Kitty: Scentball

Scentball was once a famous scent judge of Weiyang City, who named and tracked down scents for the guests who came to Huaxu Grove to savor fragrance.

It was born with a keen nose and could tell a hundred scents apart. Agarwood and sandalwood, storax, Nü'er Hong wine, crab roe buns, the incense balls in a noble's sleeve: one sniff and it knew where they came from, without a single mistake.

Naturally it became a famous cat. It rode in warm sedans carried by opossums and smelled that the curtains were Dashi scented silk; it went to the treasure auction at Mirage Tower and smelled that even the camphor balls in the vault were mixed with ambergris; it even entered Daqian Casino, where, mind you, even the toilet sticks for the cats were made of fresh bamboo paper.

It thought this was the peak of a cat's life. Golden goblets and jade dishes, fragrant robes and elegant company: all the riches of the world were there at the tip of its nose, so clear, so enchanting.

But cats grow old.

First ambergris turned into a fishy stink, then it mistook agarwood and sandalwood for wood shavings, and later it could not even tell the smell of wine and meat in a tavern. The nobles found it useless, the sedans no longer stopped for it, and when the servants saw it coming, they waved it away.

It lost everything and became an ordinary old cat wandering Hearwillow Bank. Still it refused to lower its head to sniff the food it had once looked down on.

Until one day, a child carelessly tossed down half a dried fish.

It had been hungry for a long time. It had no choice but to lower its head, and then its nose twitched, and it smelled...

A salty, savory, oily smell, roasted until crisp. It was neither precious nor worth much, but... it smelled good, so good.

It began to find time to bask in the afternoon sun. Its fur grew fluffy in the warmth, and it could smell the warm, airy scent in its own coat, like a handful of fresh-harvested wheat tucked into old cotton wadding. Then now and then it went to roll in the fields. The bitterness of grass sap, the earthy smell of upturned soil, the damp in the wind before rain, all rushing into its nose at once.

Those hundred rare scents that once made it famous now seemed, looking back, like a hazy dream behind a curtain of golden gauze.

What it should have been smelling all along was nothing more than an honest bite of dried fish, fluffy fur warmed by the sun, and a whole afternoon of growing grass and singing orioles that it could lie down in without spending a coin.

Translated by AI from the Chinese game text. It is replaced automatically when the official English text ships.