"Why would someone’s perfectly good eyes get smeared with shit? Have *your* eyes ever been smeared with shit? What’s that like? I’ve never even seen it happen!"
The little girl searched her memories from the past few years, ever since she could remember. It seemed she had never seen anyone whose eyes were smeared with shit! On second thought, maybe there was someone—Uncle Four of the Li Family. He had studied late into the night, poring over his books, and for a time, he had suffered from an eye disease. His eyes had been completely crusted over with eye boogers. She’d heard it was incredibly itchy and painful, and it took a long time for him to recover. That year, it was said, Uncle Four failed the imperial examination because of this eye disease.
Thinking this, the little girl decided that what Xiao Er meant by ’shit-smeared’ was that he had an eye disease.
She looked at Xiao Er sympathetically and spoke with great earnestness.
"It must be really hard for you. To think you could still hit my Xiaobai while suffering from an eye disease! Don’t your eyes hurt?" She walked over, scooped Xiaobai into her arms, and then peered at Xiao Er’s eyes. "Hmm, you don’t even have any eye boogers!"
The little girl’s words sent everyone around them into peals of laughter.
"Whose child is this? How is she so quick-witted?" one person exclaimed.
"More than just quick-witted, this kid’s imagination is quite rich! If this were my child, I’d probably be laughing all day long!" another added.
"Hey, am I the only one who noticed that the rabbit has been unusually quiet and well-behaved since she arrived?" someone else chimed in.
Once someone pointed this out, everyone else finally noticed. The rabbit, which had been darting and leaping all over Zhiwei Restaurant, so agile that Xiao Er couldn’t even touch it with a stick, was now nestled quietly and obediently in the little girl’s embrace.
"What’s so surprising about that? It’s obvious the rabbit is her pet. It’s behaving this way because her family must have trained it to be docile before giving it to her. Otherwise, who would dare place a rabbit that was jumping around like that just moments ago next to such an adorable child?" someone who fancied themselves a keen observer then offered their own confident explanation.
"But this little girl looks to be only three or four years old, right? Why isn’t there a family member with her? That rabbit knocked over so many of Zhiwei Restaurant’s preserved fruits and candied fruits; that must cost a lot of silver, right? Can this little girl even afford to pay?" people began to worry aloud.
Everyone knew that items from Zhiwei Restaurant were expensive. In the Capital City, if you wanted to buy even a tiny bit of their candied fruit, you either needed connections or you had to get a number and queue. If you couldn’t buy it today, you had to come back and queue again tomorrow. Or, you simply went without.
Their concern was not unfounded.
Since Xiaobai had come in, it had first devoured a whole row of preserved fruit from the shelf, then nibbled on some specially made Beef Jerky. Perhaps because it was a natural vegetarian, it abandoned the Beef Jerky after just a couple of bites. But in the food business, it didn’t matter if it only took a couple of bites. Even if its little mouth had just brushed against the Beef Jerky for an instant, that whole box of meat could no longer be sold.
Then there was the shelving unit Xiaobai had knocked over when the attendant tried to catch and kill it, not to mention all the various pots, bowls, and pans that had been broken in the chaos.
All told, the miscellaneous damages would easily amount to several hundred taels of silver, if not more.
The shopkeeper surveyed the utter mess before him, his abacus beads clattered, CLICKETY-CLACK, as he tallied the costs. The chatter from the crowd outside drifted into his ears, and his heart clenched. If this little girl’s family comes and repays the damages, then all will be well. But if her family doesn’t show up, these losses will be impossible to recover!
At this thought, the shopkeeper of Zhiwei Restaurant felt his own heart might just stop beating.