Chapter 738 --738

Chapter 738: Chapter-738

"I am not drooling," Heena replied mentally, though her dark eyes took their sweet time sweeping from a young man in translucent lilac silk all the way over to a sultry beauty biting his painted lower lip on the second-floor balcony. "I am analyzing the visual merchandising. Look at the way their robes are draped. And more importantly, smell the air."

The System paused, taking a digital whiff of the surroundings before pulling a face. "Ugh. It smells like someone dumped twenty pounds of crushed peonies into a vat of cheap lard."

"Exactly," Heena murmured, a cold, sharp glint cutting through her appreciative gaze.

As she walked slowly down the lantern-lined avenue, her senses—honed by years of working with both deadly toxins and high-court luxuries—dissected the atmosphere. The men were stunning, yes, with their soft curves, delicate features, and expertly bared collarbones. Better yet, she didn’t have to pay a single copper coin to enjoy the view from the street.

However, their cosmetics were an absolute tragedy.

Up close, she could see that the shimmering powder dusted across their chests and faces was heavy and chalky, settling into the fine lines of their skin like white flour—likely mixed with toxic lead or cheap crushed shells. And the fragrances wafting from their sheer robes were suffocatingly heavy. Instead of distilling pure essential oils or using alcohol-based infusions, the perfumers in this world were clearly just steeping dried flowers in heavy animal fats or thick, greasy base oils. After an hour in the warm morning sun, the floral scents were already turning slightly rancid and sour against their skin.

"They have top-tier packaging and bottom-tier product," Heena noted under her breath, a predatory smirk curving her lips. "If I walk into this district with a clean, alcohol-distilled floral mist and a lightweight, finely milled rice powder that actually makes their skin glow without clogging their pores... these pavilions will bankrupt themselves bidding for it."

"Okay, I will admit, that is actually solid business analysis," the System conceded, floating beside her shoulder. "So, which one of these giant pleasure houses are we going into?"

"None of these," Heena said, tearing her eyes away from a particularly striking man who had just flashed her a shy, practiced smile from behind a painted silk fan.

She gestured subtly down the street. One of the sheer-robed men had just stepped forward to greet a burly woman wearing a stained linen tunic, only for his painted smile to vanish the exact second he noticed her empty waist pouch. With a disdainful flick of his sleeve, he turned his back on her, while two towering female bouncers with thick wooden clubs immediately stepped out from the shadows of the doorway to shoo the poor woman away.

Heena looked down at her own attire. She was still wearing the coarse, unbleached linen tunic from Ren’s clinic, stained at the ribs with dried blood and smelling faintly of scorched Szechuan peppercorns and sulfur smoke.

"The front doors of these five pavilions are for women dripping in silver," Heena said pragmatically, hooking her thumbs into her waistband. "If I try to stroll in looking like a bruised street beggar, I won’t make it past the threshold before those guards break my other ribs. Besides, the pampered beauties standing out front only know how to pour wine and sing songs. They don’t know the dirty secrets of the city."

She turned her head, her dark eyes locking onto a narrow, shadowed alleyway wedged tightly between the two largest, most extravagant brothels on the block—the Crimson Lotus Pavilion and the House of Whispering Willows.

Unlike the gilded, perfume-choked main street, the narrow gap between the buildings was damp, quiet, and smelled of spilled rice wine, cheap tobacco, and wet stone. Back doors made of heavy, iron-reinforced oak lined both sides of the alley, where kitchen servants dumped trash, delivery carts unloaded barrels, and the lower-tier workers stepped out to catch their breath away from the watchful eyes of the madams.

"If you want to buy a fantasy, you use the front door," Heena murmured, stepping off the sunlit main avenue and slipping effortlessly into the cool shadows of the back alley. "If you want to extort the truth for free, you go to the back kitchen."

"Oh, back to hooligan mode," the System sighed, its golden ears flattening. "Try not to assassinate anyone’s pet this time."

Heena rolled her eyes, moving silently down the slick cobblestones. Halfway down the passage, sitting on an overturned wooden barrel beside the rear service entrance of the Crimson Lotus, was a sharp-eyed, skinny woman in her late thirties. She had a long scar running through her left eyebrow, a wooden abacus resting on her knee, and a unlit pipe clenched between her teeth.

As two young male attendants hurried out the back door carrying baskets of soiled silk sheets, they both bowed their heads low and handed the scarred woman a few copper coins before scurrying toward the washhouse. A moment later, a delivery driver pushing a cart of premium wine jars stopped, whispered something in her ear, and received a flick of her chin toward the side gate.

She wasn’t a guard, and she wasn’t a servant. She was the alley gatekeeper—the woman who took a cut of every back-door transaction, knew which noblewoman was sneaking in through the rear entrance to avoid her jealous husband, and heard every piece of filthy gossip traded by the pavilion staff.

Heena stopped ten paces away, leaning her shoulder casually against the damp brick wall. She reached into her tunic, pulled out a single copper coin, and flipped it into the air, letting it catch the dim light filtering down between the roofs with a sharp clink.

The scarred woman’s eyes instantly snapped up from her abacus, locking onto Heena with the cold, assessing glare of a street rat who knew her territory had just been breached.

"Wrong turn, little girl," the woman rasped around her pipe, her hand dropping casually toward a heavy iron wrench resting beside her barrel. "The cheap stalls are three streets north. Nothing back here for a broke stray in bloody rags."

Heena caught the copper coin in her palm and smiled—a slow, chilling expression that didn’t reach her dark eyes at all.

"I’m not looking for a bed," Heena said smoothly, pushing off the wall and walking straight toward the barrel without a shred of hesitation. "I’m looking for the person who keeps the ledgers on the noblewomen who drink next door. And you look like a woman who knows how to read a room."

The scarred woman didn’t move a muscle, save for shifting the unlit pipe from one corner of her mouth to the other. Her sharp, narrow eyes dropped to the single copper coin glinting between Heena’s fingers, and a dry, raspy laugh barked out of her throat.

"One copper?" the woman sneered, her rough fingers curling firmly around the handle of the heavy iron wrench resting against her barrel. "Little girl, did the beating that left blood on your tunic rattle your brains loose? A single copper in this alley doesn’t even buy the muddy water we use to mop the steps, let alone the names in my head."

She leaned forward, rolling her wiry shoulders with the practiced menace of a veteran street enforcer. "Turn around and walk out while your legs still work."