At three in the morning, a new post appeared without a sound on the Flower Petal Forum, which had a huge number of fans.
—Urgent, my boyfriend is pregnant, what should I do, waiting online!!!
Such an unbelievable, eye-catching title perked up quite a few bored, lurking Petal fans.
Hands-on-hips.jpg: Let me see which big genius made this clickbait post. Truly fresh and original. It pleases me greatly.
Soon the Petal fans saw the big genius OP’s incoherent, disorganized plea for help.
【Here’s what happened. For certain reasons my boyfriend and I have been in a cold war for several days. I thought about it these past few days and felt we aren’t right for each other, so I decided to break up. But! Today he suddenly contacted me and said he’s pregnant, and it’s already three months, the doctor said it can’t be aborted QAQ. I feel like my life is so bitter. I’m only in my twenties, and I don’t want to be a mother this soon. I’m asking all you all-powerful netizens for help, what should I do now, ahhh, can I just run away?!! Is that illegal??】
1L: ? Do you want to take a look at what you’re saying?
2L: How many dishes did it take to get you this drunk (dog head)
3L: Oh, I get it, it’s a typo game, right? You deliberately typed “girlfriend” as “boyfriend,” and once the buzz builds you’ll patch it up. I advise you to go wash up and sleep. If you have this much time, you’d be better off hauling a few more bricks at a construction site.
4L: Following the person above, this counts as a scumbag exposing himself, right? Your girlfriend is pregnant and you want to run away? Stinking man deserves to die!
5L: smile.jpg: It’s not illegal, but it is shameless.
6L: Have clickbait posts degenerated to this level now? Full of holes, packed with things to nitpick, and you still dared to post it, that’s brave.
7L: Am I the only one who cares which hospital that doctor is from? (dog head) Asking so I can steer clear.
8L: Hahahahahaha, seeing that there are so many people in the stay-up-late cultivation crowd, I feel reassured.
9L: Let me timidly ask, am I the only one who hopes what OP said is true? Come on, this is a man getting pregnant, oh my, just thinking about it is so exciting.
10L: Sister above, at this stage our medicine is nowhere near the level of making a man pregnant. Even if it exists, that’s a hundred years from now. For now we can only write novels and dream.
11L: Uh… there’s no need to blow it up into such a big deal, is there? Is there a possibility that OP really did just make a typo??
The newly arriving netizens slowly stacked up tall towers of replies under 9L and 10L. Men giving birth was simply too talk-worthy a topic. Whether it was mockery, doubt, or hope, it all showed that once men could give birth, this world would undergo an earth-shaking change.
As a lurker, Jiang Zhi scrolled floor by floor through the netizens’ comments, reading with relish and clicking her tongue in amazement.
The traffic-driving tricks of certain companies these days really were endless. For the sake of buzz they dared to write anything.
But setting aside whether it was true or false, the situation OP described was a little similar to her own recent relationship, both in a cold war and preparing to break up.
She couldn’t help putting herself into that situation.
If that bastard Duan Heyu found out he was pregnant, he would definitely go pale with fright on the spot, afraid the state would take him away and slice him up for research. Never mind that he was over one meter eighty tall, his guts were smaller than his petty little mind.
Too bad. If men really could give birth, that would be great. Just imagining it made Jiang Zhi unable to hold back and laugh out loud, cackling away.
【Stop scolding me, stop scolding me, I swear this isn’t a clickbait post!】
Just as the netizens thought OP had been mocked into hiding and wouldn’t dare come out again, several new messages from OP popped up on the page.
【Every word I said is true. My boyfriend really is pregnant. If you don’t believe me, I can put up the hospital’s diagnosis. Absolutely no Photoshop! This is the evidence!】
【Image】
64L: ?? That’s it?
65L: …The censoring is so heavy that even your own mother wouldn’t recognize it, and you’re telling me this is evidence? Don’t be too funny.
OP immediately followed up with a reply: 【Emmmm, I didn’t want to censor it either, but if I don’t censor it, certain departments might notice right away and invite me for tea. The matter of men getting pregnant is still classified at the moment.】
The moment this message went up, it quickly stirred up even more buzz, and the netizens discussing in the thread grew more and more heated in their words.
98L: What departments are “certain departments”? Spell it out. Saying half and hiding half just to keep people hanging, you’re really something.
99L: OP: Don’t rush, I’m still making it up (dog head)
100L: Fly freely, OP, if something happens, you carry it yourself.
Besides the one-sided sarcasm and ridicule, some rational, analytical netizens who stuck to the facts also joined in.
109L: Actually there have long been cases abroad of men giving birth, but the man in question was transgender, hadn’t had his uterus removed, still had reproductive ability, and had a child through IVF. So, OP, if your boyfriend really is pregnant, I suggest confirming whether he has ever had gender reassignment surgery.
【Thanks for the reminder, sis (laughing-crying). But my boyfriend has definitely never transitioned. We’re childhood sweethearts who grew up together, we even bathed together when we were little~ (I watched that little birdie of his grow up.)】
OP had barely finished replying when a skeptical netizen immediately chimed in with a snide remark, and OP’s explanation was soon drowned in the many voices of doubt, all for nothing.
【I really can’t produce harder evidence, but it’s not that there is none, it’s that I can’t produce it. If you don’t believe me, then fine. All I can say is that he isn’t the first man to get pregnant. There were already several cases before him. This will be exposed to the public sooner or later, and then you’ll know. So don’t rush to scold me, it will all become clear in time. PS: I won’t reply in this thread again, and I won’t delete the post.】
OP left cleanly and neatly, and some netizens, as if they had won a victory, flooded the thread with comments and mocked wildly.
Jiang Zhi still hadn’t had enough. She had rarely found something this interesting to pass the time, and just like that it was gone.
What a shame.
She didn’t know whether OP would come back later. She casually bookmarked the post, quietly looking forward to what came next.
At the same time, this post with its prophetic flavor was put into the bookmark folders of many people who had been silently lurking and watching.
When Jiang Zhi exited the forum, she glanced at the time, rubbed her sore eyes, turned off the light, and went to sleep.
This year the Spring Festival came early. New Year’s Day had just passed and Haishi was already more than half empty, the usually traffic-filled streets turned cold and desolate.
In the bedroom with the heating on, Jiang Zhi huddled under the quilt in a cold sweat, her exposed little face scrunched into a ball, pale with pain.
Her period had never been regular, and each time it came it felt like going through the Ten Great Tortures of the Qing Dynasty, every second dragging like a year.
Curled up like a shrimp, Jiang Zhi shifted carefully, trying to find a position that would ease the pain.
Even though she moved as slowly as a turtle, she still inevitably tugged at her lower belly, and the pain made her draw in a sharp breath.
This is really fucked!
Which bastard was it that installed a reproductive function in women? This period thing really was completely unnecessary.
Not being able to match men in build and strength was one thing, so why add something that held you back this much!
Jiang Zhi nearly ground her back teeth to pieces. She had a bellyful of rage to take down some idiot, but all she could do was lie weakly in bed and stare.
“Xiao Zhi, are you feeling better?”
Hearing the voice outside the room, Jiang Zhi forced herself up and opened the door.
The moment her mother, Zheng Wan, saw how pale and weak her daughter looked, her heart ached terribly. She quickly helped Jiang Zhi over to sit at the edge of the bed and urged her to drink the brown sugar ginger tea she had brewed.
Both mother and daughter had trouble with menstrual cramps. Over the years they had been seeing Chinese medicine doctors and slowly regulating their bodies, and compared with the early years when the pain made their limbs cramp, it was already much better.
With a steaming cup of brown sugar ginger tea in her stomach, Jiang Zhi’s icy hands and feet gradually warmed up, and her brows smoothed out.
Zheng Wan let out a breath of relief, stuffed a fully charged hand warmer into her daughter’s arms, and instructed her with a soft look, “Pull the quilt over you and rest properly. If anything feels wrong, call Mom. Mom will be right in the living room.”
But Jiang Zhi’s mind wasn’t on that. She glanced toward the living room. “Did Old Jiang go out?”
“Yes. Today is your grandmother’s birthday, your father went out early this morning to your eldest uncle’s house.”
Jiang Zhi gave a displeased little snort. Old Jiang was fine in every way except for his blind filial piety. That old woman’s heart tilted all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and he still eagerly went and hovered in front of her.
Zheng Wan could see what her daughter was thinking and coaxed her gently and helplessly, “I know you don’t like your grandmother. The two of us can avoid seeing her, but your father is her own son, so no matter what he has to see her a few times. You don’t want that old lady making a scene at our house either, do you?”
Come to our house?
“That absolutely won’t do!”
Refusal was written all over Jiang Zhi. She had very much the air that if the old woman dared come, she would dare to go down together with her.
Zheng Wan stroked her daughter’s head and urged her with a warm smile, “All right, Xiao Zhi, hurry and sleep. By the time you wake up your father will be back too.”
Jiang Zhi lay back down. The bedroom wasn’t well soundproofed, and she could faintly hear the clinking of pots and pans in the kitchen. Even through the thick wall she could see Zheng Wan’s busy figure moving about.
The door of her childhood memories slowly opened.
“What kind of food did you make? It’s so awful, not salty, not sweet. Even pig feed has more flavor than this!”
“You can’t do housework, you can’t cook either, and all you know is eating and drinking for free. Three years of marriage and all you gave birth to was a girl. What did my son marry you for? Simply good for nothing! Marrying a woman like you was eight lifetimes of bad luck!”
“What’s the use of a girl studying so much? She’ll have to marry someone in the end anyway. Spending all that money on all sorts of messy hobby classes, not the slightest idea how to run a household frugally, you’re nothing but a jinx!”
The young Zheng Wan listened meekly to her mother-in-law’s scolding without a word, only silently holding little Jiang Zhi tighter, covering her ears and eyes.
Even so, those sharp, mean curses, thick with disgust, still seeped bit by bit into Jiang Zhi’s childhood.
At first Jiang Zhi would carefully try to please Old Woman Jiang, gaslighting herself that if her grandmother didn’t like her, she must have done something wrong.
Later she started going to school and studying, and after learning the two terms “feudal dregs” and “preferring sons over daughters,” something seemed to knock on her head and she suddenly woke up.
Huh, wasn’t Grandma exactly that son-preferring feudal remnant from the books?
A feudal-remnant old woman didn’t deserve to be called Grandma by her, and had even less right to come yapping at her and her mother!
So Jiang Zhi, only eight years old, dialed the police station and reported her own feudal-remnant grandmother.
Woo woo woo, the sound of police sirens rang through that whole little street, and the doorway of Jiang Zhi’s home was packed solid with neighbors who had come to watch the excitement.
Old Woman Jiang, pulled aside and lectured by the police comrades, had never lost face like this before. Her dark old face was bright red, and though she was angry inside she didn’t dare let it out, as obedient as a quail [1]as obedient as a quail (anchun, 鹌鹑) Metaphor, cowed into meek silence jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_3109850_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_3109850_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
Entirely gone was her usual smug, domineering look.
Little Jiang Zhi became famous in one stroke, seen as an idol by children from all the villages around.
After all, back then no child would have dared to call the police uncles and report that an elder was a son-preferring feudal remnant, strongly demanding that the police uncles throw her own grandmother in jail to reform herself.
For a long time this matter was the after-dinner talk of people in the alley. Old Woman Jiang, both angry and ashamed, moved straight out of Jiang Zhi’s home that very night and went off to her youngest son.
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