Chapter 544: Chapter-544
"Grandma is a terrifying monster who is equally well-versed in both classical poetry and cutthroat business. She wasn’t just miraculously born that way. Her mother might have been a traditional wife who suffered, but she made a choice. Grandma’s mother acted as a shield. She stopped that generational scar from fully passing onto her daughter’s body. She absorbed the pain and stopped eighty percent of the trauma."
Heena looked back out the window toward the Vanguard estate.
"And then, when Grandma had her own son—my father—she stopped the cycle completely. And when they got their granddaughter—the original Seera—Grandma literally did not let a single lick of that submissive, victim-mentality scar touch her body."
She turned her sharp, fox-like eyes back to the glowing System.
"That is how a mother should be," Heena declared fiercely. "When a daughter is born in this era, the very first thing her mother teaches her is how to win a husband’s favor, how to act coy, and how to silently endure. But if, instead, a mother taught her daughter how to be independent? If she taught her how to survive both inside and outside the household? If she made her understand her own absolute, inherent value?"
Heena scoffed, the sheer logic of it hanging heavily in the air.
"If they did that, do you honestly think these mediocre men could afford to keep so many concubines? Do you think a Prime Minister could murder his wives so easily if those girls had been taught to fight back?"
She shook her head, closing the debate once and for all.
"No, System. This era is not a complete dead end. There is education available. There are legal opportunities. But it entirely depends on the women to decide if they are willing to brave the fire to capture them, or if they prefer the familiar warmth of their cages. I will not bleed for someone who refuses to open the door."
The System clearly wanted to argue more. It hovered near the roof of the carriage, its little blue face twisted into a knot of moral frustration. But Heena simply closed her eyes and leaned back against the cushions, entirely shutting down the conversation. She had absolutely no desire to listen to a lecture on digital morality right now.
Soon, the heavy wooden wheels of the carriage ground to a halt outside the grand Marcuset estate.
Heena opened her eyes, grabbed her gloves, and stepped out as the footman opened the door. When her boots hit the paving stones, she looked around and immediately suppressed a heavy sigh.
These ancient aristocratic estates were ridiculously massive, and they had specific traffic rules. There were essentially three ways to enter the Marcuset compound:
1. The Main Front Gate: A grand, intimidating set of wide stone stairs meant strictly for foot traffic and formal visitors. The carriage parks in the street, and you walk up.
2. The Side Pavilion Gate: A wide, sloping entrance located a bit further down the wall, designed specifically so carriages could drive directly into the inner courtyards without the masters having to walk.
3. The Back Alley Gate: A hidden, completely unglamorous set of double doors in the rear alleyway, exclusively used by servants for bringing in daily rations, firewood, and hauling away trash.
The carriage had stopped directly in front of the grand stone stairs of the Main Gate.
Heena glared at her driver. Why had he parked here instead of driving through the side gate? Because the idiot had remembered a random command Heena had given him weeks ago about "preferring fresh air" and had strictly adhered to it without asking for an update.
She wanted to scold him, but her legs were stiff from sitting in the Imperial Court for three hours, so she decided a little bit of walking wouldn’t kill her.
However, just as she was turning toward the stairs, her sharp eyes caught movement out of her peripheral vision. A line of men carrying heavy loads was quickly and quietly filing into the Back Alley Gate.
’Wait, what the heck is that?’ Heena thought, her military instincts instantly flaring.
Fearing that someone was trying to smuggle something dangerous into the estate, Heena abandoned the grand stairs and hurriedly marched through the side corridors, bypassing the front reception and stepping directly into the main central courtyard to see what was going on.
The moment she crossed the threshold, she froze in her tracks.
"What in the world..." Heena muttered, utterly dumbfounded.
The main courtyard of the Marcuset estate was massive. It was designed to comfortably hold a regiment of armored soldiers for morning drills. But right now? It was completely, entirely impassable.
There were wooden boxes everywhere. Stacks of crates, parcels wrapped in expensive silk, intricately carved chests, and towering piles of mysterious goods covered nearly every single square inch of the paving stones. It was an absolute obstacle course. It was difficult to even take a single step forward without tripping over a box of what smelled like highly imported incense.
Heena looked at the towering mountain of newly purchased goods, her right eye twitching dangerously.
"What is all of this?" Heena demanded to the empty air, though she already knew the exact answer.
Who else could possibly be responsible for this level of chaotic, unhinged financial destruction?
Right on cue, a figure stepped out from behind a particularly tall stack of cedarwood chests.
"Oh! Wife, you are here," Samuel called out smoothly.
He was dressed in loose, comfortable white silk robes, looking effortlessly radiant and completely unbothered by the fact that he had essentially turned a military compound into a wholesale merchant warehouse.
But it wasn’t the insane amount of boxes that made Heena’s blood boil. It was what he was holding.
Samuel had a smooth wooden clipboard resting casually in the crook of his left arm. In his right hand, he held a traditional ink brush. He was actively writing inventory notes on the parchment attached to the board.
Heena stared at him, an intense, irrational wave of pure, unadulterated jealousy washing over her.
It wasn’t jealousy over the things he bought. It was his hands.
’How is he doing that?!’ Heena screamed internally.
That morning, she had ruined six sheets of fine paper trying to write a single paragraph while sitting down at a stable desk. She had to lay the paper perfectly flat, hold her breath, and write like an illiterate brute trying to defuse a bomb just to make it legible.
And here was Samuel, casually strolling through a maze of boxes, holding a clipboard in mid-air, and writing flawlessly with a wet ink brush while standing up.
Heena took a step forward, her eyes narrowing sharply. She squinted hard, straining her vision to focus on the small parchment clipped to his board from a distance, half-expecting to see a puddle of ruined black ink.
But there wasn’t a single flaw.
Even from a few feet away, she could see the characters. They were crisp, elegant, perfectly proportioned, and utterly smudge-free. He was executing master-level calligraphy with the casual ease of someone jotting down a grocery list with a ballpoint pen.
’Damn him,’ Heena thought, her absolute lack of ancient literary skills physically hurting her ego. ’Damn this beautiful, perfectly coordinated, money-wasting bastard.’
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