Li ignored those bullet comments and focused her attention back on the documentary.
The pace of this documentary was actually quite fast!
"Shouldn't there be a lot of dialogue and commentary..."
Wei Li had only seen a documentary about a successful businessperson on TV before, documenting how the person started from scratch to build a billion-dollar business, with narration, interviews, and details of going to the grassroots... but it made her sleepy.
But this documentary was different.
The beginning was a case?
"Jin City Police Cats" started with a murder case.
Just like watching a detective movie, the shooting angle didn't make the audience feel detached, and she quickly got engrossed in the plot, from the thief to the corpse, to the cat's sense of smell and the murder weapon... The post-production inserted some brief science education through intercut editing, such as—
When the cat sniffed and its ear tips twitched, two sentences reminiscent of a police voiceover were inserted, which not only helped the audience understand the capabilities of the police cat but also explained why the police would recruit police cats.
After completing one case, Wei Li was satisfied and felt a bit closer to the police cat as the protagonist.
Then, the film began to incorporate the story of this cat's employment.
"So it wasn't raised from a kitten, but trained after adulthood?"
Wei Li: "Wait—"
This was only seventeen minutes in!
Although she had unconsciously watched seventeen minutes of content, was it a bit excessive to cram so much into seventeen minutes? What else could be filmed afterward, would it all be daily life?
With such doubts, she continued to watch.
Afterward, another case was introduced—
A drug trafficking case.
The protagonist of the case became another cat, which seemed to be more adept at searching for drugs, and after completing the drug search, it also showed its lively and mischievous side.
Wei Li couldn't help but smile, realizing that this time the video used a shorter format to introduce the cat's past... Indeed, each cat had a unique personality.
—But they were all trained at the Jin City Police Dog Training Base and were now serving at the Jin City Police Station.
Wei Li realized that the video was the key point here:
The protagonist of the documentary is Jin City Police Cats, which introduces the abilities of cats and different training directions through cases, allowing the audience to understand the training methods and selection criteria for cats. The entire video is detailed and packed with useful information, but it is presented in an engaging way.
As a documentary, its quality is truly high.
However, the video is only thirty-three minutes long at this point.
Wei Li suppressed her curiosity and continued to watch.
The camera shot from above, and the city name in the top right corner revealed a small city lush with greenery.
"Kongsu City..." She felt like she had heard this name before, but she was certain she had never been there.
[High energy ahead! Warning, high energy ahead!]
[I watched the rest from the back... Oh my god, it was really dangerous at that time...]
[This part was actually included in the documentary? If Chu Tingwu was in Kongsu City at that time, I take back calling you a pigeon.]
Wei Li: "Huh?"
The camera focused on the third protagonist, a cat named "Xiaoyan," a tabby cat.
The cat's face filled the entire screen, its eyes staring directly into the camera... Wei Li suddenly realized: Was this the scene from the promotional footage? Is this the same kitten that appeared in the promo?
The next second, the world seemed to collapse.
In fact, the scene did not shake violently, just a slight, slow tremor during the earthquake.
But it was this slight, slow tremor that gave the audience a feeling of "the world slowly falling apart"... Wei Li saw walls collapsing, roads cracking, and people who had heeded the previous warnings and stepped out of their homes or stopped driving, looking at each other in bewilderment.
Under the mighty power of nature, even with the advancement of technology, humans are powerless to resist the disaster and can only flee and protect themselves.
Wei Li witnessed the camera rise, silently observing the epicenter of the earthquake as the ground trembled, creating "ripples"—fragile like a child's toppled building blocks.
Her heart clenched at this moment.
The scene features a time added in post-production, accelerated time:
Time flowed rapidly, quickly transitioning from day to evening, but the camera lens still hung in the air, silently gazing at the land.
Watching people save themselves, watching them run, the camera and the cat remained at the center of the shot, both prominent and insignificant.
[News reports say the hardest-hit areas are a district under the city and the mountains, where tourists and villagers who didn't move out are trapped. I thought it wasn't too bad since no one died... But seeing this perspective, the impact of the earthquake is actually quite long-lasting.]
There are many earthquake-related films and television works, but this kind of overhead real-shot perspective is rare. Most online videos are from surveillance footage, showing the shaking, but the camera itself is also shaking—not as stable as this system's footage.
The more impartial and unbiased the perspective, the more it allows the audience to empathize with the people and animals in the frame.
Then, the camera follows Yanping and Xiaoyan all the way, capturing them as they climb the mountain.
The rescue team set out on foot, illuminating the dark mountain road with artificial light, the flashlight beams forming a winding silver line.
Even as the earth trembled, this line remained lit.
Wei Li suddenly understood what the documentary "Golden City Police Cat" wanted to express:
It was a thematic statement, featuring the two police cats of Jin City, the reserve cats at the Jin City Police Cat Training Base, and the already trained police cats dispatched to other locations for active duty... There seemed to be a subtle hint that most police cats now originate from Jin City, linking the concept of "police cats" with "Jin City" while introducing the base.
On the other hand, it was about "relationships."
Even though the documentary never explicitly mentioned it, all the shots were conveying the message of "police cats and humans," with cats stepping out of the role of pets and becoming not only family but also closer partners and comrades.
When, with Xiaoyan's help, a trapped self-driving traveler in a car was successfully rescued, the people in the shot cheered, and the documentary's screen gradually brightened.
The screen slowly filled with pure white, and then the words of the creators appeared:
Since the Kongsu City 1004 Earthquake in Shannan Province, there have been no fatalities, with an estimated economic loss of two million one hundred thousand. A total of 14 search-and-rescue dogs and 4 search-and-rescue cats (police cats) participated in the rescue activities, successfully rescuing 117 people.
Currently, there are 27 police cats in active service. Thank you for your contribution to our happy lives.
The video ended here, without any bloopers.
The credits and production team list were written in the introduction.
Filled with an inexplicable sense of emotion, Wei Li scrolled down and saw the comment section: "Hmm?"
A comment was pinned at the top, from the official account of Kongsu City, which not only answered more data about post-earthquake relief but also added:
"…In fact, more than four police cats participated in the rescue. There was also a civilian cat, San (using a pseudonym at the owner's request), who, along with its owner, volunteered for the rescue. We are very grateful…"
Wei Li: "…"
Did this "civilian cat" really need a pseudonym?
Even she, a non-fan, could guess who it was!
