Chapter 805 --805

Chapter 805: Chapter-805

"Good. Use good materials. I don’t want to pay for repairs again in a few months."

The carpenter accepted the money and nodded.

"Don’t worry. I know my craft."

"Then we understand each other."

Heena left the details in the carpenter’s hands.

She had spent enough time worrying about every coin she parted with. There was no point in saving money on materials only to spend twice as much fixing the damage later.

Besides, the shop wasn’t just a place to earn money anymore.

It was becoming the foundation of her future.

By the time Heena left Carpenters’ Alley, the system’s earlier behavior had begun bothering her again.

The emergency alert. The missing hosts. The systems that had supposedly been killed. The sudden recall to headquarters.

The system had tried to reassure her, but Heena wasn’t an idiot.

She had spent too many lifetimes navigating dangerous situations to accept a vague explanation when the available evidence pointed toward something far worse.

If an interdimensional organization was urgently recalling its systems, something serious had happened.

Something serious enough that even an AI usually determined to annoy her had looked genuinely unsettled.

Heena frowned as she walked.

"Systems getting killed, hosts disappearing, and headquarters issuing emergency recalls..."

She paused.

"What exactly are you hiding, you little furball?"

Of course, the system wasn’t there to answer her.

Heena clicked her tongue.

"Fine. Keep your secrets. I’ll find out eventually."

She glanced toward the surrounding buildings.

The capital was beautiful, there was no denying that. Curved rooftops stretched over crowded streets, decorative wooden beams framed the storefronts, and intricate carvings adorned the entrances of wealthy establishments.

But beauty wasn’t the same as safety.

Most of those buildings relied heavily on wood. Their roofs were covered in tiles, their doors were made from timber, and their interiors contained enough flammable material to turn a small fire into a disaster.

A coordinated attack involving fire arrows could destroy an entire street before anyone had time to react.

And if a group of trained enforcers decided to force their way into a building, a flimsy wooden door wouldn’t stop them for long.

Heena slowed her steps.

Her eyes narrowed.

"I’m thinking about this all wrong."

A passing merchant glanced at her.

"Did you say something, miss?"

"No."

Heena continued walking.

I’ve been treating the shop as a business project. But what if trouble comes knocking before I even make my first sale?

She looked at the wooden rooftops lining the street.

"Beautiful," she murmured. "And completely useless if someone decides to set them on fire."

The merchant, who was still close enough to hear her, looked at the roof above his shop.

Heena paid him no attention.

Wooden doors, wooden shelves, wooden roofs. One fire, and half the street could turn into ashes.

She frowned.

"I need a stronger door. Reinforced walls, too."

The merchant stared at her.

"Miss, are you planning to fight a war?"

Heena turned to look at him.

"Hopefully not."

"Then why do you need reinforced walls?"

"Because I prefer not to die if one starts."

The merchant’s mouth fell open.

Heena walked away before he could ask anything else.

She might not be able to build an actual fortress, but she could certainly make her home and business harder to attack.

A stronger door. Reinforced walls. Better locks. A roof that wouldn’t turn into a blazing inferno at the first sign of trouble.

The expense would be considerable, and the neighborhood aunties would probably decide that she had lost her mind.

Heena couldn’t care less.

Let them gossip.

They could call her paranoid, unreasonable, or even cursed for all she cared. None of those accusations would be particularly useful if someone came knocking on her door with murderous intentions.

She would rather spend her money on unnecessary precautions and never need them than find herself wishing she had prepared when it was already too late.

"Fine," she muttered. "I’ll reinforce the building while I’m at it."

With that decision made, Heena turned toward the district where stone masons and metalworkers conducted their trade.

She needed to find out how much it would cost to reinforce the courtyard walls, strengthen the entrances, and add iron fittings to the doors.

Perhaps she could even replace some of the more vulnerable roofing materials.

Her mind was already occupied with measurements, expenses, and possible construction plans when she stepped out of the narrow alley and back onto the main thoroughfare.

Then she stopped.

The afternoon sunlight had disappeared.

In its place, the sky had turned a deep shade of indigo, and red paper lanterns were beginning to glow beneath the eaves of the tea houses. Merchants were packing away their unsold goods, while shopkeepers prepared to close their doors for the night.

The heavy materials district would be shutting down soon.

Heena looked toward the distant rooftops, then down at her aching legs.

Only then did she remember that she had been running around the capital for nearly the entire day.

Her back was still recovering, and the hours of walking had left her thoroughly exhausted.

She released a long breath.

"Tomorrow," she muttered, pulling her black cloak closer around her shoulders. "I’ll deal with the masons and metalworkers tomorrow."

There was no point in exhausting herself to the point of collapse. She could continue making arrangements in the morning.

For now, she needed to return home, eat a proper meal, and get some rest.

As she began walking, she glanced at the sky one last time.

"First, food storage. Then the shop. Then the walls and roof. After that, I’ll figure out what the system is hiding."

She paused.

"And somewhere in between, I should probably find a way to sleep without being eaten alive by mosquitoes."

A tired sigh escaped her.

"Honestly, being a transmigrator is exhausting."

With her head full of construction plans, business calculations, and increasingly elaborate survival strategies, Heena finally turned away from the market.

The exiled daughter of the Lu family made her way home beneath the glowing red lanterns, completely unaware that the man she had narrowly missed seeing that afternoon might soon become the most dangerous complication in her carefully constructed plans.

And somewhere behind her, a little digital lion cub was desperately hoping that she would remain unaware for just a little longer.

The toxic, hand-rolled mosquito coils worked like an absolute charm. After her first full, uninterrupted night of sleep since arriving in this dimension, Heena woke up with her mind sharp, her exhaustion cleared, and her fortress blueprint fully finalized.

She marched straight into the suffocating, sulfur-choked heat of the Iron District.

In this era, iron was staggeringly expensive. Without modern blast furnaces or mechanized mining, extracting and forging the ore was backbreaking, intensely labor-heavy work. While the military and the nobility commissioned iron weapons, horseshoes, and carriage reinforcements, commoners strictly relied on wood.

Heena navigated through the thick, stinging smoke and the deafening clanging of hammers until she found the largest, most active forge on the street. It was operated by a heavily muscled, soot-covered female blacksmith and her two brawny daughters. They were rhythmically pounding a glowing red iron bar on a massive anvil, their biceps bulging with every strike. A quiet, older man—the blacksmith’s husband—sat in the corner, carefully polishing a set of finished iron nails with a rough cloth.