Chapter 731 --731

Chapter 731: Chapter-731

The quiet peace of the dark storage room was immediately shattered.

"Um... Host?" the System whispered, hovering just inches from her face, its digital glow irritatingly bright against her closed eyelids.

"What the heck?" Heena groaned, refusing to move a single muscle.

"Host, I think you forgot something."

Heena let out a long, suffering sigh. "System, I am tired. Do not irritate me."

"Um, Host, you really are forgetting something important," the golden lion cub insisted, lightly tapping her shoulder with a glowing paw.

Heena snapped her eyes open, raw irritation flashing in the dim room. "What?! I am—"

She froze. The words died instantly in her throat.

A sudden, hollow ache violently clawed its way up her torso. She belatedly realized exactly what she had forgotten.

Food.

Her stomach was so completely empty it felt like it was actively trying to digest her own spine. She hadn’t eaten a single bite of solid food since she woke up. Ren had poured bitter medicinal sludge down her throat, but the man hadn’t exactly offered her breakfast before she dramatically marched out of his clinic. After that, she had spent the entire day walking across the city, aggressively cataloging spices, and supervising a construction crew. The sheer, driving momentum of her plotting had completely masked her biological needs.

But now that she had stopped moving? Now that she had actively acknowledged it?

The hunger hit her like a physical blow. Heena slowly pushed herself up from the burlap pallet, swaying heavily as a sudden wave of intense dizziness washed over her. She stumbled over to a cheap wooden chair she had bought from the laborers earlier and practically collapsed into it. Her stomach churned violently, threatening to make her vomit up the plain water she had been drinking all afternoon.

She clutched her abdomen, groaning quietly into the empty shop.

To make matters infinitely worse, she looked toward the shredded front windows. It was deep into the evening. The bustling daytime market was closed, replaced by the scattered, dimly lit night stalls.

"Damn it," Heena muttered, resting her heavy head in her hands.

Her mind sluggishly calculated her remaining funds. She had started the day with five silver coins. She had broken one of them into copper to pay the cleaning crew their six hundred pieces, and spent about four hundred more on basic supplies, a bucket, and the wooden chair she was currently slumping in. That left her with roughly four to five hundred loose copper coins, and three completely whole, unbroken silver taels.

Buying a quick, cheap meal right now was a logistical nightmare. Night market food vendors dealt strictly in small change. If she tried to hand a street cook an entire, unbroken silver coin for a bowl of plain porridge, they would either claim they didn’t have enough change to break it, or they would completely scam her out of the difference. She couldn’t afford to lose a whole silver to a scam, and her brain was currently too starved and dizzy to aggressively negotiate prices using her loose coppers.

"Should I check if there are any edible spices in the front?" the System offered weakly, sensing her absolute misery. "Maybe you could chew on some cinnamon bark?"

"If I eat raw cinnamon on an empty, bruised stomach, my ulcer will kill me before the Lu family even gets the chance," Heena rasped, keeping her eyes squeezed shut as the room spun slightly.

"Oh my God," the System gasped, its digital eyes widening as it hovered over her shoulder. "Do you actually know medicine?!"

"Shut the fuck up, you idiot," Heena groaned, sliding off the hard wooden chair and simply sitting flat on the dusty floorboards.

She absolutely did not know ancient medicine. Everyone knew a little bit of basic first aid—how to brew ginger for a cold or use aloe for a burn—but diagnosing internal injuries with tree bark was entirely out of her depth. She sat on the ground, staring blankly at the neat rows of spices the cleaners had organized. She could try to boil something, but the shop was entirely devoid of actual groceries. There was no salt, no sugar, no rice, and absolutely no flour.

To hell with it. She was not going to boil raw cinnamon bark and drink it. She knew it functioned as a culinary spice, but God only knew what a concentrated dose of raw ancient cinnamon would do to an empty, severely battered stomach.

She sat there, thinking long and hard, her stomach letting out an aggressive, hollow growl that echoed in the empty room.

"Host, let’s just go out and do a little shopping," the System suggested gently, trying to be helpful. "You have those loose coppers! You can just buy a steamed bun from a night vendor."

Heena opened one dark eye and glared at the glowing lion cub. "Is your daddy paying the money?"

The System immediately snapped its mouth shut.

Heena dragged a heavy hand down her face. She had already caused quite a commotion in the east market today by casually throwing around silver to hire laborers. If she went out right now, hobbling through the night market like a bruised beggar while paying with heavy copper strings, she was going to draw entirely the wrong kind of attention.

More importantly, she was terrified of the math. Three silver taels and five hundred copper coins sounded like a safety net, but it was practically nothing when you factored in the cost of raw materials for her cosmetic business, living expenses, and the fact that she currently had a grand total of zero income. Once you started spending, silver vanished like water through a sieve. Until she had a reliable way to actually earn money, she had to treat every single copper coin like it was coated in her own blood. She absolutely refused to spend her startup capital on a midnight snack.

With a heavy, resigned sigh, Heena pushed herself off the floorboards.

"Where are you going?" the System asked nervously as she unbarred the back door instead of the front.

"To get dinner," Heena muttered, stepping out into the cool night air.

But she didn’t turn toward the glowing lanterns and mouth-watering smells of the market district. Instead, she turned her back on the city entirely, limping toward the dark, overgrown edge of the east sector. According to the original host’s fragmented memories, the capital’s lower market bordered a dense, abandoned stretch of forested hills.

"Host, why are we going into the woods?" the System whined, its golden lion form floating cautiously behind her as the last slivers of twilight painted the sky in bruised purples and deep blues.

"Shut up," Heena grunted, using a thick tree branch to steady her descent down a slight embankment. "It is not even fully night yet. And this is a secondary forest bordering a highly populated market district. The local guards and woodcutters will have driven out any actual predators long ago. There are no large animals here."

The System’s digital nose twitched in exasperation. "Yeah, but Host, by that exact same logic, that also means there is absolutely no fruit in here, right? If there were edible berries or apples growing this close to a poverty-stricken slum, the locals would have completely stripped the branches bare years ago! There’s nothing left!"