The owner of those green-glowing eyes, illuminated by the riverbank bonfire, was a tiger more than two meters long, with an orange-yellow coat covered in black stripes and snowy white on its belly, chin, and cheeks!
Chen Jue had never expected that practicing the Tiger Roar Golden Bell Shield on the riverbank for a while, making tiger-like roars to condition his internal organs through sound, would actually draw a tiger out of these remote mountain forests!
But this tiger looked somewhat different from the tigers he remembered. Although the black stripes on its forehead formed the character for "king," it fell well short of the tigers he had seen at the zoo.
Besides that, this wild tiger had a very rounded head, a deeper orange coat, and somewhat narrower black stripes.
What Chen Jue did not know was that this was an extremely rare Indochinese Tiger, also called a Corbett Tiger, a sparsely populated subspecies found mainly in other countries beyond the southwestern border. Although traces of these Indochinese Tigers had once been discovered in southwestern China, sightings had become extremely rare in recent years. It was an endangered animal protected at the global level.
Man and tiger stared at each other in the bonfire's glow. Since taking up cultivation, Chen Jue had grown increasingly bold, and at Chen Village Reservoir, he had once sent a male wild boar weighing over 150 kilograms flying with a kick.
Facing a wild tiger like this, he felt no fear. Instead, he felt a faint stir of excitement.
As mentioned earlier, Chen Jue's nickname at university had been Kitty. His favorite little animals were the plump stray cats people fed around campus, and he had even bought cat food online to feed a few big ginger cats himself. Petting cats felt wonderful.
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