Chapter 762 --762
Heena tilted her chin up slightly, letting the faint crimson light from the high balcony lanterns above catch the razor-sharp curve of her smirk.
"If you break my legs tonight, the Madam gives you a pat on the shoulder and maybe fifty extra coppers to buy bandaging cloth," Heena whispered. "If you stand back, keep your hands off your clubs, and fetch me a clean cushion when I visit this alley next week... you eat meat from my table instead of chewing on salted beef tendons in the dark. Think carefully about whose dog you want to be when that door opens."
The three thugs stared at her, completely thrown off balance.
They had expected begging, or at least reckless street bravado. They hadn’t expected a calm, devastatingly accurate dissection of their empty pockets followed by a bribe wrapped in an insult. The two guards behind Ren exchanged a brief, hesitant glance, the tense grip on their cudgels loosening slightly as the sheer weight of the number thirty silver taels echoed in their greedy skulls.
Before the scar-browed woman could open her mouth to bark back, a sudden, heavy metallic CLANG echoed from the iron-reinforced back door of the pavilion.
Everyone in the alley whipped their heads toward the building.
The heavy iron bolts were thrown back from the inside with frantic speed, and the thick oak door swung wide open, spilling warm yellow lantern light and the loud, melodic strumming of silk-stringed pipas out into the damp passage.
Three-Fingers Qiu didn’t walk out alone.
Stepping across the threshold right ahead of her was a tall, striking woman in her late thirties, draped in a floor-length robe of deep plum-colored brocade stitched with gold thread. Her hair was coiled high with heavy (gold) hairpins studded with freshwater pearls, and despite the thick layer of expensive white powder on her face, the sharp, calculating eyes of a seasoned underworld syndicate boss burned beneath her painted brows.
Behind her crowded two young male attendants holding silk lanterns, and standing just inside the doorway—clutching a sheer crimson silk robe tightly around his bare collarbones with a look of desperate, manic obsession in his kohl-rimmed eyes—was a breathtakingly beautiful young man of nineteen, the pavilion’s reigning top star, Willow-Mist.
The scar-browed thug and her two companions instantly scrambled backward off the stools, bowing their heads low toward the cobblestones. "Madam Hua!"
Madam Hua didn’t even look at her guards.
In her right hand, her long, crimson-painted fingernails wereclutched so tightly around Heena’s tiny porcelain sample vial that her knuckles were white. The faint, intoxicating fragrance of Winter Moon—sharp winter frost melting into warm, imperial osmanthus and deep agarwood—was drifting in a heavenly cloud from the collar of the young courtesan standing behind her, completely obliterating the smell of the alley.
Madam Hua’s sharp eyes locked directly onto the cloaked figure standing behind the grease-stained table.
"You," Madam Hua breathed, stepping right out onto the dirty cobblestones in her embroidered silk shoes without caring about the mud. "Qiu says you have two full vessels of the finished product in that box. Is the powder inside that chest truly the same stuff smeared on the rim of this bottle?"
Behind the black gauze veil, Ren felt his heart skip a beat as he watched the famously untouchable Madam of the Crimson Lotus practically trembling with urgency. On the courtesan’s cheek behind her, a small patch of red, inflamed skin near his jawline—where a white-lead sore had clearly been weeping earlier—was already looking pale, smooth, and seamlessly luminous beneath a tiny smudge of the Fallen Cloud sample powder.
Heena didn’t bow, and she didn’t step forward. She remained standing calmly behind the table, her pale hand resting lightly on Ren’s veiled arm.
"Every grain in the jar was refined through five layers of silk and blended with pure pearl and Bletilla root, Madam Hua," Heena said, her raspy, unhurried voice cutting cleanly through the night air. "And the bottle contains a full half-ounce of the pure spirit—enough to scent your top three stars for an entire month of banquets."
Madam Hua didn’t hesitate for a single fraction of a second.
𝑓𝓇𝖾ℯ𝔀𝔢𝒃𝙣𝒐𝚟𝖾ℓ.𝖈𝕠𝘮
"Pay her," she snapped over her shoulder.
One of the male attendants hurried forward, his arms straining under the weight of a heavy, iron-bound rosewood lockbox. He set it down right on top of the grease-stained wooden table—shoving the two cracked teacups completely off the edge to shatter on the stones—and flipped the brass latch open.
Inside, nestled on dark red velvet, gleamed three neat rows of official, government-stamped fifty-tael silver ingots, alongside three smaller ten-tael ingots.
Even through the dark veil, Ren’s breath caught slightly at the sight of so much solid silver gleaming in the lantern light. Up in the air, the System practically dove headfirst into the lockbox, hugging the virtual projection of the silver ingots with starry eyes.
"One hundred and fifty taels of pure官银 (official silver)," Madam Hua said sharply, her eyes never leaving the padded medicine box strapped across Ren’s chest. "Leave both containers on the table, and swear on your bloodline that not a single drop of this fragrance enters the House of Whispering Willows for seven days."
"Wait," Heena said softly.
The entire alley froze. Three-Fingers Qiu’s scarred face paled slightly, terrified the crazy girl was about to blow up the deal at the finish line, while Madam Hua’s painted brows drew together in a dangerous scowl.
"What do you mean, wait?" Madam Hua demanded coldly. "That is the exact price you gave Qiu!"
"One hundred and fifty taels is the price for tonight’s batch, yes," Heena murmured smoothly, lifting two pale fingers to pick up three of the smaller ten-tael ingots from the box and tossing them casually across the table into Three-Fingers Qiu’s waiting hands with a heavy clink. "And my word stands—for seven days, your rivals next door will smell like rancid pig fat while the Crimson Lotus takes every high-born patron on the street."
Heena leaned forward just half an inch across the table, her raven-black eyes locking onto Madam Hua’s.
"However, Madam Hua... this batch was brewed in a borrowed medicine pot while I was half-dead," Heena whispered silkily. "Once I open my proper workshop in the East Market this week, I can produce ten jars of Fallen Cloud and five bottles of Winter Moon every seven days. Or... I can take your silver tonight, and on the eighth day, I can walk next door and sell the next ten jars to the Whispering Willows."
Madam Hua’s pupils contracted into pinpricks.
If the Whispering Willows got their hands on this stuff next week, tonight’s advantage would vanish in a puff of smoke. Worse, if the high noblewomen of the West District found out where the workshop was, they would buy the stock directly from the source and bypass the brothels entirely!
"What do you want?" Madam Hua asked, her voice dropping low and guarded as she realized she wasn’t dealing with a street peddler, but a shark who knew exactly how to choke a supply chain.
"A monthly retainer," Heena stated flatly. "Fifty silver taels paid in advance on the first of every month just to keep my formulas out of every other brothel in the south avenue—plus fifty taels per batch delivered. And more importantly..."
Heena cast a cold, sideways glance down the narrow alley toward the main thoroughfare.
"...A crimson lantern hung outside my East Market apothecary bearing the seal of the Crimson Lotus syndicate," Heena finished softly. "If Mrs. Lynn from the East Timber Guild—or anyone else in this district—tries to throw a rock through my shop window while my attendant and I are working, I expect your people to break their legs before my mortar stops grinding. Do we have an understanding?"
For five long, breathless seconds, the only sound in the alley was the distant laughter of noblewomen arriving at the front gates and the crackling of the silk lanterns.
Madam Hua stared at the pale, sharp-featured girl wrapped in the oversized wool cloak. She knew who Lu Heena was—everyone with ears in the underworld had heard how the cast-off Lu daughter had blinded a timber thug and shattered a kneecap in the south alley yesterday noon.
Hiring guards to smash the East Timber Guild would cost Madam Hua nothing more than a word to her syndicate enforcers. In exchange, the Crimson Lotus would hold a total, crushing monopoly on a cosmetic miracle that would bleed the wealthiest noblewomen in the capital dry for months.
Slowly, a wide, genuine, and thoroughly ruthless smile spread across Madam Hua’s painted lips.
"Qiu," Madam Hua called out without taking her eyes off Heena. "Go to the counting room and fetch another fifty-tael ingot for the first month’s retainer, along with an iron syndicate plaque for the little boss’s storefront. If anyone from the East Timber Guild sets foot within a hundred paces of her shop in the East Market, chop their hands off and nail them to Mrs. Lynn’s warehouse gate."
"Yes, Madam!" Three-Fingers Qiu grinned fiercely, clutching her thirty taels of silver to her chest as she spun around to sprint back inside.
Heena gave a single, slow nod to Ren.
Moving with quiet, unhurried grace behind his black veil, Ren unclasped the padded wooden medicine box, lifted out the two small, wax-sealed porcelain containers, and set them gently on the center of the wooden table right beside the gleaming chest of silver.
In less than twenty minutes, with a torn back and two ounces of rice and alcohol, Heena hadn’t just saved her shop deed and made two hundred taels of pure silver—she had just bought the biggest underworld syndicate in the southern district as her personal bodyguard.