Chapter 729 --729

Chapter 729: Chapter-729

In the bright daylight, the full reality of this inverted society was on absolute display. The streets were packed with bodies, but the dynamics were entirely flipped from the ancient worlds she was used to conquering. Broad-shouldered women hauled heavy wooden crates of produce, shouting aggressive, boisterous bargains at each other over the din of the crowd. Female guards marched through the thoroughfares with their hands resting casually on the pommels of their swords.

Meanwhile, the men who dared to venture out were either heavily veiled, clutching woven shopping baskets tightly to their chests as they hurried nervously through the market, or flanked by imposing female escorts who glared viciously at anyone who got too close to their fragile, beautiful charges.

It was a fascinating, twisted ecosystem. But Heena didn’t have the luxury of sightseeing. She kept her head down, navigating the winding alleys and bustling thoroughfares until the fragmented memories of the original host finally aligned with the physical geography of the east market.

She stopped dead in her tracks.

Heena stood on the edge of a narrow, muddy street, staring at the crumpled property deed in her hand, and then up at the wooden structure sitting entirely abandoned between a bustling blacksmith and a noisy teahouse.

"Damn," Heena muttered, the single word carrying the weight of absolute, crushing defeat.

"Oh, Host..." the System whispered, manifesting beside her, its glowing blue eyes wide with digital horror. "It’s... well, it certainly has... character?"

That was the understatement of the century. The shop was a complete, unmitigated disaster.

The wooden awning out front had partially collapsed, hanging off its rusted iron hinges like a broken wing and casting a jagged shadow over the storefront. The front steps were rotting away, covered in a thick layer of street grime, dead leaves, and overgrown weeds. The oiled paper windows were violently shredded, flapping pitifully in the morning breeze. The heavy wooden sign hung above the door was so faded, cracked, and splintered that the painted characters were entirely illegible.

It looked exactly like what it was: a business that had been deliberately, maliciously starved to death by the wealthy Lu family after the original host’s father had passed away.

Heena pushed past the rotting door, the swollen wood shrieking agonizingly against the floorboards. The interior was somehow even worse than the facade.

The air was thick with the suffocating, stale stench of ancient dust and aggressively pungent, decaying organic matter. Row upon row of sagging wooden shelves lined the walls, filled to the brim with hundreds of cracked ceramic jars, rotting wooden lockboxes, and molding burlap sacks.

It was a sprawling, traditional apothecary. A medicine and spice shop.

And therein lay the absolute, catastrophic problem.

Heena stood in the center of the ruined shop, staring blankly at a clear glass jar filled with dried, twisted roots that looked suspiciously like severed fingers. She aggressively interrogated the original host’s memories, digging frantically through the fragmented shards of the girl’s mind to find the inventory ledger, the medicinal recipes, the spice blends—absolutely anything that could tell her what was in this room.

Nothing. There was absolute, terrifying blankness.

The original host had known how to balance a financial ledger. She knew how to calculate profit margins and manage basic coin. But because she had been locked away in the inner courtyards and forbidden from stepping foot in the lower markets, she didn’t know the first damn thing about the actual products her father had sold.

And Heena? Heena was a Black Lotus. She was a warlord, a ruthless assassin, and a master manipulator. She knew military triage. She knew exactly how to cauterize a battlefield wound with black powder, how to extract a bullet from a shoulder, and how to synthesize basic Western medicines if given the right chemical components. She even knew exactly which exotic poisons would stop a human heart in under three seconds.

But ancient, esoteric Eastern herbalism? Thousands upon thousands of different tree barks, dried flowers, ground bones, and bizarre roots? She had absolutely no idea what any of this garbage was.

"Are you telling me," the System said slowly, its voice echoing loudly in the dusty, silent expanse of the shop, "that we now own an ancient medical supply store, and neither you nor the original body has even a shred of medical knowledge?"

Heena squeezed her eyes shut, a fresh, throbbing headache blooming at the base of her skull.

"How," Heena whispered into the empty, rotting room, her voice trembling with pure, unadulterated frustration, "can you be the sole heir to a medical shop, and not know a single damn thing about medicine? What was this girl doing her entire life?!"

"Well, to be fair, she was mostly just crying in the courtyard and getting framed by her brother-in-law," the System offered unhelpfully, floating over to poke a dusty sack with a digital paw.

Heena opened her eyes, glaring at a massive, rotting burlap sack of unidentified dried leaves in the corner. If she opened these doors and sold the wrong herb to a customer, accidentally poisoning them, she wouldn’t just lose the shop. In this rigid society, she would be dragged before the city magistrate and executed in the public square before sunset.

She was standing in a goldmine of potential capital, completely paralyzed by her own ignorance. She couldn’t revive a dead apothecary if she couldn’t even tell the difference between a healing root and a lethal toxin. The grand, slow-burn revenge against the Lu family suddenly seemed infinitely further away, buried alive under a mountain of rotting, unidentified bark.

.

.

Ten minutes later....

Heena stared at the massive burlap sack of unidentifiable dried leaves for a full, agonizing minute. The dust settling in the air illuminated just how catastrophic this inheritance truly was.

"So," the System ventured cautiously, breaking the heavy silence. "Do we just... burn it down and claim the insurance? Does this ancient society even have property insurance?"

"We are not burning it down," Heena said, her voice flattening into a cold, terrifying calm.

She turned away from the shelves and walked back toward the shattered front entrance, her bare feet kicking up small clouds of dust. The panic and frustration that had momentarily gripped her evaporated, replaced by the icy, calculating pragmatism of a conqueror. A ruined shop was just a chaotic battlefield. And Heena knew exactly how to establish order on a battlefield.

She stood on the rotting front step and looked out at the bustling east market. A few stalls down, a group of brawny, ragged-looking women were sitting on wooden crates, aggressively haggling over the price of stale steamed buns. They had the calloused hands and broad shoulders of day laborers looking for coin.

Heena reached into her waistband, untied the coarse rag, and pulled out one of her five silver coins. It felt heavy and cool in her palm. In this district, one silver tael could feed a family for a month.

She walked directly up to the largest woman in the group. The laborer looked up, her eyes narrowing suspiciously at Heena’s bruised face and cheap, blood-stained linen tunic, but her gaze immediately locked onto the glint of pure silver.