Chapter 751 --751

Chapter 751: Chapter-751

With a surge of terrifying grandma strength, she braced her foot against the table leg, fully intending to drag Heena off the examination plank by her neck and toss her straight out the front door.

A white-hot flash of pain tore across Heena’s shoulder blades from the sudden yank. Realizing this lunatic old woman was actually going to paralyze her before she could even make her first batch of perfume, Heena shouted the only language a slum survivor respected.

"Fifty silver taels!" Heena croaked out at top volume.

Old Lady Lin froze mid-yank. Her hands stayed locked in Heena’s collar, holding her suspended half an inch off the wood, as her sharp eyes narrowed to slits.

"...Huh?" the old woman rasped suspiciously. "What the hell did you just say?"

Heena was trembling slightly—both from the agonizing pull on her shredded back muscles and the sheer effort of holding her neck up—but she forced her voice to stay steady.

"Fifty taels," Heena breathed out, staring straight into the furious mother’s eyes. "I will pay you fifty silver taels just for letting him grind that rice and help me mix what I am making."

Old Lady Lin slowly looked Heena up and down, taking in the bloodstained clinic tunic, the bare dirty feet, and the cheap bundle of groceries sitting in the front room. A biting, mocking sneer twisted her lips.

"You barely have enough copper to buy a sack of rice to eat, and you dare open your mouth and talk to me about fifty silver taels?" Old Lady Lin scoffed, giving her collar a sharp shake. "What? Is your mother going to squat down and give birth to fifty taels of silver for you?!"

Heena’s jaw twitched at the vulgarity, another slight tremor running through her strained shoulders. "No," she gritted out. "But I will."

"Bah! What kind of lunatic nonsense are you spouting now?!"

"If I do not place fifty silver taels into your palm after this batch is finished," Heena declared coldly, locking her gaze onto the woman’s face, "then the property deed to my two-story apothecary shop in the East Market is yours. Legally and permanently."

This time, Old Lady Lin didn’t scoff.

An apothecary storefront in the East Market—even a dilapidated, haunted-looking one—was worth at least eighty to a hundred taels of silver just for the land and timber alone. If this crazy girl defaulted, Ren would get a massive upgrade from their cramped back-alley clinic. And if she somehow told the truth, fifty silver taels was enough to live like royalty for five years.

Slowly, Old Lady Lin lowered Heena back down onto the wooden plank and released her collar.

Without saying a single word, the old woman turned on her heel, marched over to the medicine counter, and whipped out a blank sheet of coarse ledger paper, an inkstone, and a pot of red cinnabar paste faster than a seasoned loan shark. She scribbled five aggressive columns of characters across the page with a heavy brush and slammed the paper down right beside Heena’s face.

"Write your name down!" Old Lady Lin ordered fiercely. "No verbal promises in this house! Black ink on white paper!"

Up near the ceiling, the System was practically wheezing with laughter, wiping a digital tear from its eye. "Wow, Host! You finally met your match, huh?! She didn’t just call your bluff, she brought out a binding mortgage contract in ten seconds flat!"

Heena stared sideways at the wet black brush Old Lady Lin was shoving toward her fingers.

There was just one massive problem. While she could read the characters of this empire thanks to the original owner’s passive memory, muscle memory for calligraphy was an entirely different beast. She had no idea what the original Lu Heena’s personal signature or brushstrokes looked like, and trying to write complex ancient script while lying flat on her stomach with a torn back would look like chicken scratch.

Ignoring the wet brush completely, Heena simply lifted her right hand, plunged her thumb directly into the pot of sticky red cinnabar paste, and pressed a heavy, crimson thumbprint squarely onto the bottom of the contract.

Old Lady Lin snatched the paper up to blow on the ink, only to freeze as she stared at the big red smudge at the bottom.

She slowly raised her head, looking down at Heena with an expression of profound, unmitigated disgust.

"Even though you were raised in a high noble estate and fed books since you were in diapers, you still sign a contract with a muddy thumbprint like an illiterate turnip farmer, huh?" Old Lady Lin sneered, shaking her head in utter disdain as she tucked the paper safely into her vest. "Completely useless being a noble. Ren! Pick up that pestle and start grinding the damn rice before I change my mind!"

Heena didn’t even bother wiping the red cinnabar paste off her thumb. Instead, she rested her chin back on the folded linen pad, completely unbothered by the accusation of illiteracy.

"Calligraphy doesn’t pay the bills," Heena rasped smoothly, her dark eyes tracking Ren as he nervously picked the heavy stone pestle back up. "And since fifty silver taels are now on the line, Mother-in-Law, you might want to close that curtain and guard the door. If anyone steals my formula before tomorrow night, neither of us gets paid."

Old Lady Lin’s temple twitched violently at the shameless form of address. "Call me Mother-in-Law one more time and I will sew your blistered lips together with catgut! I am only standing here to make sure you don’t trick my son into brewing illegal poison in my clinic!"

Despite her ferocious barking, the old woman marched over to the doorway, yanked the heavy cloth partition firmly shut, and planted herself beside the worktable with her arms crossed like an executioner overseeing a sentence.

Up near the ceiling, the System settled onto a wooden rafter with a bucket of imaginary popcorn. "Alright, Host. The clock is ticking, you’re wrapped up like a giant spring roll, and Grandma Scary is waiting to repossess your shop. How exactly are we turning a two-copper bowl of rice into fifty silver taels?"

"By introducing these primitives to basic chemistry," Heena replied mentally.

She turned her head slightly toward the worktable. "Ren. Stop grinding it dry."

Ren froze mid-strike, looking over at her in confusion. "Not dry? But if I don’t crush the grains dry, how will it turn into powder?"

"Dry-grinding rice in a stone mortar leaves jagged, microscopic grit," Heena explained, her voice steady despite the raw scrape in her throat. "When the courtesans out front put their current powders on, it cakes into their pores like wet wall plaster because they are just smashing shells and lead ore with a hammer. Pour warm water into the mortar. Soak the rice until it softens, then grind it into a thick, milky paste."

Ren blinked, his physician’s brain immediately catching onto the method. "Wait... you mean water-levigation? Like how we refine heavy mineral medicines to remove impurities?"

"Exactly," Heena said, approving of his quick wit. "Once you grind it into a liquid slurry, pour it into a wide basin and let the heavy, coarse grit sink to the bottom. Skim only the finest white milk off the top, spread it thinly over flat porcelain plates, and bake the moisture out over a low charcoal brazier. When it dries, scrape it off and pass it through that fine silk sieve I bought five times."