Chapter 682 --682

Chapter 682: Chapter-682

She had panicked, fumbled the cup, and he had caught her. The resulting beating had left her bedridden for a week, while he claimed to the household that she was merely "sick."

"If he got even a single gist of this plot," Heena said quietly, "he would not have just killed you. He would have tortured you until you dragged me and my entire family into the execution block with you. I needed you to be completely, genuinely ignorant. That is why I used you as the vector, and gave the active trigger to her."

Heena gestured to Razia. "Despite being raised in a merchant guild, her mother’s side is military blood. She has the training, the nerve, and the experience to handle weaponized toxins. You didn’t. So I made the choice for you."

Madam Gu stared at her, her chest heaving. The flawless strategic brilliance of the plan didn’t matter to her in that exact second; the sheer violation of trust did.

"That’s not what I am asking," Madam Gu said, her voice trembling with a sudden, fierce anger. "I am asking you... did you give me a deadly poison without me knowing?"

Heena looked at her through half-lidded, exhausted eyes. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t look guilty. "Yes, I did. So?"

"So?!" Madam Gu snapped, stepping forward, the battered wife entirely replaced by a furious, indignant woman. "You dare to turn me into a weapon without my consent? What if I had ingested it? What if it had seeped into my tea or my skin while I was sleeping?"

Heena groaned quietly, gripping her forehead as a sharp, blinding spike of pain drove through her skull. The exhaustion was becoming unbearable, and her patience for the argument was entirely gone. "That surely wouldn’t have happened," she muttered, her voice strained.

Before Madam Gu could push the argument further, a shadow detached itself from the darkest corner of the room. A masked guard dropped silently to one knee. "My lady. The civil officials and servants are panicking outside. They are actively searching for Madam Gu."

The ticking clock of the outside world had finally caught up to them.

Heena stood up. The movement was a little too slow, a little too heavy, but she forced her spine straight, projecting the unbreakable, terrifying aura of the Vanguard Madam.

"What I did, I did," Heena said coldly, looking down at the furious woman. "Now, it depends entirely on you. You can choose to stay angry, walk out there, and eventually be buried alongside that paralyzed monster... or you can take the power I just handed you and live as his wife with absolute authority over this estate. I am not going to apologize for what I did to keep you alive. Power is what you deserve."

With that, Heena turned her back on her and started walking toward the heavy oak doors. Razia immediately scrambled after her, the chaotic cousin suddenly looking very small in the wake of Heena’s wrath.

"Wait." Madam Gu’s voice rang out, stopping Heena just as her hand grasped the iron handle.

Heena didn’t turn around.

"Did you..." Madam Gu’s voice cracked, the anger suddenly giving way to a raw, desperate vulnerability. "Did you even worry for a single second that I might have died?"

Heena paused. She stood in the dim light of the doorway for a long moment before tilting her head slightly over her shoulder.

"Weren’t you ready to die every single day you lived in this house?" Heena asked quietly. "And besides... I was one hundred percent sure you wouldn’t die."

Madam Gu frowned, her eyes wide. "How could you possibly be sure?"

"Don’t worry," Heena murmured, a faint ghost of a smirk touching her pale lips. "I gave you the antidote a long time ago."

Before Madam Gu could even process the revelation, Heena pushed the heavy doors open and stepped out into the chaotic corridor, leaving the Prime Minister’s wife standing completely stunned in the quiet chamber without a single word of further explanation.

The moment they were out in the open, the chaotic facade returned. Servants were rushing back and forth in the distance, shouting orders. Razia immediately started buzzing around Heena like an anxious hornet, talking a mile a minute in a hushed, frantic whisper.

"I’m so sorry, Sister, I didn’t mean to blurt out the poison thing, I just got excited! You know how I get when the adrenaline hits, I swear I didn’t mean to ruin the dramatic tension—"

Smack.

Heena casually raised her hand and delivered a sharp, echoing slap to the middle of Razia’s back, nearly knocking the wind out of the girl.

"I’m writing a letter to your father tonight," Heena deadpanned, continuing to walk down the hall without breaking her stride. "I’m telling him you are practically useless."

Razia stumbled, clutching her back with a look of absolute, dramatic betrayal. "What the heck do you mean I’m useless?!" she squawked, hurrying to catch up. "I paralyzed the Prime Minister!"

"Keep shouting in the middle of a hostile estate," Heena warned, her voice barely a rough whisper as they walked rapidly down the corridor, "and in just a few seconds, if the wrong guard hears you, you will be hanging on the outer wall of the capital."

Razia blinked, her chaotic mind immediately spinning the threat into a compliment. "You mean, like a painted banner? Praised for my tactical genius by the common folk?"

"No," Heena deadpanned, not even turning her head. "I mean your severed head mounted on an iron spike, and your headless body casually thrown into a municipal mass grave."

Razia gasped in sheer, dramatic offense. "You?! How could you curse your own flesh and blood like that?!"

Hitching up her expensive silk skirts, Razia rushed to keep pace, grumbling wildly about ungrateful warlords and unappreciated sabotage. But Heena wasn’t listening anymore.

The moment they reached the secluded outer terrace overlooking the estate’s private carriage courtyard, the adrenaline completely evaporated from Heena’s bloodstream. The terrifying, invincible Vanguard Madam stepped into the shadows of the terrace, slumped heavily against the stone balustrade, and before Razia could even finish her next complaint, Heena literally fell asleep on her feet.

This was the horrifying new reality of her failing body. When she was awake, the intracranial pressure spiked with such blinding, agonizing pain that it felt like a dagger was being twisted behind her eyes. When the pain finally receded, a suffocating, unnatural drowsiness violently dragged her under. She had started speaking less and less, terrified of the moments when she would open her mouth and find that the words had simply vanished from her vocabulary.

But in her relentless, pragmatic planning, there was one terrifying medical variable that Heena, the seasoned transmigrator, had completely overlooked.

She was currently residing in a physical, biological body. The terminal disease was actively destroying the brain tissue of that specific body. In all her past lives, she had treated host bodies like temporary rental carriages—if the carriage broke down, she simply stepped out of it when the mission ended.

But she had forgotten that a soul cannot process thought without intact hardware. If the blood clot was erasing the physical brain’s memory centers, it wasn’t just erasing the original Vanguard Madam’s memories. It was corrupting the transmigrator’s memories, too.