lcionline Chapter 361 --361
Chapter 361 --361
The next day came and went, bleeding away into the sweltering, unforgiving heat of the capital, and Heena had almost absolutely nothing to show for it.
Which was, if she was being ruthlessly honest with herself, entirely predictable.
This wasn’t some cheap, serialized play where the protagonist casually wandered into a fragrant teahouse, dropped a single silver coin on the table, struck up a convenient conversation with a gossipy merchant’s wife, and walked out forty minutes later with the complete, annotated history of a noble family’s darkest, most guarded secrets. That was simply not how real information worked in the capital. Real information was slow. It was stubborn, paranoid, and highly defensive. It hid in places you couldn’t reach without either extensive time or high-level access — and right now, as a supposed dead woman wearing a young master’s disguise, she had a desperate lack of both.
What she had managed to scrape together after ten hours of walking the blistering streets was agonizingly thin. A few jagged fragments of rumor whispered by the estate’s lower laundry maids that may or may not connect to anything real. A dark, twisted theory that felt exactly right in her bones but had absolutely zero hard evidence underneath it to support the immense weight of an accusation. It was half a picture assembled from Seera’s fractured, traumatic memories, and the rest patched together by Heena’s own predatory instinct.
It was not nothing. But it was also nowhere near enough to act on without getting herself killed.
She sat on the edge of the stiff inn bed that evening, the heavy summer air clinging to her skin like a second, unwanted garment, and stared blankly at the plastered wall across from her.
The System sat beside her on the mattress, blissfully quiet for once.
His small luminous form was curled tightly near her hip, the faint warm gold of his coat casting a soft glow against the floorboards that no one else would ever see. He had spent the entire grueling day at her side — watching her work, watching her hit dead end after dead end with the patient, grinding methodicalness of someone who refused to let frustration show on her face — and had possessed the rare, newly acquired decency not to make a single sarcastic comment about the lack of results. Not one. It was, Heena privately acknowledged, a significant personal growth moment for him.
She didn’t say so out loud. She didn’t want to encourage him.
The problem, she had known going in, was layered with lethal complications that compounded each other in deeply unhelpful ways.
Tailing the Marquis directly was absolutely out of the question. The man had spent two decades soaking his boots in the blood and paranoia of the border military camps. He possessed the highly honed, lethal situational awareness of a veteran commander who had survived long enough to become one — he would spot an amateur tail in an instant, and his first reaction wouldn’t be to ask questions. It would be to draw a blade. The four adopted grooms, however, presented an entirely different and equally insurmountable nightmare. They had spent over a decade growing up alongside Seera from childhood. They had eaten at the same table and studied in the same courtyards and argued over the same tutors. They wouldn’t just look at her disguise — they would recognize the specific tilt of her chin, the gait of her walk, the exact shape of her eyes in a crowded market from twenty paces away without even consciously trying.
And the security surrounding all of them was not the kind you tested casually and survived the lesson.
She was intimately, uncomfortably aware of her own fragility right now. She was neither invisible nor armed with extraordinary martial ability nor protected by any powerful backing that could pull her out of trouble if she stumbled into it. As for her true status as the Marquis’s legitimate daughter — she carried absolutely no proof of her identity. Not a document. Not a witness. Not a single object that couldn’t be dismissed or destroyed.
If she acted recklessly and was caught lurking near the inner walls by any of the family’s elite guards, her second life could be snuffed out in a fraction of a second. They didn’t need a grand trial. They merely had to claim she stole a silver cup — or casually accuse her of being a deranged stalker — and it would provide a perfectly valid, entirely unquestionable legal reason to execute her on the spot. Such was the miserable, entirely worthless value of a commoner’s life when placed on the scales against the absolute, suffocating weight of noble authority.
She had absolutely no intention of gambling her life just to see if her so-called family harbored a single shred of humanity or remorse.
Never.
So instead, she had spent the entire day operating in the shadows and doing the unglamorous, essential work that nobody in those cheap serialized plays ever showed. She had carefully, methodically scouted the full perimeter of the aristocratic district, treating the streets the way she had once treated unfamiliar battlefields — not as scenery, but as terrain. She memorized the exact number of steps on every stone staircase so she wouldn’t trip on them in the dark. She mapped the blind spots of every twisting alley, traced the patrol rotation of the city watch down to the minute, and located every hidden path, servant’s entrance, and narrow escape route and tested where each one led.
If she was going to tear this family apart, she needed to own the ground she was fighting on first.
She rubbed the back of her neck, tipping her head slightly to one side until her spine cracked.
The System lifted his chin from his paws and looked at her.
.
.
Heena was still sitting exactly as before—slumped, staring blankly at the wall—when a quiet, rhythmic knock sounded at the door.
"Come in," she said, not even bothering to move.
The door clicked open, and Samuel stepped inside, balancing a large wooden tray in his hands. He nudged the door shut with his foot and paused, taking in her exhausted, defeated posture.
"I heard you haven’t eaten anything since we returned," he said softly.
Heena blinked, finally dragging her gaze away from the wall. "No. I’m full. I just don’t have an appetite."
Samuel didn’t argue. He walked over, set the heavy tray on the table in front of her, and pulled up a stool to sit across from her.
"First things first," he said calmly. "It’s night. You’ve been pushing yourself all day. You shouldn’t go to sleep hungry."
A faint, sudden smile flickered across Heena’s face, catching him off guard.
"Why?" she asked lightly. "If I sleep hungry, will the night cat come check my empty stomach?"
Samuel paused, tilting his head, a small smile tugging at his lips. "Who told you that?"
Instinctively she murmured, her gaze drifting. "My mother."
For a brief moment, something in her cracked.
The sharpness in her eyes softened, replaced by a warmth that didn’t belong to this world—or at least, not to the life she lived now. It wasn’t the distant memory of Seera’s aristocratic mother. It was older. Deeper.
Real.