Chapter 756 --756
"Because two seconds ago, you told me I was just dropping off a box of expensive powder to collect fifty taels!" Old Lady Lin barked back, glaring down at Heena as if the girl had completely lost her mind. "If it was a simple delivery to a regular merchant, I would have done it! Are you trying to fool me?! Why did you wait until the very last breath to casually drop the name Three-Fingers Qiu?! Do you have any idea how heinous that woman and the bosses behind those brothels are?! Now you want me to march into her alley and extort the Madam for a hundred and fifty taels?!"
Heena rolled her eyes slightly, trying to smooth it over. "Sorry I left the name out, alright? Look, that’s it—you don’t even have to fight anyone, just stand there and collect one hundred and fifty taels—"
Old Lady Lin let out a cold, mocking laugh, her weathered face stretching into a tight, refusal-filled smile.
"Even if you promised me two hundred taels, I am not walking into that den of wolves!" the old woman snapped. "Do you think I was born yesterday? Those pleasure houses are backed by the darkest syndicates in the capital! If a nobody like me walks into their service alley demanding a hundred and fifty silver taels for two tiny bottles of water, they won’t open their coin vaults—they will chop me up into mincemeat and dump my bones in the canal before I even get the cork off the bottle!"
Honestly, she wasn’t wrong.
Up near the ceiling beams, the System shook its furry golden head, clicking its tongue at Heena. "She has a solid point, Host. At least have a shred of conscience! Plus, because you spent thirty-six hours in a fever coma, you are already cutting it razor-thin on your promised time, and now you’re changing the price on a woman who cuts people’s fingers off for fun! Do you really think those underworld sharks would let an old lady walk back out alive?"
"Of course I know how dangerous it is," Heena replied shamelessly inside her head, keeping her outward expression completely innocent. "Why the hell do you think I was trying to send the tough old woman instead of going myself?"
Unfortunately for Heena, she had paused for just a fraction of a second too long, and a tiny, calculating flicker in her dark eyes gave her away.
Old Lady Lin had survived forty years in the slums by reading people’s faces. Her eyes narrowed to dangerous slits as she stared at Heena’s suspiciously blank expression.
"Wait a minute..." the old woman rasped, her hand slowly creeping toward the heavy stone pestle on the table. "You knew they would attack the messenger for raising the price, didn’t you? You were literally sending me down there to take the beating and die in your place, weren’t you?!"
"Oh, heavens, of course not!" Heena lied without missing a beat, schooling her pale face into a mask of pure, wounded virtue. "How could you think so poorly of me, Mother Lin? I simply trusted your formidable aura!"
"My formidable aura my wrinkled ass!" Old Lady Lin cursed, throwing both hands up in the air and taking two big steps back toward the doorway. "Forget it! Keep your fifty taels, and I’ll just wait until midnight to seize your shop deed when you default! My hands are clean—I am not taking a single step near that alley!"
With the clinic’s matriarch officially on strike, a heavy, awkward silence fell over the back room.
Heena’s dark eyes slowly shifted across the room, landing on the only other breathing human in the building.
Ren stood near the herb cabinets, holding a clean towel, blinking back at her like a startled deer caught in the crosshairs.
For half a second, Heena considered it—and then immediately threw the thought into the trash. Ren was a slender, undeniably gorgeous, unmarried young man. Sending him alone at dusk into the back alley of the five biggest male brothels in the capital wasn’t a delivery run; it was gifting a lamb to a pack of starving tigers. Before he could even say the name "Three-Fingers Qiu," the pavilion bouncers would knock him out with a sack, throw him into a locked room upstairs, and sell his first night to the highest bidder before the incense burned halfway down.
Her courier was on strike, her assistant was too pretty to survive the street, and her shop deed was four hours away from legally belonging to a foul-mouthed grandmother.
Heena closed her eyes and let out a long, deep breath through her nose.
𝖿𝔯𝓮𝗲𝓌𝗲𝘣𝙣ℴ𝕧𝓮𝗹.𝒸𝓸𝗺
"Fine," Heena rasped, her eyes snapping back open with a cold, relentless steel gleaming in their depths. She braced her palms flat against the wooden examination table, preparing to push her heavily bandaged, screaming torso upright. "Give me a walking stick and a thick cloak. I will go myself."
Up near the ceiling beams, the System stared down at her, clasping its digital paws together in mock reverence. "Oh, really, Host? Protecting the old grandma and the pretty boy by marching into the wolves’ den yourself? Since when did you become such a noble, self-sacrificing saint?"
"Shut up," Heena snapped back mentally, sliding her bare legs carefully over the edge of the wooden examination table.
Slowly, she braced her palms against the wood and pushed herself upright until her feet touched the cold floorboards.
To be completely honest, the agony was nowhere near as blinding as it had been the day before. In her past lives, she had marched across winter battlefields with arrow shafts snapped off in her shoulder; she was intimately used to operating through high-level physical trauma. More importantly, the heavy poppy-husk decoctions and top-tier stasis-clearing salves this mother-and-son pair had packed onto her back were genuinely miraculous. Her fever was gone, the deep muscular tearing was tightly bound, and aside from a stiff, fiery pull across her ribs and shoulder blades, she was entirely capable of walking down the street.
But so what? Why suffer quietly like a tough soldier when a little bit of shameless theater could get her out of doing legwork?
The exact second her feet took her weight, Heena let out a weak, pathetic gasp. She threw a pale, trembling hand up to press against her temple, squeezed her eyes shut, and swayed violently to the left as if a sudden, catastrophic wave of vertigo had just knocked her senses out. Her knees buckled dramatically, and she tipped forward as though she were about to pitch face-first onto the stone floor all over again.
"Miss Lu!"
The effect on Ren was instantaneous. His dark eyes went wide with panic, dropping the towel in his hands as he lunged three hurried steps across the room, his arms outstretched to catch her before she could hit the ground and tear her back open.
"Stand right where you are, boy!"
Old Lady Lin’s voice cracked through the room like a whip.
𝐟𝚛𝖊𝓮𝔀ⅇ𝑏𝐧𝔬𝓋ℯ𝚕.𝖼𝚘𝓶
Ren froze mid-stride, his hands hovering helplessly in the air, just inches from Heena’s swaying shoulders. He turned his head, staring at his mother in stunned confusion, his frame trembling slightly with the urgent instinct to catch his falling patient. "M-Mother? She is going to collapse! Her fever just broke—"