Chapter 732 --732

Chapter 732: Chapter-732

"We will see," Heena replied cryptically, keeping her dark eyes glued to the damp soil and rotting logs lining the forest floor.

She wasn’t looking for fruit. Fruit was obvious, and the AI was right—the commoners would have picked it clean. She was looking for mushrooms.

In her experience, the average peasant was utterly terrified of wild fungi. Without proper medical or botanical knowledge, eating a random forest mushroom was a game of lethal roulette, so most uneducated locals simply avoided them entirely. Heena, on the other hand, was not an herbalist, but she had spent enough time surviving in brutal wilderness environments to identify at least a few basic, non-lethal varieties. If she could find a patch of safe caps growing in the damp underbrush, she could boil them back at the shop. It wouldn’t be a feast, but it would stop her stomach from trying to digest itself.

And, of course, there was a secondary, much more ambitious hope flickering in the back of her starved mind.

"What are you staring at the bushes for?" the System whispered.

"Since we are right on the edge of the market," Heena murmured, her eyes scanning the thickets, "there is always a chance some careless merchant dropped a crate, or a stray chicken wandered off from the farm carts. If I can get my hands on a fat hen tonight, I will wring its neck myself."

The System stared at her, thoroughly disturbed by the pure, predatory hunger flashing in her eyes. The great, terrifying Black Lotus—a woman who had overthrown empires and outsmarted the most dangerous anomalies in the multiverse—was currently limping through the twilight woods, actively praying to encounter a lost chicken.

Heena ignored the AI’s judgmental stare and pushed deeper into the trees. Her bound ribs ached fiercely with every step, and her vision swam slightly from the dizzying lack of calories, but the sheer, spiteful will to survive kept her moving. She crouched low, using the fading twilight to inspect the base of an old, rotting oak tree, determined not to return to her empty shop empty-handed.

Heena crouched beside the rotting oak, her knees popping softly in the quiet twilight. Ignoring the sharp pull in her bound torso, she reached out and peeled back a thick curtain of damp ivy clinging to the decaying bark.

Growing in dense, overlapping shelves along the dead wood was a pristine cluster of pale, fan-shaped oyster mushrooms.

"Bingo," Heena whispered, a faint, triumphant gleam lighting up her dark eyes.

"Wait, those are actually edible?" the System asked, floating down to scan the pale fungi with its blue interface. "Let me run a toxicity check... Oh! Zero toxins detected! Host, you actually found free food!"

"Of course they are edible," Heena muttered, pulling the bottom hem of her coarse linen tunic up to form a makeshift basket. She carefully sliced the mushrooms from the bark using a sharp, flat stone, dropping them into the fabric. "Even in the most barren wastelands, rotting hardwood always yields something if you bother to look."

It was enough to fill her stomach, at least. Boiled mushrooms in plain water would taste like wet dirt without any salt, but it would stop the dizzying, nauseating cramps clawing at her insides.

Just as she was about to push herself up and head back to the shop, a faint, erratic rustling sounded from a dense thicket of thorny brambles ten paces away.

Heena froze completely. Her breathing stopped, her dark eyes snapping toward the bushes with terrifying, laser-focused intensity.

"Host?" the System whispered nervously. "Did you hear that? What if I was wrong and there really is a wild boar in here?"

"Shut up," Heena snapped back mentally, her gaze narrowing as a small, low-hanging branch twitched.

A soft, unmistakable cluck echoed from the leaves.

Pecking lazily at a patch of disturbed dirt beneath the brambles was a remarkably plump, reddish-brown hen. Around its scaly left leg was a snapped piece of frayed hemp twine—undeniable proof that the bird had chewed through its tether on some careless farmer’s cart in the east market and wandered into the trees to gorge itself on beetles.

The golden lion cub’s jaw dropped open. "No way. You actually manifested a chicken."

Heena’s eyes locked onto the bird like a starving wolf spotting a lame deer. There was only one problem: chickens were fast, agile, and loud. If she lunged at it blindly, her fractured ribs would lock up, she would miss, and the bird would go flying squawking into the canopy. She couldn’t chase it. She had one single shot.

Moving in slow, silent increments so she wouldn’t rustle the dry leaves beneath her bare feet, Heena shifted her weight. With her free hand, her fingers closed around a heavy, fist-sized river stone half-buried in the damp soil.

She tested the weight of the rock in her palm. Her vision was still slightly blurry at the edges from low blood sugar, and the fading twilight made depth perception a nightmare, but muscle memory honed over countless lifetimes didn’t rely on perfect eyesight. It relied on pure geometry and instinct.

The hen raised its head, its beady eyes darting around nervously as if finally sensing the suffocating, predatory aura rolling off the woman crouched in the shadows.

Before the bird could even open its beak to squawk, Heena’s arm whipped forward.

She didn’t throw from the shoulder, which would have torn her chest bandages wide open; she snapped her wrist and forearm like a whip. The heavy stone sliced through the twilight air with a low whistle.

Thwack.

The rock struck the hen squarely at the base of its skull. The bird didn’t even flap its wings; it simply dropped flat into the dirt, instantly dead.

"...Holy shit," the System breathed, staring at the limp bird in absolute awe. "You just assassinated poultry."

"Protein is protein," Heena rasped, letting out a sharp breath as she stood up and limped over to the brambles. She grabbed the heavy, warm bird by its feet, tucked her bundle of mushrooms securely against her stomach, and turned back toward the shop.

Twenty minutes later, the back storage room of the ruined apothecary was filled with a surprisingly rich, mouth-watering aroma.

The shop had no kitchen pots or iron woks, and she certainly had no salt or cooking oil. However, the original host’s father had left behind several large, thick-walled clay decoction pots meant for boiling heavy batches of medicinal roots over a small charcoal brazier.

After scrubbing one of the clay pots until her arms ached, Heena had plucked and butchered the hen behind the shop using a sharpened piece of scrap iron. She threw the meat and the wild mushrooms into the boiling water, and then raided her own front shelves. She tossed in two slices of dried ginger, a single star anise pod, and a tiny pinch of crushed peppercorns to mask the gamey flavor and compensate for the complete lack of salt.

Sitting cross-legged on the burlap sacks, Heena blew across a chipped ceramic bowl filled with steaming, clear golden broth and tore off a piece of boiled chicken meat.

The first sip of the hot, ginger-infused soup sliding down her throat felt like pure resurrection. The violent, nauseating knots in her stomach immediately began to uncoil, and a wave of genuine warmth spread out to her freezing fingertips.

"How is it?" the System asked, sitting politely beside the clay brazier, watching her eat like an eager puppy.