Samuel might have defended her honor in public, but Heena had never been a benevolent, forgiving person. Samuel had stopped the uncle from hitting her a second time, but the man had still put his filthy hands on her.

And Heena always collected her debts personally.

She touched her stinging cheek once, her eyes going cold. Standing up, she immediately stripped off the cumbersome, restrictive white mourning robes. She didn’t dress in the sleek, form-fitting assassin gear seen in martial arts dramas—she couldn’t fly across rooftops anyway. Instead, she dug out a simple, dark pajama-style suit. It was unassuming, loose enough for mobility, but tight enough not to catch on anything.

She tied a dark cloth securely over the lower half of her face and slipped out the back window.

Having spent weeks subjected to grueling labor as a lowly maid, Heena knew the layout of the Chen estate better than the master himself. She knew every blind spot, every overgrown path, and every shortcut. Moving silently through the shadows of the decorative bushes, she bypassed the bustling main courtyards and arrived at the isolated servant quarters completely undetected.

Peering through a crack in the wooden shutters of the designated recovery room, Heena assessed her target.

The uncle was lying on a low cot, his head heavily wrapped in bloody bandages. Beside him stood his wife, looking down at him with an expression of profound irritation rather than sympathy.

"You see?" his wife hissed, crossing her arms. "I have told you a thousand times to keep your hands to yourself and stay away from young girls! But no, you just *had* to go and grope Samuel’s new wife. Look where it got you. Now stay here and suffer quietly."

The wife didn’t even wait for a response. The relatives outside were hungry, and she had no intention of missing out on the funeral feast. Normally, custom dictated waiting until the body was at least prepared before gorging oneself, but these relatives were little more than starving vultures.

As soon as the wife marched out and the door clicked shut, Heena moved.

She slipped through the window with the practiced silence of a ghost.

The uncle, barely conscious and groaning in pain, slowly opened his eyes, sensing a shift in the room’s air. When he saw the dark-clad figure standing over his bed, his eyes widened in terror. He recognized the height and the build immediately.

Heena smiled, reaching up to slowly untie the mask covering her face, letting it fall away.

"You fucking moron," she whispered, her voice devoid of any warmth.

The uncle opened his mouth to scream for the guards, but Heena was faster. She grabbed one of his own dirty socks from the floor nearby and ruthlessly jammed it deep into his mouth, gagging him instantly.

Before he could even thrash, Heena seized his right hand—the exact hand he had used to grab her wrist and strike her face.

*CRACK.*

With a swift, brutal twist of her body weight, she snapped his wrist completely backward.

The uncle’s eyes bulged, his body arching off the cot as a muffled, agonizing scream tore at the back of his throat.

But Heena wasn’t done. As a veteran System Host who had survived countless worlds and played dozens of roles, she had acquired a terrifying array of skills. She knew human anatomy perfectly. She knew exactly where to strike a body to inflict the absolute maximum amount of excruciating pain without leaving a single visible bruise for a physician to find.

Her knuckles dug into the nerve clusters under his arms, her elbows struck the soft tissue of his floating ribs. She delivered a rapid, devastating series of strikes that sent his nervous system into absolute shock. The uncle convulsed on the bed, tears streaming down his face, completely unable to make a sound around the gag.

Finally, Heena stopped. She pulled a small, wicked-looking utility knife from her belt and pressed the cold steel directly against the erratic pulse of his throat.

"If you ever dare to speak a word of this to anyone," Heena whispered, leaning in so her cold eyes filled his entire vision, "I will return, and I will carve you to pieces."

She pulled the knife back just a fraction of an inch. Then, with surgical precision, she struck a specific, vital acupuncture point at the base of his neck with two rigid fingers.

The uncle’s body seized violently. The strike effectively paralyzed his vocal cords; Samuel’s dear uncle would not be speaking to anyone for a very, very long time.

By the time Heena stepped back, the man was literally foaming at the mouth, his eyes rolled back in a haze of pure agony and terror.

Satisfied with her work, Heena offered him a final, chilling smile.

Hearing the faint crunch of footsteps approaching down the gravel path outside, she smoothly vaulted back out the open window, melting into the shadows of the estate just as the door to the room swung open.

The aftermath unfolded exactly as Heena had calculated.

When the servants finally returned to the recovery room with a tray of bland funeral food, they didn’t find a resting patient. They found the uncle sprawled on the floor, twitching uncontrollably, his eyes rolled entirely to the back of his head, and thick white foam bubbling from his lips. He looked less like a man and more like a dismantled, short-circuiting machine.

Panic erupted immediately. The physicians on standby for the funeral were rushed in, but they were utterly baffled. In this era, medical diagnostics began and ended with taking a patient’s pulse and observing their tongue. Since Heena had expertly targeted deep nerve clusters and specific acupuncture points, she hadn’t left a single external bruise or broken the skin.

"His pulse is entirely chaotic," the lead physician declared, sweating profusely as he pressed his fingers to the uncle’s wrist. "But there is no physical trauma. It must be... a severe shock to the spirit."

Because the uncle still couldn’t utter a single syllable thanks to his paralyzed vocal cords, he couldn’t tell them about the terrifying, dark-clad woman who had tortured him. He could only lay there, weeping silently in sheer agony.

In the absence of a logical explanation, the terrified relatives quickly manufactured a supernatural one.

"It’s a curse," an elderly aunt whispered loudly in the main hall, clutching her prayer beads. "He disrespected the young master and the new bride in front of everyone! The Old Master’s spirit saw it from the afterlife and struck him down!"

"Vengeance from beyond the grave," another muttered, shivering.

Heena, sitting demurely in her white mourning robes with her veil perfectly in place, had to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from laughing out loud. Yes, the "Old Master’s spirit" had certainly delivered a vicious beating.

The rest of the day was a grueling, hectic blur of ceremonial wailing, burning incense, and managing terrified guests who were now walking on eggshells, desperately afraid of angering the estate’s resident ghosts.

But eventually, night fell.

The heavy gates were locked, the mourners retreated to their heavily guarded guest rooms, and an eerie, heavy silence descended over the Chen estate.