Chapter 761 --761
As the heavy iron-reinforced back door of the Crimson Lotus slammed shut behind Three-Fingers Qiu, the System floated down from the brick wall, preening its glowing golden fur and looking down at itself with smug pride.
"Wow, Host, look at us go," the AI purred, crossing its phantom paws in mid-air. "Thirty silver taels dangled in front of her nose and she turns into your personal errand dog! You are having such a great time running this street!"
Beneath the dark hood of her cloak, Heena let out a silent, icy scoff. "A great time? Open your eyes, you blind furball. That scarred bitch just turned us into hostages."
The System paused mid-preen, blinking its big blue eyes as it looked toward the front of the wet alley. "Wait... oh."
"Yeah. Not ’oh,’" Heena replied darkly in her mind. "If the Madam upstairs likes it, we get paid. If the Madam decides it’s cheaper to slit my throat and torture Ren until we write down the recipe, those three thugs aren’t guarding the street from flies—they are corking the bottle so we can’t run."
As if to prove her exact point, the three burly alley thugs didn’t actually walk out to the mouth of the lane.
Instead, the largest of the three—a thick-shouldered woman with a jagged scar splitting her left eyebrow—grinned crookedly, reached behind the stacked firewood by the kitchen wall, and hauled out a heavy, grease-stained square wooden table.
𝙛𝕣𝖊𝚎𝑤𝘦𝕓𝓃𝕠𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝑐𝕠𝑚
She marched two steps forward and slammed the table down onto the slick cobblestones directly in front of Heena’s boots.
BANG!
The echoing crash was so abrupt and violent in the narrow brick passage that behind his black gauze veil, Ren visibly flinched, his right hand jerking half an inch inside his sleeve as his heart leaped into his throat.
The second thug kicked two low wooden stools behind the table, while the third produced a chipped clay teapot and two cracked ceramic cups from a warm basket by the back door. With wide, unsettlingly polite smiles that didn’t reach their cold eyes at all, the scar-browed thug poured two steaming cups of murky brown tea, sliding them across the scarred wood toward Heena and Ren while the other two casually stood behind them, their arms crossed over the wooden cudgels at their waists.
"Please, take a seat and wet your throats, little boss," the scar-browed woman said, her voice dripping with fake hospitality as she planted her heavy boot on the rung of the table, effectively trapping the hem of Heena’s cloak if she tried to step backward. "Sister Qiu said three cups of tea, didn’t she? Can’t let our honored guests stand in the damp cold while we wait."
Heena didn’t sit—mostly because bending her torso at a ninety-degree angle right now would crack the medicinal crust across her pulverized back wide open—and she certainly didn’t reach for the cup.
She stared down at the dark, oily film floating on the surface of the steaming liquid.
In the back alleys of the pleasure district, "hospitality tea" came in only two flavors: unwashed ditch water, or fast-acting Soft-Bone Powder designed to drop a victim to the cobblestones in thirty seconds so they could be stripped, bound, and carried upstairs in a burlap sack.
Neither Heena nor Ren had the slightest desire to test their luck. Behind her shoulder, Ren kept his hands locked tightly around the strap of the wooden medicine box, his posture rigid as he stared down at the cracked cups through his veil without moving a muscle.
"My physician forbids me from drinking murky water after sundown," Heena said smoothly, not a flicker of fear showing in her dark eyes as she met the thug’s gaze over the rising steam. "It ruins the palate. Keep the pot warm for Qiu—if she takes longer than ten minutes on those stairs, you three are going to need something to wash down your teeth when I walk out of here anyway."
The fake, oily smile on the scar-browed thug’s face froze instantly.
Her fingers twitched against the heavy wooden handle of the cudgel hanging from her belt, a dark flush creeping up her thick neck. Behind Heena and Ren, the other two guards shifted their weight onto the balls of their feet, the leather soles of their boots scraping softly against the wet cobblestones as they closed the gap by another inch.
"That is a mighty big mouth for a girl standing in a dead-end lane with one skinny servant, little boss," the scar-browed woman growled, leaning her knuckles heavily onto the grease-stained table so her face was level with Heena’s hood. "Out in the south alley, you were dealing with Mrs. Lynn’s stupid timber haulers. Down here, nobody cares whose daughter you used to be. If Sister Qiu comes back down those stairs and says the Madam doesn’t like your price... you won’t be walking out of here on two legs."
𝗳𝓻𝖾𝙚𝙬𝗲𝗯𝗇𝐨𝚟𝓮𝔩.𝓬𝒐𝓶
Behind the dark gauze veil, Ren’s breathing went completely silent.
Without shifting his shoulders or drawing attention to his hands, his right thumb slid smoothly beneath his inner cuff, gently working open the fold of the oiled paper packet containing the seven-step weeping lime. He calculated the angles in the narrow brick passage—if the woman across the table lunged at Heena, he would throw the lime straight into the faces of the two guards blocking the exit behind them, smash the ceramic vial of blistering dew onto the table to blind the leader, and haul Heena out toward the main street where his mother was waiting with the iron crowbar.
"Host, the guy behind you is literally unwrapping the chemical weapons right now," the System whispered nervously, hovering just above the teapot. "Should I pull up a map of the sewer grates in case we have to jump in a ditch?"
"Tell your paws to stop shaking," Heena replied mentally, her gaze never wavering from the scar-browed thug’s eyes. "If we run out of this alley covered in lime dust without a single copper in our pockets, Old Lady Lin owns my shop at midnight anyway. Nobody is throwing anything until I say so."
Outwardly, Heena didn’t even blink at the thug’s threat. Slowly, she lifted one pale, slender hand from beneath her heavy wool cloak and rested the tip of her index finger right on the rim of the cracked teacup.
"Look at your boots," Heena murmured softly.
The scar-browed thug frowned, confused by the sudden non-sequitur. "What?"
"The leather is splitting at the welt, and you have dried mud from the docks caked on your heels," Heena observed, her voice dripping with quiet, aristocratic disdain. "Which means the Madam of the Crimson Lotus pays you three miserable strings of copper a month to stand in the wet cold, breathe kitchen grease, and risk getting your skull caved in by desperate lunatics like me."
The thug’s jaw tightened, her hand gripping her club harder.
"Meanwhile," Heena continued smoothly, tapping the side of the ceramic cup with her fingernail, clink, clink, "in about two minutes, Three-Fingers Qiu is going to walk through that iron door and pocket thirty silver taels just for carrying a bottle up two flights of stairs. Thirty taels. Enough to buy a small courtyard house, drink good wine for three years, and never stand in a wet gutter again."