She was holding the cloth bag and walking on the way home, tears streaming down her face.
It was not just out of gratitude, but also a complex sadness - for the cruelty of fate, for one's own powerlessness, and for the silent kindness that one encountered unexpectedly in the cold world.
She clenched the money in her pocket as if she was clutching a faint fire in the darkness.
Silence returned to the "Chen Ji" noodle shop. Chen Yanbai picked up a freshly washed white porcelain bowl and looked at it against the light. The bowl wall was as smooth as new, reflecting his delicate but expressionless face.
"Brother," he spoke again, his voice a little uncomfortably loud in the quiet shop, "that list...that mark with the character 'owl' at the end..."
He was referring to an inconspicuous corner at the bottom of the bill, where there was a minimalist symbol resembling a bird's beak, lightly drawn in pencil.
Ordinary people wouldn't notice it, or think it was just a child's graffiti. But Shen Yanbai and Shen Yanxiu were all too familiar with this symbol—it was the extremely subtle mark left behind by the "Night Owl" organization when they controlled certain gray industries (such as underground black clinics and illegal pharmaceutical factories).
This means that the hospital or drug source pointed to by this bill may have intricate and unclear residual connections with the dark empire that they destroyed with their own hands.
Chen Yanxiu's hands, kneading the dough, paused for a barely perceptible fraction of a second. The dough tightened in his palms, then slowly loosened.
He raised his eyes, and the gaze behind the lenses looked through the glass door and into the dark night outside, as deep as a cold pond.
"Yeah." He still said it lightly. But Chen Yanbai understood. That meant his brother had noticed it, and had taken it to heart.
The corners of Chen Yanbai's mouth curled up into a very faint and cold arc, like the edge of a knife tempered by ice.
He stopped talking, simply picked up another bowl and continued wiping it, his fingertips gliding across the smooth porcelain surface, his movements gentle yet carrying an invisible sense of power.
They were once hunters lurking in the abyss, having personally ignited the blazing fire that consumed the behemoth. Now, they retreat to this tiny shop, kneading dough and boiling soup, seemingly at peace with the world.
But some things are already etched into my bones. The sensitivity to darkness, the sharp edge hidden beneath my indifference to injustice, has never truly disappeared.
The money stuffed into the old man's mouth was pity; and noticing that symbol was the hunter's instinct ingrained in his bones.
The night wind picked up a withered yellow ginkgo leaf, swirling it around and gently hitting the glass door of "Chen Ji".
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