Chapter 747 --747
Old Lady Lin flinched violently, taking a step back as if she had been physically slapped. In this matriarchal empire, where men were expected to be soft-spoken, weeping willow branches who obeyed their mothers without question, a son screaming at his matriarch in the middle of the street was practically scandalous.
"First, take her inside!" Ren ordered, his voice cracking with frantic, undeniable authority. He didn’t care about the mud ruining his robes, nor did he care about the terrifying rumor Heena had just shouted to the entire market. He scrambled across the dirt on his knees and pressed his clean, trembling hands directly over the profusely bleeding wound on Heena’s chest, trying to apply pressure. "Her internal stitches are completely torn! If we leave her out here arguing about whose fault it is for another minute, she is going to die! Grab her shoulders and help me lift her!"The sheer panic in her son’s voice finally snapped Old Lady Lin out of her bitter tirade. Swallowing her pride and her disgust, the old woman hurried forward, grabbing Heena firmly by the shoulders while Ren took her waist and legs.
Together, they hauled her limp, blood-soaked body out of the alleyway and dragged her over the splintered threshold of the clinic.
The familiar, sharp scent of dried mugwort, bitter ginseng, and clean rubbing alcohol washed over Heena’s fading senses. It was a stark contrast to the acrid smoke and rotting garbage of the morning market.
"Put her on the back table! The clean one!" Ren shouted, practically kicking the door to the treatment room open.
They hoisted her up onto the firm wooden examination table. Heena let out a weak, involuntary groan as the rough movement ground her fractured ribs together. Her vision was completely blackening at the edges, her consciousness hanging on by a rapidly fraying thread.
"Boil water! Get the heavy shears and the thickest catgut thread we have!" Ren commanded, his hands already flying over her ruined tunic, desperately trying to unknot the linen bindings without causing further trauma. His fingers were completely slick with her blood, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps. "And bring the crushed Sanqi root! We have to stop the hemorrhaging right now!"
Old Lady Lin didn’t argue this time. She scrambled toward the apothecary cabinets, her hands flying over the wooden drawers with practiced speed.
Through the suffocating haze of pain, Heena forced her dark eyes open just a fraction. She looked up at the young man leaning over her. Ren’s hair was coming undone from its neat pin, falling in messy strands across his pale, sweat-slicked face. His beautiful, usually timid eyes were entirely focused, burning with the fierce, uncompromising determination of a healer refusing to lose a life on his table.
He really is a good doctor, Heena thought faintly, a tiny, bloody smirk tugging at the very corner of her lips.
"Host, stay with me! Do not close your eyes!" the System screamed.
But the Black Lotus had finally reached her absolute physical limit. As Ren’s shears cut through the blood-soaked linen, exposing the catastrophic damage to her chest, Heena let out one last, shuddering exhale, and let the darkness pull her completely under.
Under normal circumstances, the disciplinary beating of a noble daughter—even an unfavored, illegitimate concubine’s daughter—was never meant to be fatal. The Lu Matriarch only cared about maintaining the family’s ruthless dignity, not committing open filicide in her own courtyard.
However, Su Jin was not one to leave loose ends. Behind the Matriarch’s back, that venomous brother-in-law had slipped heavy silver into the palms of the estate guards, bribing them to put their full, crushing weight behind the wooden paddles.
The resulting trauma wasn’t a clean, surface-level laceration that could simply be sewn shut. The heavy blows had pulverized the muscle tissue across her back and ribs, leaving the skin severely contused, split, and weeping from deep tissue damage. To make matters infinitely worse, after being thrown into the filthy mud of the slums without a drop of medicine, she had spent the last twenty-four hours abusing the vessel relentlessly.
This ancient world had no modern chemical antiseptics, no intravenous antibiotics, and no magic pills that healed crushed flesh in a second. Physicians here relied on strong grain alcohol to clean wounds and thick herbal pastes to bind the skin together. Because the worst of the damage was across her back and ribs, Heena hadn’t been able to reach or clean it properly herself. When she had collapsed onto the dusty burlap sacks in her ruined shop the night before, and later rolled around in the dirt digging a hole to bury Old Zhao’s chicken, fine sand, soot, and debris had seeped straight through her sweat-soaked bandages and ground directly into the raw, pulverized flesh.
Then, she had sprinted across a crowded market and swung a heavy timber beam with all her might.
By the time they got her onto the examination table, the internal strain and deep-seated dirt had triggered a massive, raging infection.
Once the immediate panic subsided and Old Lady Lin came back to her senses, traditional propriety immediately took over. No matter how dire the medical emergency was, Ren was still an unmarried young man. The old woman had firmly shoved her son out of the way behind a wooden screen, taking over the brutal work of scrubbing the sand and scorched pepper dust out of Heena’s ruined back with sharp alcohol, applying heavy layers of black drawing salve, and binding her entire torso in tight, immobile linen wraps.
The herbal decoctions they had given her the first night had only been enough to temporarily stabilize her vital signs. They couldn’t stop the raging systemic fever that hit her two hours later.
As dusk fell over the clinic, Heena’s skin burned like a furnace.
"The inflammation has gone deep into the blood," Old Lady Lin muttered grimly, wiping her hands on a towel as she looked down at Heena’s flushed, motionless face. "I’ve packed the wounds with the strongest cooling herbs we have, and we’ve bled the stagnant heat from her fingertips. There is nothing else we can do tonight. We have to wait until tomorrow morning. If the fever breaks by dawn, she lives. If it doesn’t... she won’t wake up."
Ren didn’t leave the bedside. Sitting on a low wooden stool with his sleeves rolled up, he dipped a clean linen cloth into a basin of cold well water, wrung it out, and gently placed it across Heena’s burning forehead, repeating the motion over and over as the hours bled together.
Up near the ceiling, invisible to the two mortals, the System was having an absolute meltdown.
The golden lion cub paced frantic circles in the air, tugging at its own digital mane as red warning screens flashed violently around Heena’s head.
"Why?! Why the hell does my Host always do this?!" the System groaned, half-furious and half-terrified. "You are supposed to be a heartless villain! Why do you always end up throwing your life away for random side-character NPCs just because they gave you a bowl of soup?!"
The AI was genuinely freaking out. Transmigrators were not invincible gods; if the physical vessel suffered total organ failure from sepsis, the Host’s soul would be violently ejected and obliterated.