1RomanceEB Chapter 379 --379
Chapter 379 --379
Her gaze locked onto his footwear, and her brows knitted together in deep suspicion. She looked up, staring dead into his eyes. "Whose shoes have you stolen now?"
Samuel glanced down at his feet, offering a completely unbothered, cheerful smile. "A friend’s."
Heena stared at him in utter disbelief.
There was a well-known old saying in high society: *You can easily judge a person’s wealth, status, and true character by their shoes.* And it was a universal truth. A wealthy noble who cared about their dignity and possessed endless coins would never wear the same pair of shoes repeatedly until they wore out. The moment a shoe showed even a microscopic scuff or a tiny tear, they would throw it away without a second thought.
That was exactly what Samuel used to do back home. No matter how poorly the old man treated them or how much he complained about expenses, Samuel always insisted on having countless pairs of flawless shoes. His footwear was never worn out.
Then there was the second type of person: someone who owned a heavily worn pair of shoes but took such meticulous care of them—polishing the leather, cleaning the soles—that they still looked dignified. That showed a person of true pride, humility, and upstanding character.
And then came the third category. A person whose shoes were literally screaming for mercy, splitting at the seams, and held together by sheer luck and thread. This only happened when a person was completely destitute, or when they performed grueling, backbreaking manual labor every single day.
Right now, Samuel’s stolen shoes were exactly like that.
The rough, uneven stitching along the side was completely exposed. Just by looking at the frayed leather, anyone could guess that these shoes had been crudely repaired and stitched together at least two separate times. From the shape and the wear, it was painfully obvious that these shoes belonged to a low-ranking, hardworking estate servant.
Heena’s jaw tightened. She opened her mouth to berate him for being so careless with his disguise, but just as the words were about to leave her lips, her sharp senses caught a microscopic shift in the air outside.
A presence. Someone was lingering just beyond the heavy courtyard window, lurking in the shadows of the veranda.
Heena’s expression didn’t change, but her voice instantly dropped into a loud, deliberate tone. "Guard, I am going to take a bath. Go and check if Grandmother is asleep or not."
Samuel’s eyes sharpened instantly beneath his mask. He knew his wife inside and out. The moment she called him "Guard" with that specific, icy edge, he understood that something was seriously wrong. He gave her a firm, silent nod, spun on his heel, and walked out of the chamber, his heavy steps intentionally echoing down the hall.
Left alone, Heena moved with fluid, unhurried grace. She reached up and unpinned her heavy silk shawl, letting it slide carelessly off her shoulders. Slowly, deliberately, she began to undo the fastens of her outer gown, stepping out of the heavy fabric until she was left standing in nothing but her thin, white silk inner garments.
Through the sheer curtains, she felt the hidden gaze outside pause. Whoever was spying on her stared intently for a few silent moments, trying to catch a glimpse of any identifying marks or reactions. But the very second the faint, heavy echo of Samuel’s returning footsteps began to vibrate through the floorboards, the spy panicked. A soft, hurried rustle of fabric echoed outside as they quickly rushed away into the darkness.
Heena didn’t bother chasing them. She smoothly turned and walked into the attached bathing chamber.
The bathing room was vast and luxurious—par for the course for a powerful Marquis estate. It wasn’t modern, of course; there were no brass buttons or running pipes. Instead, the estate servants had already meticulously filled a massive, beautifully carved wooden tub with fresh water.
Heena dipped her bare foot into the water first. She closed her eyes as the perfect temperature washed over her skin—neither too hot nor too cold, just a beautifully soothing warmth. Stepping entirely into the tub, she let her body sink into the depths, slowly submerging her head completely beneath the surface.
Her long, dark hair unfurled in the water, floating around her shoulders like a cloud of silk thread. Thanks to Samuel’s obsessive, doting care over the past few months—always brushing it, oiling it, and washing it for her—her hair had become incredibly smooth and radiant.
As the quiet warmth of the water enveloped her ears, cutting off the noise of the outside world, a storm of calculations began to churn in Heena’s mind.
She didn’t waste her energy thinking about the spy outside. She already knew whoever it was had just been sent to verify if she was the original Seera or an impostor. In this nest of vipers, a spy could only be sent by one of five people: either three of the adopted grooms—excluding Kavien, since that idiot was too busy sucking up to her mother—the Marchioness herself, or the Marquis. Those five individuals were the only ones desperate enough to check her. To Heena, their pathetic little games didn’t matter. They were already walking into her trap.
Instead, what made Heena frown underwater was something much deeper, something cosmic.
From the exact moment she had entered this world to execute her mission, she hadn’t felt even a single tremor of a strong cosmic backlash. For an experienced hopper like her, this made absolutely no sense. Those who knew the rules of the system knew that in Heena’s previous missions, the cosmic backlash from altering a world’s plot was incredibly violent, threatening to rip her apart.
But here? Everything was going far too smoothly. The old man’s parental love for her had been terrifyingly genuine and intense. The male lead’s devotion to her was unyielding and fierce. Yet, the world’s penalty on her was completely nonexistent. The cosmic backlash was practically zero.
There were only two possible reasons for this anomalies.
First, the Guide of this world—the cosmic entity that mortals might call a God or Goddess—had either met with some catastrophic accident, or they had simply abandoned their post, leaving the world to run entirely on its own natural, chaotic rules. This wasn’t entirely uncommon; many ancient Guides grew bored and left their universes to spin out on their own.
But the second reason was far more dangerous. In serialized stories like this, the visible main characters weren’t always the true center of the universe. Sometimes, a hidden side character was the absolute favorite child of the world’s consciousness. If an interloper touched or harmed a world’s true favorite, they would immediately trigger a devastating, fatal cosmic counterattack. Heena hadn’t faced any such attack yet, which meant she hadn’t crossed paths with the true pivot of this world.
Suddenly, a memory flashed in Heena’s mind through the dark water. She remembered the strange, cryptic words Maya’s mother had whispered about her daughter before.
Heena’s eyes snapped open underwater. She didn’t want to complicate her current revenge plot, but her hyper-analytical mind could not ignore a variable this massive. She desperately needed to investigate the truth behind this world’s hidden narrative.
With a sudden, sharp movement, Heena broke through the surface of the water, gasping for air as her long hair slicked back against her shoulders, her eyes burning with a cold, renewed focus.