Chapter 741 --741

Chapter 741: Chapter-741

She even stopped by a potter’s stall to pick up five tiny, cheap porcelain vials and a fine-mesh silk sieve to start processing her cosmetic samples later that afternoon.

As a massive, burly woman carrying two wooden buckets of hot, fragrant broth walked past her toward a nearby noodle stand, Heena paused, her nose twitching.

"Actually," Heena mused, rubbing her chin thoughtfully as her stomach gave a polite rumble, "the broth last night wasn’t half bad once it boiled down. Since I have real salt and scallions now, maybe I should walk over to the western butcher stalls and buy a fresh hen to make a proper chicken soup for lunch."

Beside her ear, the System nearly short-circuited, staring at her in utter, scandalized disbelief.

"Host, at least have an ounce of shame!" the golden lion cub cried out. "You literally boiled and ate someone’s beloved family member yesterday, buried the corpse under your floorboards this morning, and you are already craving chicken soup again?! The dirt isn’t even dry yet!"

"Just shut up," Heena snapped back mentally, hefting her new sack of rice over her good shoulder as she marched shamelessly toward the meat stalls. "Who the fuck lets their precious ’family member’ wander around a public hill at twilight without a proper collar or a name tag on its neck? If it didn’t want to end up in a medicine pot, it shouldn’t have looked so delicious."

Heena continued bickering with the System inside her head as she navigated the packed, noisy lanes of the market, her arms gradually filling up with bundled parcels.

The economy of this ancient capital was wildly erratic. Basic staples like coarse salt and bruised turnips were dirt cheap, costing barely a copper or two, while anything remotely refined—like finely milled white flour or clear lamp oil—was marked up to highway-robbery prices. It forced Heena to stop at nearly every stall and engage in ruthless verbal combat just to keep her copper strings intact.

What surprised her most was that several of the smaller stalls—particularly those selling embroidery threads, pickled vegetables, and dried sweetmeats—were actually run by commoner men. And despite the fragile, weeping-willow standard set by noble husbands like Su Jin, these market men had tongues like sharpened iron. With their sleeves rolled up and sheer veils pinned back out of the way, they haggled with a fierce, rapid-fire intensity that matched any broad-shouldered woman on the street, batting their eyelashes one second to draw a customer in and ruthlessly refusing to drop a price by half a copper the next.

In fact, as the late morning sun climbed higher in the sky, the entire demographic of the street had shifted. When she had passed through at dawn, the roads had belonged almost entirely to rough female laborers and guards. Now, during the peak mid-morning shopping hour, the market was overflowing with men.

Groups of young husbands and unmarried sons moved from stall to stall in lively clusters, flanked by their families’ burly female servants who carried their heavy baskets. It was a loud, bustling commotion of daily life—one man delicately pinching the stems of water spinach to check for freshness, two others arguing animatedly over a bolt of dyed silk, and another haggling loudly over the weight of a live carp. No matter the gender rules of the empire, the universal joy of spending household coin in a busy bazaar remained exactly the same.

Heena had just finished bullying a sharp-tongued male vendor into throwing two free heads of garlic into her basket when a snippet of loud, malicious gossip drifted over from the neighboring tofu stall.

"—telling you, the whole back lane saw it with their own eyes this morning!" a thick-necked woman in a greasy leather apron was saying, leaning across the wooden counter to chat with two veiled men holding shopping baskets.

"Saw what?" one of the men asked eagerly, leaning in so fast his veil fluttered. "Are you talking about that young Physician Ren down in the south alley?"

Heena’s footsteps halted instantly. Standing half-hidden behind a hanging rack of dried gourds, she kept her hand on her sack of rice, her dark eyes narrowing as she tuned her ears directly to the conversation.

"Who else?!" the aproned woman scoffed, slapping her palm against the counter for emphasis. "Old Lady Lin always acts so high and mighty, bragging about how her son Ren is a pure, virtuous healer who wouldn’t even look a strange woman in the eye without a chaperone. Ha! Pure, my foot! That boy is a shameless little vixen behind closed doors!"

The two veiled men gasped in unison, their eyes sparkling with scandalized delight. "No! What did he do?!"

"Not once, but twice yesterday, neighbors saw a strange woman sneaking in and out of their clinic!" the gossip continued, lowering her voice to a stage whisper that carried ten feet in every direction. "And she didn’t even use the front door the second time—she climbed straight over his back garden wall in the middle of the night! She stayed locked inside that clinic with him until dawn! Word is, she walked out this morning with her clothes all torn and covered in bloodstains, looking like she’d had a wild fight in his bedsheets!"

"Heavens above!" the younger man shrieked behind his sleeve. "Keeping a wild woman overnight without a marriage match?! How utterly shameless! His reputation is completely ruined—what decent matriarch would ever pay a bride-price for a loose doctor who lets strange women climb his bedroom walls in the dark?!"

"...Oops," the System whispered in the dead silence of Heena’s mind, slowly shrinking back behind her shoulder. "Host... I think they are talking about you."

Heena stood behind the rack of dried gourds, her jaw tightening by a fraction of an inch.

In her scramble to survive the night and hide from alley thugs, she had completely underestimated how viciously a rumor could mutate in a society obsessed with male chastity. To her, she had simply fallen over a wall and had her broken ribs bandaged by a grumpy old woman. To the filthy-minded gossips of the lower market, her midnight entrance and morning exit had just painted Ren as a ruined, promiscuous harlot.

And in this world, a ruined reputation didn’t just mean harsh words—it meant the neighborhood thugs and greedy guild sharks would suddenly view that quiet little clinic as fair game.

The malicious chatter at the tofu stall didn’t stop there. Having hooked her audience, the thick-necked vendor leaned even further over her wooden counter, her face twisting with self-righteous disdain.

"And the most laughable part?" the woman sneered. "Just last week, that little ingrate had the audacity to reject a marriage offer from Mrs. Lynn! Can you imagine the nerve?"

One of the veiled men blinked, shifting his vegetable basket uncomfortably on his arm. "Wait... Mrs. Lynn from the East Timber Guild? Isn’t she nearly as old as Physician Ren’s own mother?"

"So what if she’s got a few gray hairs?!" the tofu vendor barked, waving a greasy cleaver in the air. "A man past his prime who runs a dusty back-alley clinic should be weeping with gratitude that a wealthy woman is willing to take him into her courtyard! Especially now! After sneaking around with some wild street woman in the dark, who else would ever touch him? Honestly, it’s all that shameless vixen’s fault for thinking he’s above his station. Gods only know how impure he truly is behind that polite face of his!"