Chapter 742 --742

Chapter 742: Chapter-742

The older veiled man beside the counter nodded vigorously, pulling his sheer shawl tighter around his shoulders with an air of smug superiority. "Exactly. It is loose, undisciplined men like him who ruin it for the rest of us. When a man doesn’t guard his chastity and lets strange women climb his walls, it makes all the matriarchs think men are cheap!"

They all chuckled nastily, basking in their shared superiority—until the younger man at the edge of the stall spoke up again, his voice dropping to a hesitant, quiet murmur.

"Still... didn’t Mrs. Lynn already take five young husbands into her estate over the last ten years?" he whispered, his eyes darting nervously down the street. "And... didn’t all five of them die before they even reached twenty-five?"

Instantly, the gloating laughter died.

A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the tofu stall. The greasy-aproned vendor clamped her mouth shut, her eyes shifting away, while the older veiled man suddenly found the floorboards beneath his embroidered shoes fascinating. Everyone in the东 market knew the truth about the Lynn estate—the bruised corpses rolled out the back gates in straw mats, officially declared dead from "sudden winter chills" even in the middle of July.

Behind the hanging rack of dried gourds, Heena’s dark eyes went completely still.

She didn’t know the intricate local history of the East Timber Guild, nor did she know who Mrs. Lynn was. Yet, the exact moment those words hung in the air, a cold, unmistakable vibration of danger prickled along the base of her spine.

Her tactical mind connected the pieces in half a second. Ren rejects a wealthy, sadistic older woman with a habit of beating her young husbands to death. Days later, Heena accidentally tumbles over his back wall at midnight. Now, before the morning sun has even reached its peak, a vicious, meticulously detailed rumor about Ren being a "ruined harlot" is being shouted across the central market.

In a society like this, if a man was proven virtuous, a bride-seeker had to go through official matchmakers, pay a heavy bride-price, and obtain the mother’s legal consent.

Unless the man was publicly branded a shameless, promiscuous vixen. Once a man’s reputation was in the gutter, the city magistrates looked the other way if a wealthy patron simply sent thugs to drag him into a sedan chair as an unpaid, unprotected concubine.

"Host..." the System whispered, its glowing blue ears flattening completely against its skull. "That timing is way too fast. Someone was watching his clinic last night. If Mrs. Lynn uses your midnight wall-climb as an excuse to drag that doctor into her house..."

Heena thought of the bowl of warm, bitter medicine Ren had handed her when she was coughing up blood. She thought of his fierce, protective mother standing in the moonlit garden with a wooden stick, making Heena swear on her honor not to bring ruin to their house.

Heena had promised. And the Black Lotus did not break her word.

Shifting the sack of rice effortlessly into the crook of her left arm, Heena stepped out from behind the hanging gourds and walked directly toward the tofu stall.

On the surface, she was still dressed in the coarse, unbleached linen tunic from the clinic, her skin pale from blood loss and a faint purple bruise still fading along her jawline. She didn’t have the soft, bulky muscle of the commoner women on the street. Yet, as she closed the distance, she didn’t walk like a vendor—she moved with the long, unhurried, and terrifyingly poised stride of high nobility. The original body had been bred from the finest aristocratic bloodline in the capital, possessing a sharp, striking bone structure, high cheekbones, and raven-black eyes that looked as though they had been carved from winter ice.

Combined with Heena’s own centuries of lethal command, she stood out in the muddy vegetable market like an unsheathed sword in a basket of turnips.

"Excuse me," Heena said, her voice smooth, low, and dangerously polite as she stopped right in front of the counter. "May I ask what you are all talking about?"

The three gossipers jumped as if they had been struck by lightning.

The tofu vendor nearly dropped her greasy cleaver, while the two veiled men gasped softly, taking a hasty half-step back. For a long beat, all three of them simply stared at her in stunned silence, their eyes widening at the sight of the striking, icy-eyed woman who had seemingly materialized out of thin air right in front of them.

The greasy-aproned tofu vendor swallowed hard, her fingers tightening awkwardly around the handle of her cleaver. Up close, the contradiction between Heena’s coarse, blood-spotted linen tunic and her razor-sharp, aristocratic features was deeply unsettling. In the capital, eccentric noble heirs occasionally dressed in rags to slum it in the lower rings and look for trouble, and nobody wanted to be the idiot who offended a tiger pretending to be a housecat.

"W-We weren’t talking about anything important, my lady!" the vendor stammered, her bluster evaporating into nervous sweat. "Just... just neighborhood business down in the south alley!"

Heena didn’t blink, her dark, winter-cold eyes pinning the woman to the spot. "I heard the name Physician Ren. And I heard the name Mrs. Lynn. Speak clearly. What is happening in the south alley?"

Seeing that the scary woman wasn’t going to let them off the hook, the younger veiled man hurried to answer before the vendor could say something stupid.

"It’s Mrs. Lynn from the East Timber Guild, miss!" the young man blurted out, pointing a trembling finger down the southern thoroughfare. "When word got out at dawn that a strange woman climbed over the clinic wall last night, Mrs. Lynn declared that since Physician Ren had already thrown away his virtue in the dark, there was no longer any need to wait for an official matchmaker or his mother’s consent!"

"She... she went there?" Heena asked, her voice dropping half an octave.

"She is at his front door right now!" the older veiled man chimed in, his eyes wide with a mix of fear and morbid excitement. "We passed the procession ten minutes ago on our way here! She brought a stripped-down concubine’s sedan chair and eight of her biggest timber-yard haulers to ’fetch her groom.’ By now, they are probably already dragging him over the threshold!"

The tofu vendor nodded rapidly. "Old Lady Lin was barring the door with a wooden staff when we walked by, screaming her lungs out, but what can an old woman and a fragile doctor do against eight timber thugs? And since the neighbors all think the boy is a ruined harlot now, not a single person on the street is stepping in to call the guards!"

"Host!" the System gasped, its digital fur bristling like needles. "That old hag didn’t just start the rumor—she was waiting outside with a sedan chair the second you left this morning! She used your shadow on that wall as a free pass to kidnap him in broad daylight!"

Heena stood dead still in the middle of the bustling market street.

The noise of the haggling vendors around her seemed to fade into a low, distant hum, replaced by the icy, rhythmic thrum of her own pulse.