Chapter 743 --743

Chapter 743: Chapter-743

In her head, she saw the weathered, exhausted face of Ren’s mother standing in the moonlit dirt, holding a wooden stick with trembling, work-worn hands to shield her son. ’I don’t care about whatever grand revenge you are planning. If you bring trouble down on our heads, I will personally throw you back over this wall.’

And Heena had looked that woman in the eye and sworn she would not bring ruin to their house.

Less than four hours later, because Heena had been too careless to check for eyes in the dark before scaling that brick wall, a pack of guild thugs was tearing their front door off its hinges to drag Ren into a house where five young men had already been beaten into early graves.

Heena looked down at her arms. She was currently cradling a heavy sack of rice, a bag of salt, a clay jar of lard, bundles of fresh green scallions, and five fragile porcelain vials.

She couldn’t run with twenty pounds of groceries weighing down her fractured ribs. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to dump fifty coppers’ worth of hard-won supplies into the mud for the street rats to steal.

With a terrifyingly calm, deliberate motion, Heena stepped forward and set the sack of rice, the lard, and the vegetables down onto the clean corner of the tofu counter with a heavy thud.

The tofu vendor flinched backward. "M-My lady?"

Heena leaned across the counter just an inch, her dark eyes locking onto the vendor’s sweating face.

"You are going to watch my groceries," Heena stated, her voice a soft, lethal purr that made the hairs on the woman’s arms stand straight up. "I am going to walk down to the south alley, and I will be back in twenty minutes. If I return and find a single grain of rice missing, or a single green onion bruised... I won’t just smash your tofu vats. I will burn your stall to ash and bury you under the floorboards. Do we understand each other?"

The burly vendor turned the color of her own bean curd, nodding her head so fast her double chin wobbled. "Y-Yes, my lady! I will guard it with my life! Nobody will touch a single leaf!"

"Good," Heena murmured.

She didn’t leave everything behind. Before turning away, her pale fingers dipped into the grocery pile and pulled out two specific items: the small, tightly bound linen pouch of extra-coarse white salt, and a leftover fistful of fiery red dried chilies the spice vendor had thrown in as a bonus.

Tucking both securely into the folds of her waistband, Heena turned on her heel and strode south.

"Host, slow down! Your ribs!" the System panicked, flying rapidly alongside her as she cut through the market crowd like a knife through water. "What is the plan here?! Mrs. Lynn has eight brawny timber haulers, and you are operating at thirty percent physical capacity! We can’t fight eight women with a bag of table salt!"

Heena did not respond to the assistant. The golden lion cub’s frantic, high-pitched digital warnings faded into absolute, buzzing static in her mind, completely drowned out by the deafening rush of blood pounding in her ears. She didn’t offer a witty retort, nor did she pause to calculate the exact structural limits of her bruised ribcage or formulate a meticulous tactical retreat.

She simply dropped her aristocratic facade like a heavy, useless cloak and broke into a dead, reckless sprint.

The exact instant her worn boots hammered against the uneven flagstones, a blinding, white-hot spike of agony shot upward from her bound chest, radiating outward to freeze her fingertips. Every frantic intake of breath felt like inhaling crushed glass. But the agonizing pain didn’t slow her down; instead, it acted as a violent, volatile catalyst, sharpening her scattered focus into a razor-thin point of pure, predatory intent.

In the dramatized theatrical plays and heroic novels of the capital, a protagonist rushing to a desperate rescue always ran in a perfect, unobstructed straight line. Their silken robes would billow dramatically in the wind, their faces perfectly composed, as the masses of commoners conveniently parted before them like a split sea, awed by their sheer aura.

Reality in the lower rings of the east market was a suffocating, chaotic, and entirely unglamorous nightmare.

The sprawling slums were an absolute labyrinth of narrow, winding alleyways built without an ounce of municipal planning or logic. The paths were choked with sagging canvas awnings, haphazardly parked wooden handcarts, overflowing drainage gutters, and stray livestock wandering aimlessly between the stalls. There were absolutely no straight lines here. It was a suffocating gauntlet of unwashed flesh, rotting wood, and jagged stone, and navigating it at top speed was practically suicidal.

Heena didn’t gracefully weave through the crowd; she violently collided with it.

She practically ricocheted off the dense, sluggish mass of morning shoppers, her shoulders absorbing brutal, bone-rattling impacts as she forced her way through the crush.

"Hey! Watch where you’re going, you blind rat!" a burly, broad-shouldered blacksmith bellowed as Heena’s shoulder clipped her heavily muscled arm, nearly sending the woman’s heavy iron tongs clattering into the mud.

Heena didn’t look back. She stumbled, her worn boots slipping dangerously on a slick patch of crushed, rotting cabbage left in the gutter. Her balance completely gave out, but she threw her left hand out with desperate speed, bracing her bare palm against a damp brick wall to violently correct her momentum before she could hit the filthy ground. The rough brick tore the skin from her palm, but she pushed off the wall and kept moving, her legs pumping with frantic, mechanical desperation.

She shoved past a pair of young, heavily veiled men who were casually blocking the center of the lane to inspect a bolt of dyed silk. Her sudden, violent shove sent one of them spinning, his woven basket of radishes flying from his grasp to scatter across the cobblestones.

"Heavens above! Have you lost your mind?!" the man screeched, his voice pitching high with aristocratic indignation as he aggressively waved his silk fan at her retreating back. "Guards! Someone grab that madwoman! She ruined my vegetables!"

Curses, filthy insults, and furious shouts exploded in her wake like a trail of lit gunpowder. The entire market seemed to turn against her, outraged by the disruption.

She crashed headlong through a low-hanging bamboo blind belonging to a busy dumpling stall, the dry wooden beads snapping and raining down on the cobblestones in a chaotic clatter. She ducked blindly beneath a female laborer carrying a massive, groaning wooden yoke of river water across her shoulders. The laborer cursed loudly, spinning to avoid the collision, but the heavy wooden bucket swung wildly, clipping Heena’s hip. The brutal impact sent Heena stumbling sideways into a towering stack of empty bamboo steamer baskets.

The baskets went flying into the air, rolling across the muddy street and drawing a fresh, venomous wave of enraged screaming from the dumpling vendor, who immediately grabbed a wooden ladle to give chase before giving up halfway down the block.

The physical toll of the brutal sprint was catastrophic. With every harsh collision, her fractured ribs ground painfully against their tight linen bindings, sending fresh waves of nausea rolling through her stomach.