The Return of the Thousand-Year-Old Sparrow
✬✬✬
Shen Zhao Zhao lowered her gaze and pulled at the silver chain bag hanging across her chest and opened the buckle.
All of a sudden two explosions sounded from the stove, and bits of the burning wood blew apart.
She raised her head in shock and was instantly met with his gaze as he stood right in front of her.
She felt her eyes suddenly blur and her breath hitched in her chest. It was as if she had been attacked by a sudden pressure and sadness, and she felt extremely uncomfortable. However, the sensation only lasted an instant, and before she knew it, it disappeared as quickly as it had come.
The rain must have made the air too stifling.
Shen Zhao Zhao took a deep breath before taking out some coins from her purse. She looked up again and smiled at him, “I want the one with a little bit of red on top.”
She placed the money on top of the low counter, but he gave no response.
“The red one,” she repeated.
He seemed to hesitate for a moment before he followed the girl’s gaze and looked at the newly baked flower cakes made with a myriad of colours.
“Sorry?” He finally asked.
“Red.”
He didn’t move, and instead asked, “What do you mean?”
Shen Zhao Zhao was stunned. Could he not hear her properly?
“The third, fourth and fifth cake from the right.”
He didn’t go to get the cake, but instead took out a black wallet from his trousers pocket, and said looking towards the curtain, “I just wrapped it all up, and I want three more flower cakes.”
An old woman walked out with a smile, apologized to Shen Zhao Zhao for her lateness, then wrapped up the flower cake for her.
✬
Half an hour later, she and her sister were going with their mother to see their cousin. When they entered the main hall, they saw him sitting on a chair on the right side of Shen Gong, with his cousin Shen Jiaheng opposite him.
“The twins are here,” Shen Gong said with a smile.
Shen Zhao Zhao’s eyes widened, as she looked at the person sitting next to him.
He watched her hold back her words, and she tried to avoid his gaze. He did not appear surprised as if he knew that there would be a second meeting. In fact, when he’d seen her clothes and the jade pendant hanging from her neck in the shop, he’d known the girl was from the Shen family. All the children who came to worship their ancestors at this time had been given a similar accessory by Duke Shen.
Shen Ce was a descendant of the Shen family from the Macau branch.
As for who the Macau branch was, she had heard her mother talk about it twice. The ancestors of the Shen family had once suffered a great disaster to the point where they had almost been wiped out. So they decided to branch off. One branch stayed in Taizhou, and the other went south and settled in Macau.
However, the branch that went south also suffered heavy losses before the fall of the Qing Dynasty.
There were very few of them left, but both men and women were dragons and phoenixes. She had always been in awe of the Shen family in Macau, and she’d finally met one of them today.
Her first thought was that this person was very special. When he’d heard that she and her sister were twins, he hadn’t looked surprised and didn’t ask why they didn’t look alike.
When he heard the two words “Zhao Zhao”, he suddenly raised his eyes and looked at the two sisters seriously for a moment.
Shen Zhao Zhao couldn’t help laughing.
Her sister sighed deliberately.
Everyone looked over.
“Why are you so close to this brother?” Grandpa asked her kindly.
She smiled mysteriously.
He would surely ask why there were two Zhao Zhao.
Unexpectedly though, after Shen Ce stared at the two sisters for some time, he just said, “Good name.”
“Come to think of it, your seniority is not low compared to theirs,” Shen Gong said. “What should these twins call you? It’s really a problem.”
“Call me brother,” Shen Ce said.
After he’d arrived in Jiangnan, his father had told him that the two branches had completely separated more than a dozen generations ago, so there was no blood relationship.
Under this arrangement, the two sisters formally greeted their elder brother, and then were sent to another yard.
The yard had been quickly cleaned after the rain stopped. String lights, as well as decorative wooden lanterns had been lit, giving the courtyard a dreamy feel. There were also lights on the rocks and on the lake, all lit up brightly to give the children a fun time.
Now that the ancestor worship was over, everyone would be leaving the next day, and since it wasn’t known when they would see each other again, the adults had arranged for the children of the Shen family to gather there one last time.
The younger children were taken to watch the revolving lanterns, and the older ones played Pai Gow together 1 a Chinese gambling game, played with a set of 32 Chinese dominoes .
Because of the different environments, everyone had grown up in, the yard had various accents and was interlaced with various languages. A lot of the languages spoken were English, French and other Western languages, coupled with Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and the Sichuan dialect.
The place was lively as hell.
Qin Zhao Zhao played Pai Gow, while Shen Zhao Zhao sat down and listened to everyone chatting.
After night fell, some people began to sprinkle mosquito repellent water on the flowers, and moved a few pots of jasmine flowers to the pond to repel the mosquitoes. It was the first time she had ever seen jasmine flowers. She squatted in front of the flower pot and stared at the lemon-yellow flower, smelling it hesitantly. It had a very strong fragrance.
Someone pulled her up with one hand and said, “It’s too strong, it’s not good for people to smell it so closely.”
It was Shen Jiaheng, with Shen Ce a few steps behind him.
This was their third meeting of the day.
A five-year-old child was playing with a lantern stamped with a running horse pattern next to him. The light from the lantern was spinning quite fast, causing a shadow to pass on his face. He had not been like this in the main hall, pretending not to know her, because when he saw her now, he smiled.
Shen Zhao Zhao folded her hands behind her back, and deliberately did not acknowledge him. She instead turned her attention to Shen Jiaheng, and asked him detailed questions about the jasmine flower.
Shen Jiaheng liked this beautiful distant sister, and spoke to her with interest. Shen Ce listened to the two of them chatting animatedly, without interjecting. They both just pretended not to know each other, for it had just been a small incident in the afternoon after all.
Suddenly, Qin Zhao Zhao exclaimed from the Pai Gow table, “I can’t see clearly at night,” and shoved the dominoes into the hand of a girl besides her, “Here.”
This was an excuse.
Her sister had won too many times all night, and was embarrassed to win again.
The girl who had taken Qin Zhao Zhao’s dominoes quickly won.
Amidst everyone’s laughter, someone suddenly asked her, “Why can’t you see clearly at night?”
It was Shen Ce. After he had listened about jasmine and mosquito repellent for half an hour without interjecting, something had finally caught his interest.
“It’s night blindness.”
Qin Zhao Zhao hadn’t expected this person to ask her out of the blue.
Her sister hadn’t gone to the cake shop that afternoon, and so, she hadn’t met Shen Ce. The only time they’d met was when she was told to call him “Brother” in the front hall. Shen Ce was a pure stranger to her.
So the conversation between the two was quite abrupt.
Shen Jiaheng felt concerned about his cousin and asked, “Did you see a doctor? What did the doctor say?”
“I’ve seen one, and it’s much better, now,” she answered vaguely. “But my eyes still sometimes don’t work properly in dim light.”
Shen Zhao Zhao bit back the urge to laugh.
It was Shen Zhao Zhao who had suffered from night-blindness since childhood, not her sister. When she lived in China as a child, she had often been laughed at by her friends because of this. Her sister knew this, and had often helped her. As she got older, her night blindness improved, but her sister now liked to use this “excuse” for herself to help her out of various problems.
Even their parents had been deceived by her, and mistakenly thought that this was a shared genetic disorder. The younger daughter was in fact fine, and it was only the older daughter that had this problem.
Later that night Shen Zhao Zhao noticed that Shen Ce had looked toward her twice, and felt embarrassed at first, but then realized that he had in fact been looking at her sister beside her.
Shen Zhao Zhao finally understood that this person was in fact not the shopkeeper.
This was her first meeting with Shen Ce.
Sorry about that
Tjanks for the answer !
Hi, did you decide to drop this ?
You haven’t posted any release in two months
No, we aren’t dropping this. Our translator is having exams so it is on hiatus rn. We’ll try to release a new chapter as soon as it’s ready.
Thanks for translating this. I love MBFB and the beautiful bones story.