Chapter 797 --797

Chapter 797: Chapter-797

Then, the neighborhood women slowly turned to look at each other, their faces pale and their eyes wide with profound, staggering horror.

"Is this woman a maniac?" one of the women finally whispered, her voice trembling.

They had all heard the market rumors. They knew she had supposedly broken bones in the Black Alley, and they knew she had negotiated ruthlessly with the hardware merchants. They had assumed it just meant she was a strong-willed, tragic heroine who knew how to stand her ground.

But absolutely no one had anticipated this.

Usually, the Lu girl appeared so cool and polite. She smiled brightly, memorized their surnames, and gossiped with them over tea like a perfectly normal, slightly heartbroken young woman. But after seeing the completely dead, emotionless way she had choked a giant enforcer to her knees—and the terrifyingly easy way she had snapped back to a cheerful smile a second later...

Only one collective, undeniable thought echoed through the minds of the East Market elders.

The exiled Lu daughter wasn’t just a strong woman. She was an absolute, terrifying maniac.

Heena turned her back on the bolted door and surveyed the interior of her apothecary. Everything inside was mostly untouched, and Ren was nowhere to be seen—likely still at the herbalist guild or running errands. Thank heavens for that.

The Lu servants hadn’t even bothered trying to seize the actual inventory or equipment yet; they had simply smashed the lock and started throwing Madam Lin’s personal belongings out into the dirt purely to humiliate them. It showed exactly how the Lu Matriarch operated: petty, arrogant, and entirely reliant on fear. They truly didn’t have the guts for a real fight.

Heena kicked the splintered remains of the front door’s wooden lock aside and walked over to the massive rain-barrel resting in the corner of the room. She dipped a wooden ladle inside, splashing the freezing water over her face and neck to wash away the sweat and the lingering adrenaline of the street.

Standing a few feet away, Madam Lin stared at Heena’s back, her mind spinning in absolute turmoil.

Madam Lin had lived her entire life in the dusty alleys and crowded slums of the lower rings. She was no stranger to profanity. She had heard brawling drunkards swear so viciously that it would make a sailor’s ears bleed. It was a common occurrence in the gutters.

But Heena was a Lu.

No matter how disgraced or beaten she was, she was supposedly born in a golden cradle, raised behind high walls, and educated by the finest tutors in the empire. How could a sheltered aristocratic daughter curse with such filthy, casual venom? When Heena had choked that enforcer to the ground, she hadn’t sounded like a fallen noble at all. She had sounded like a ruthless alley punk who had spent decades surviving gang wars and slaughtering her way out of disasters.

Heena stood up, grabbing a coarse linen cloth from a nearby stool. She vigorously wiped the cold water from her face and hands. As she was rubbing her knuckles dry, she noticed the older woman staring at her.

Heena paused, lowering the cloth. "What happened?" she asked smoothly. "Is there dirt on my face?"

Madam Lin took a slow, trembling breath, desperately trying to reassert her authority. "I am taking my son," the old woman announced, her voice tight. "And we are going back to our south-alley clinic."

It was a test. A threat designed to force the girl to beg, to apologize, or at least explain herself to keep her only allies.

Heena merely paused. She looked at the older woman, slowly raised a single, elegant eyebrow, and tossed the damp towel onto the counter.

"As you wish," Heena said, her voice utterly devoid of emotion. "Go."

Madam Lin blinked, completely blindsided. She had expected the young woman to panic. Instead, Heena simply turned her back and started walking toward the kitchen courtyard, entirely unbothered by the loss of her live-in physician.

"Don’t you think you should explain something to us?!" Madam Lin blurted out, her frustration boiling over as she chased Heena’s retreating back.

Heena stopped. She calmly turned around, tilting her head with a dark, genuinely amused expression. "Explain what?"

"You never told us your family hated you this much!" Madam Lin accused, her voice rising in panic. "You never said they would send thugs into the streets to destroy our things!"

Heena looked at her, widening her eyes in mock surprise. She tapped her chin, putting on a deeply thoughtful, exaggerated gesture. "Well," Heena mused lazily. "Who exactly do you think kicks their beloved child out of their estate? A loving mother? I thought you had at least a bit of a brain, old woman."

Madam Lin clenched her frail, calloused fists. "Yes, families fight, and nobles throw tantrums! But no mother does that to her own flesh and blood! They beat you until you were on the verge of death!"

"Well, my parents did," Heena replied calmly, her face hardening into a mask of stone. "So what?"

"So what?!" Madam Lin gasped. "You never told us that staying with you would be this dangerous! If my son had been here today, what would have happened to him? They could have broken his arms!"

Heena stared at the older woman for a long, suffocating moment. The faint trace of amusement vanished from her face, replaced by the lethal, calculating edge of a syndicate boss.

"Madam Lin," Heena murmured, her raspy voice dropping into a chilling register. "Let’s not play games anymore."

Heena took a few slow, deliberate steps forward, closing the distance until she was looking directly down into the older woman’s eyes.

"Do you really think a kicked-out, disowned noble daughter is any better than a street beggar in my mother’s eyes?" Heena asked, her gaze piercing right through Madam Lin’s skull. "Did you honestly not know that befriending me was equal to declaring enmity against the Lu family?"

Madam Lin froze, her breath catching in her throat as Heena cornered her against her own hidden motives.

"Don’t try to sell me some sentimental nonsense," Heena sneered softly. "I never hid my condition from you. From the sheer state of my back when Ren pulled me out of that alley, you should have already guessed the truth. Do you really think my mother threw me out to protect me? To teach me a mild lesson?"

Heena leaned in closer, ruthlessly tearing open the unspoken, greedy gamble Madam Lin had made the day she took Heena in.

"Or did you think," Heena whispered, her voice dripping with venom, "that I would suddenly transform back into a wealthy noble daughter the moment my mother’s anger subsided? Did you think you were harboring a temporarily temporarily disgraced heiress, and that one day, the Lu Matriarch would welcome me home and reward the humble physician who saved me?"

The color completely drained from Madam Lin’s face. It was as if someone had violently ripped her chest open, exposing the exact, quiet calculation she had been nursing in the back of her mind for four days.

Heena looked at her utterly shattered facade with cold, dead eyes.