Chapter 748 --748
And if Heena died here, the System wouldn’t just lose its favorite partner—it would have to go back to the bureaucratic nightmare of the main server, take a massive penalty, and search through millions of souls to bind a new host.
And God only knew how hard it was to find a host like Heena! Ninety-nine percent of transmigrators were brainless romantics who immediately fell in love with the toxic main leads, cried over every moral dilemma, and ruined the plot with their stupidity. Finding a true, ruthless, career-focused Black Lotus who preferred building monopolies and crushing enemies over chasing romance was like winning the cosmic lottery.
"You better not die on me over a bag of table salt, you hear me?!" the System sniffled, floating down to curl up tightly beside her pillow like a worried guard dog.
Heena heard none of it.
Her unconsciousness was so absolute that she didn’t even dream. There were no memories of past lives, no tactical simulations, and no swirling nightmares. It was just a heavy, suffocating void of pure blankness.
Hours—or perhaps an entire day—slipped by in that dark abyss before a sharp, agonizing sensation finally dragged her back to the surface.
It was her throat. It felt as though someone had poured hot sand and broken glass down her windpipe.
Heena didn’t move her head. She couldn’t. Slowly, her heavy eyelids fluttered open a fraction of an inch. Her vision was blurry and swimming with heat, so she simply rolled her dark eyes weakly to take in the dim wooden beams of the clinic ceiling.
"Host?! Host, are you awake?!"
A sudden burst of golden light appeared right beside her cheek. The System practically threw itself onto her shoulder, hugging her neck with its phantom paws as huge, pixelated tears poured down its furry face. "Oh thank God! Your vitals finally stabilized! I thought you were going to flatline and leave me with some idiot newbie host!"
Heena wanted to tell the loud furball to shut up, or at least ask for water, but when she tried to part her lips, they didn’t budge.
Dehydration and the raging fever had completely dried out her mouth, leaving her cracked lips stuck together like glue. With a massive, exhausting effort, she forced her jaw to move, peeling her dry lips apart with a faint, painful sting.
She tried to wet them with her tongue, only to wince internally. Her entire mouth was a wasteland. Because she had been burning up with a high fever for hours without being able to swallow water, painful little fever blisters and raw, swollen bumps had erupted across her tongue and the insides of her cheeks. There wasn’t enough saliva in her mouth to wet a postage stamp.
Her head throbbed with a blinding, rhythmic migraine. Her back felt like it had been flayed open and pressed against a hot iron grate, and every breath pulled tightly against the stiff bandages wrapping her ribs. In this primitive era, there were no intravenous painkillers—any pain relief had to be boiled into a bitter soup and drunk orally, and since she had been completely comatose since yesterday noon, she had been enduring the raw, unmedicated agony of torn muscles and severe inflammation entirely raw.
She tried to shift her weight by half an inch to relieve the numbness in her shoulder.
Instantly, a white-hot bolt of pain lanced up her spine, so vicious that her vision went white and her breath caught in her blistered throat.
Lying frozen on the hard wooden plank, staring blankly at the ceiling while her body screamed in fifty different flavors of misery, a single, monumental wave of pure hatred washed through Heena’s mind.
Why the fuck, she thought bitterly, do I always transmigrate into a half-dead trash pile?
"Stop cursing the heavens and make a noise, Host!" the System urged, wiping away its pixelated tears as it hovered anxiously over her face. "The doctor is right there! If you don’t drink water soon, your throat is going to fuse shut!"
Heena rolled her aching eyes slightly to the left.
Slumped on a low wooden stool beside the examination table was Ren. He looked utterly exhausted. His pale cheek was resting on his folded arms against the edge of the wood, dark purple shadows bruised beneath his closed eyes, and a damp, lukewarm cloth still dangling loosely from his fingers over the side of a copper basin.
She tried to call out to him. She forced air up from her bruised lungs and pushed it past her vocal cords.
What came out was not a commanding aristocratic order. It was a pathetic, raspy croak that sounded like two dry autumn leaves scraping together on a tombstone.
"...Kuh."
It was barely audible, yet to a physician who had been sleeping on a hair-trigger vigil for thirty-six hours, it might as well have been a gong.
Ren’s eyelashes fluttered. He jolted upright instantly, nearly knocking the wooden stool over as his wide, bloodshot eyes snapped to her face.
"You’re awake!" he gasped, the relief in his voice so raw his tone cracked.
He instinctively reached out toward her shoulder, then froze mid-air, remembering both her shredded back and the strict boundaries of propriety his mother had screamed into his ears while bandaging her. Dropping his hand awkwardly, he scrambled up from the stool and hurried over to a small clay stove in the corner where a pot of clear liquid was kept barely warm.
"Don’t try to speak, and don’t move your back," Ren instructed quickly, returning to the bedside with a small porcelain cup and a clean wooden spoon. "Your fever burned so high yesterday that the moisture in your body completely dried up. If you try to gulp cold water right now, you’ll choke and tear the scabs on your ribs."
He dipped the tip of the spoon into the cup and carefully held it to her cracked, stuck-together lips.
Instead of plain water, it was lukewarm water infused with a tiny drop of wild honey and soothing licorice root. As the first warm droplets seeped between her lips, softening the dried skin, Heena felt a wave of relief so profound she nearly shivered.
Spoonful by excruciatingly slow spoonful, Ren patiently dripped the soothing liquid into her mouth. The cool licorice extract coated the raw, stinging fever blisters on her tongue and cheeks, taking the fiery edge off the inflammation before trickling down her sandpaper throat.
It took ten minutes just to finish half a cup. By the time her tongue no longer felt like a piece of salted leather, the heavy curtain separating the back treatment room from the front shop was abruptly yanked aside.
Old Lady Lin marched in, carrying a steaming black bowl of thick, pitch-dark medicinal sludge that smelled aggressively of boiled tree bark and crushed beetles.
The older woman stopped at the foot of the table, her sharp, weathered eyes narrowing as she saw Heena’s open eyes. There was no warm bedside manner on her face—only a complicated, sour scowl of grudging obligation.
"So the阎王 (King of Hell) refused to take you,"
Old Lady Lin grunted, setting the tray down with a sharp clack before shoving her son aside by his shoulder. "Out of the way, boy. Go check the drying racks in the courtyard. It is bad enough the entire east sector thinks you’re keeping a wild brigand in your bedchamber; you don’t need to sit here hovering over her like a newlywed husband !"