Ruan Mei picked up a plum blossom cake and an Immortal's Delight and handed them to Herta.
Herta took them, but her gaze lingered on the figure growing smaller in the distance—the man still fleeing with his entire stall on his back. "Ruan Mei, that guy refused to sell to me and ran away. I'm not happy about it."
Ruan Mei blinked, then nodded with a faint, knowing smile. "This is the Xianzhou. Try not to draw too much attention, unlike before."
Taking Ruan Mei's silence as assent, Herta curled her lips in a confident smirk, flicked the brim of her magic hat, and summoned her magic key.
Scotty, still carrying his stall, had fled all the way from the The Sleepless Earl in Central Starskiff Haven to Changle. The Xianzhou natives stared at him with strange looks.
He glared back. "What are you looking at?! If you're not buying anything, stop staring!"
Just as he thought he had escaped, spatial ripples from magic mirrors appeared around him. He instinctively tried to flee—only to find himself, along with his stall, teleported back to where he started, before The Sleepless Earl.
His eyes went wide in disbelief as he looked around. The moment he saw Herta and Ruan Mei, his pupils contracted in sheer terror.
He stammered, "Bl-black! Black! Ruan... Ruan Tower lady?! No, Black Plum lady?! That's not right either—"
Herta barely glanced at the flustered, incoherent man. "It's the great Madam Herta and the peerless Madam Ruan Mei. Got it?"
Scotty nodded frantically, paralyzed by fear.
Herta crossed her arms. "I wanted to buy something. Why did you run the moment you saw me? Wait... you look familiar."
Scotty was already beside himself with terror. To him, Herta and Ruan Mei were the embodiment of absolute horror.
"G-great Madam Herta, please take whatever you like from my stall. No charge. Free."
Herta turned to Ruan Mei. "What do you want? I'll pick for you."
Ruan Mei sighed, glancing at Scotty—the "lone wolf" had been scared out of his wits, just like Silver Wolf.
She shook her head. "Herta, forget it. Let's just go have tea at The Sleepless Earl."
"Fine. I'll listen to you."
With that, Herta and Ruan Mei walked away. Scotty breathed a long sigh of relief.
Once upon a time, meeting the notoriously eccentric geniuses—Madam Herta and Madam Ruan Mei—was harder than reaching the stars. And now? He kept wandering to the edge of despair.
"Sigh. I must have done too much evil in my first half of life. It takes a villain to torment a villain."
With that final lament, he resumed hawking Xianzhou specialties, an unwanted tear tracing down his cheek.
---
At The Sleepless Earl, the storyteller was saying, "...The second half of the High-Cloud Quintet's story will continue tomorrow at the hour of Chen. For now, let me tell you the legend of the unparalleled genius—Madam Herta, Genius Society member #83."
In a private room, Herta, who had been calmly drinking tea with Ruan Mei, frowned. "Why do they have to bring up Genius Society member #83? I have far more fitting titles."
Ruan Mei, serene and unfazed, looked at Herta. "In the eyes of ordinary people, the Genius Society is already an absolute existence. Every year, scholars of the Intelligentsia Guild exhaust themselves trying to gain an audience with Nous and become geniuses. But for most of them, that is harder than reaching the stars."