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After taking the dementia medication, Katharine Hepburn still occasionally forgot things in daily life.
However, those moments felt less like symptoms and more like the behavior of an elderly child seeking attention.
At the same time, many subtle signs showed that her condition had genuinely improved.
The most obvious change was that she no longer stopped halfway through an action, unable to remember what she was trying to do next.
There had been several occasions before when she had simply stood where she was and wet herself, so embarrassed afterward that she cried.
Sometimes she forgot where the bathroom was.
Other times she genuinely forgot what she had intended to do, even when her bladder could no longer hold out.
Now those situations had completely disappeared.
She appeared to have returned to a normal life.
Although she still enjoyed being the center of attention, she had Katie by her side, and Katharine Hepburn had always been a highly independent woman.
As a result, those attention-seeking behaviors never became frequent enough to annoy anyone.
Some elderly people could be even worse than children.
Take your eyes off them for a moment and they'd create all sorts of trouble, as though causing problems for others was the only way to feel a sense of authority as an elder.
Katharine Hepburn wasn't like that.
Another person who deeply felt the improvement was her private caregiver, Maria Thomson.
There were still tasks that Henry, as a man, wasn't suited to handle personally, so Maria's role remained important.
But with her workload significantly reduced, how could she not be pleased?
Still, matters related to the dementia medication were far from over.
As word leaked out from the Indian pharmaceutical company, people gradually began seeking out Henry in New York.
Some merely probed for information.
Others arrived as representatives of various interests, hoping to negotiate.
From their differing approaches, Henry could gauge the strength of the organizations behind them and how much accurate intelligence they possessed.
After all, the dementia medication was patented only in India.
In Europe and North America, the field remained completely open.
Had Henry not limited the licensing agreement to manufacturing and sales within India alone, the ambitious executive running the company would already have attempted to use the drug as a springboard into Western markets and elevate his firm into the ranks of major pharmaceutical corporations.
The drug genuinely possessed that kind of potential.
There was even room for further research into whether it could treat other neurological disorders.
Perhaps when the original partnership had been negotiated, the other party had only agreed out of respect for Jin Ge and hadn't truly taken the project seriously.
As a result, Sujay Patel—the nephew of Jin Ge's steward Karan Patel, and the man who had represented Henry during negotiations—had inserted a considerable number of restrictions into the contract.
Those restrictions mattered.
Some corporations would simply ignore the wishes of individual inventors and drag any future lawsuits out indefinitely.
However, there was one crucial element in the manufacturing process:
A specialized refining device supplied by Henry himself.
This was also the reason other pharmaceutical companies couldn't successfully replicate the medication, even after analyzing the finished product and reviewing the Indian patent filings.
The machine was a nano-scale filtration and purification unit.
It could selectively isolate specific molecules from chemical solutions at the nanometer level while removing impurities to a purity of 99.9999999%—nine nines.
Within Kree Empire and Skrull Empire pharmaceutical technology, this was considered a basic processing step.
Earth's medical technology had not yet reached that level.
The relevant scientific concepts already existed in laboratories, but nobody had yet realized their potential applications in pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Henry never explained the machine's actual purpose to the Indian company.
He merely required that all solutions pass through the machine during production as a mandatory "filtration" step.
As long as the number of machines remained unchanged, the company couldn't significantly expand production.
The machine's throughput effectively determined the maximum output of the drug.
Without access to such equipment, rival manufacturers naturally couldn't reproduce the same results.
Even the Indian company itself had conducted tests and discovered that medications produced with and without the machine yielded noticeably different effects.
Furthermore, there was only one machine.
Even by Indian standards, they hadn't been bold enough to dismantle it for reverse engineering.
The contract clearly stated that if the machine's tamper seals were broken, Henry would no longer provide maintenance or support.
As long as the machine remained operational, the production line continued running.
And as long as the production line ran, money flowed in endlessly, almost like printing cash.
Even though this wasn't a chronic medication requiring lifelong use, it occupied an entirely untouched blue-ocean market within the pharmaceutical industry.
If the machine disappeared, production would stop immediately.
Anyone capable of basic arithmetic understood which option was more profitable.
If someone truly chose to kill the goose that laid golden eggs, Henry could only laugh.
What else was there to say?
His primary goal had always been to verify the medication's effectiveness.
The people he wanted to help had already been helped.
As for everyone else, fate could decide.
Although Sujay Patel had negotiated an excellent profit-sharing arrangement for the drug, Henry never cared much about the money itself.
Even without firsthand experience, he'd heard plenty of stories about how business was conducted in India.
The reason Stark Pictures' Indian subsidiary consistently paid dividends was because it worked directly with Jin Ge, and the Eternal was willing to do Henry a favor.
The pharmaceutical partnership, however, involved an additional layer of separation.
Henry had approached the matter with a simple mindset:
If he received his share, great.
If he didn't, that was normal.
So when the Indian company used Sujay Patel as an intermediary to express its desire to expand production and enter Western markets, Henry simply ignored them.
Part of the reason was that, after seeing the drug's profitability, the company had begun withholding Henry's contractual revenue share under the excuse of needing capital for expansion and reinvestment.
Nothing in the contract authorized such actions.
They even openly threatened that if he wanted future profit distributions, he should send them more "filtration machines."
The situation eventually became serious enough that Jin Ge personally called Henry to apologize.
"Sorry, Henry. I never imagined that man would be so shortsighted and refuse to honor the contract."
"It's fine. I've already obtained the data that mattered most. The rest isn't particularly important to me."
"How can you say that? That money rightfully belongs to you. I've already contacted some people to intervene, but recovering your share may take time. That's why I called."
"No, Jin Ge. Don't trouble yourself. Leave it to Sujay. I actually want to use this opportunity to see whether he's capable."
"Oh? A test?"
"Yes, a test."
Henry leaned back as he spoke.
"There are plenty of tedious matters I don't want to deal with personally. If I can find someone competent to handle them, life becomes much easier.
"But I don't want to hire just anyone.
"This situation happens to provide a good opportunity for me to evaluate Sujay's abilities.
"So don't help him cheat."
Jin Ge chuckled.
"Don't help him cheat, huh? So if the kid comes to me for assistance on his own initiative, that's acceptable?"
"Within reason."
Henry laughed.
"If we personally showed up demanding payment, we'd get it. Honestly, we could probably bankrupt them through outright robbery if we wanted.
"But that wouldn't mean anything.
"What matters is how Sujay thinks and what actions he chooses to take. That's the part I'm evaluating."
"I understand."
Jin Ge's tone became thoughtful.
"To be honest, placing trust in a human being is never easy. I know that feeling well."
"Exactly. If I can use this amount of money to determine whether someone is worth relying on, then I'd say I'm getting a bargain."
"Understood," Jin Ge said from the other end of the line.
"I'll keep an eye on the kid for you as well."
"Thanks."
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