Shen Chenbi obediently stayed at home for another three days.
This time, her sister not only confined her to the house but would not even let her go into the garden. Shen Wenyu’s exact words had been, “There are bugs in the pomegranate tree, the magnolia has started shedding leaves, and two of the stones beside the pond have come loose. There isn’t a single safe place in the entire garden.”
After listening, Shen Chenbi nodded seriously. “I understand, Older Sister.”
She thought her sister really did know everything. She could even tell when a pomegranate tree had bugs in it. No wonder she was in charge of the household.
—She completely failed to notice that only yesterday, she had stood by the window and seen two magpies perched on the pomegranate tree, hopping around full of life. There had not been a single withered leaf in sight.
Shen Chenbi’s greatest virtue was that she listened. When her sister told her not to leave the house, she did not leave the house. When her sister said the garden was unsafe, she stopped going to the garden. When her sister told her to stay away from strange men—
“Older Sister, what counts as a strange man?”
“A man you don’t know.”
“What about the ones I do know?”
Shen Wenyu gave her a cold look. “How many men do you know?”
Shen Chenbi counted on her fingers. “Uncle Zhou, Uncle Fu, Little Doudou—”
“Little Doudou is Auntie Wang from the kitchen’s son. He’s seven years old this year.”
“Doesn’t he still count as a man?”
Shen Wenyu took a deep breath. “Stay away from Uncle Zhou too.”
“Uncle Zhou?” Shen Chenbi was shocked. “Uncle Zhou is already fifty!”
“What’s wrong with fifty?” Shen Wenyu said without changing expression. “A man is a man.”
Shen Chenbi felt that something about this statement was off, but whatever her sister said surely had its reasons. Thus, from that day onward, whenever she saw Uncle Zhou, she even went around him.
Poor Uncle Zhou was already getting on in years. For three days in a row, he encountered Second Miss in the residence, but before he could even bow and salute, Second Miss would turn and run as though she had seen a ghost.
Uncle Zhou: “…”
He went back and looked at himself in the mirror, deeply reflecting on whether he had grown too frightening-looking.
By the fifth day of being cooped up at home, Shen Chenbi’s consumption of eyebrow pencils had reached an unprecedented peak. She drew three sets of eyebrows a day on average, arranging the cloudy, sunny, rainy, and snowy weather for the entire coming month.
On the sixth day, Qingzao really could not bear to watch anymore.
“Miss, if you’re truly bored, why don’t you do something else?” Qingzao tentatively suggested. “Embroider something? Play the qin? Read a storybook?”
Shen Chenbi lay sprawled across the table, her cheek pressed against its surface. She shook her head weakly.
“I finished all the storybooks.”
“When did you finish them?”
“Last night. I read three in one go. In one, a scholar got together with a young lady; in another, a different scholar got together with a fairy; and in the last, a scholar got together with a female ghost.” She paused, then added, “Older Sister gave them all to me.”
Qingzao froze. “The Eldest Miss even gives you storybooks to read?”
The Eldest Miss wished she could clear every man in the world out of her younger sister’s sight, yet she had actually given her stories about talented scholars and beautiful ladies?
Shen Chenbi lifted her head from the table. Red marks left by the tabletop covered her face. Under the candlelight, they set off her luminous white complexion like a smear of rouge bleeding across xuan paper. Completely unaware of it, she explained earnestly, “The scholars in the storybooks Older Sister gave me were all terrible people.”
“Ah?”
“In the first one, the scholar dumped the young lady after passing the palace examination and becoming the top scholar. In the second, the scholar tricked the fairy into helping him ascend, then went off to become an immortal by himself. And in the third—” Shen Chenbi thought for a moment. “The scholar sold the female ghost in exchange for one hundred taels of silver.”
Qingzao fell silent.
She finally understood why the Eldest Miss was willing to let Second Miss read storybooks.
These were not storybooks. They were self-defense manuals.
“Then… have you learned anything from them?” Qingzao asked cautiously.
Shen Chenbi’s expression brightened. She felt that her five days of study had not been wasted. “Not a single man is any good.”
Qingzao: “…And then?”
“Then I definitely won’t be able to tell the good ones from the bad ones.” Shen Chenbi spread her hands with complete frankness. “So I’ve decided that from now on, whenever a man speaks to me, I’ll assume he’s trying to deceive me. That way, at least ninety percent of them can be screened out.”
For a moment, Qingzao did not know whether she should praise her cleverness or feel sorry for her.
“What about the remaining ten percent?”
“The remaining ten percent,” Shen Chenbi declared righteously, “will be left for my sister to screen.”
Qingzao was rendered completely speechless.
All right. She might be foolish, but at least she listened.
Just then, a burst of footsteps suddenly came from the courtyard, followed by Shen Wenyu’s voice. “Bier, change your clothes and come out with me.”
Shen Chenbi shot upright from the table, nearly knocking over the eyebrow pencil lying on it.
“Go out?” She could hardly believe she had heard correctly. “You’re taking me out?”
Shen Wenyu had already pushed open the door. She swept her gaze over Shen Chenbi from head to toe and frowned. “You’re wearing that?”
Shen Chenbi looked down at herself—a faded, everyday old garment, with ink spots still staining the cuffs where she had rubbed against them while drawing her eyebrows. Her hair was even worse. It had been loosely twisted into a bun, with the hairpin stuck in crookedly, looking as though it might fall out at any moment.
“I’ll go change right away,” she said obediently.
“There’s no need to change into anything too nice.” Shen Wenyu looked her over again. “Keep it plain.”
Shen Chenbi nodded, thinking that this was something she was good at.
A moment later, she emerged from behind the screen, and Shen Wenyu fell silent after one glance.
She had told her younger sister to dress plainly.
Her younger sister had indeed put on a simple, unadorned garment—a sky-blue fine cotton beizi, so plain it looked like a bowl of clear water. Her hair had been combed anew and adorned with only a single wooden hairpin. She wore no makeup, and had not even applied lip color.
Yet as her younger sister stood there, the light streaming through the window fell across her face, and all that plainness became irrelevant.
The coarse cloth beizi suddenly no longer looked like coarse cloth on her. The wooden hairpin in her hair suddenly seemed like the prized work of some master craftsman. When the light touched that unadorned face, her brows were green without being painted, and her lips red without being tinted. She wore not a single valuable ornament from head to toe, yet it made her whole person resemble a piece of mutton-fat jade washed clean in clear water.
Shen Wenyu stared at her younger sister’s face for a moment, then turned and rummaged through the dressing case. She took out a veiled hat and set it over Shen Chenbi’s head.
The fine gauze fell down, covering that face.
The world before Shen Chenbi’s eyes darkened. She reached up and touched the edge of the hat, then said obediently, “Let’s go.”