At twelve midnight, an amusing piece of news from the Neon Country climbed into the top ten of Weibo’s trending searches.
The trending title was: Neon Country boy applies for the Guinness World Record as the world’s first pregnant man.
The surfing netizens declared: the title is long, there are a lot of characters, they recognize all of them, but they don’t understand it.
【So Weibo trending really is just a matter of having money. Which 208 is this blocking a knife for this time?】
【Another day of worrying about the mental state of the Neon Country’s people (hands out)】
【Asking because I don’t know, does Guinness World Records have every kind of freakish category?】
【Is there a big shot who understands who can explain? What strange nonsense is Little Neon up to now?】
Before long a big shot really did pop up to point the way.
【I posted the screen recording of this Neon kid’s livestream on my homepage. All I can say is that it’s hard to comment. See for yourselves (dog head)】
The netizens who were idle anyway and might as well eat some melon swarmed into the commenting big shot’s homepage and clicked the pinned video, and a pale, chubby boy in a Neon school uniform appeared on camera.
As the big shot had said, it was a three-minute screen recording of a livestream, and what the boy said had been translated and written underneath.
【About two months ago I invited the girl I had a crush on to visit my home. My parents were out that day, so we naturally had relations.】
【Feelings? If we’re talking about feelings, it wasn’t like I imagined. In any case I probably won’t do it with her a second time.】
【Not long after we had relations, my belly started hurting inexplicably for a long time. I ate more and more, I got fatter and fatter, and I couldn’t summon the energy for class. My older sister happened to be pregnant at that time, and I felt our symptoms were similar, so I’m very sure I’m pregnant.】
【What? Men can’t get pregnant? No, that’s just your own wishful thinking. My intuition tells me I’m pregnant.】
【Does it matter that I haven’t gone to a hospital? The pregnancy test I bought at the pharmacy has already confirmed my guess is correct.】
The boy took out of his pocket a pregnancy test he said he had used not long before. The camera zoomed in, and you could clearly see the two red lines on the test.
【I will become the first pregnant human male on Earth. My name will ring out across the whole world and I will be someone the Neon Country remembers forever.】
The bullet comments rolling by fast underneath weren’t translated, but the netizens didn’t need a translation at all, because their reaction at that moment was the same as those Neon netizens’.
old-man-on-the-subway-looking-at-his-phone.jpg
Were the aftereffects of the virus this big? Nobody had heard that testing positive turned you mentally ill…
If this boy was mentally normal and only doing it for traffic, to grab eyeballs and heat, then he had succeeded, because this news didn’t only make Xia’s trending searches, next door the Universe Country was discussing it heatedly at that very moment too.
【So what does the UN say?】
【I don’t know what the UN says, I only care whether Guinness called the police.】
【Back from over the wall. Hahaha, Guinness officially didn’t pay him any attention at all, too lazy even to respond, dying of laughter!】
Xu Sui, unable to sleep in the middle of the night and coming across this trending search, casually shared the link with her good sister Jiang Zhi.
Xu Sui griped: 【What’s going on lately, why do these trending searches that make you laugh and cry keep showing up? Boring enough.】
Jiang Zhi was keeping watch by the hospital bed. After reading the trending content, she guessed that maybe the mutation had appeared abroad earlier.
The boy in the video who openly said he was pregnant might have been acting on the government’s instruction, giving a round of preventive injections in advance to a public that didn’t know the truth.
She didn’t know how many countries the mutation had already appeared in. Jiang Zhi tried searching for recent related content on a search engine, and then discovered with surprise that as early as a year ago in the Pretty Country across the ocean, a netizen had posted a revelation claiming her own older brother had given birth to a baby girl.
It stirred up some heat within a small circle at the time, but a few days later the girl changed her words in the post and said it was a slip of the tongue, that the niece had been adopted by her brother and sister-in-law together, and after that it came to nothing.
Of course Jiang Zhi didn’t believe this was just a so-called slip of the tongue.
Everyone knew the Pretty Country liked to secretly research all sorts of projects that couldn’t see the light, and the moment something went wrong it shirked responsibility. This country’s nature had long been well known to every country.
Xia, which had been screwed over many times, knew it even better, and so had never acted rashly.
Although she didn’t know what Xia was planning at the moment, and no pregnant man in the country had come out loudly with a revelation yet, that didn’t mean the government was covering mouths.
On the contrary, the two hot posts from before on Flower Petal and Little Blue Book were both still sitting there just fine.
As a member of Xia, Jiang Zhi firmly believed that every step the country took and every instruction it made must be correct.
Having thought all this through, Jiang Zhi decided to give Xu Sui an advance warning too.
【Suisui, suppose these aren’t hype but events that really happened. How would you feel about it?】
【How would I feel? I would absolutely go crazy!】
Jiang Zhi: 【?】
Jiang Zhi: 【Isn’t it good for men to give birth? Aren’t you the one most afraid of pain?】
Xu Sui: 【But someone like me who changes boyfriends every two months would go bankrupt raising children (awkwardly rubbing hands). I don’t want an ex-boyfriend suddenly showing up at my door with a big belly to tell me I’ve happily become a mother, hahaha.】
Jiang Zhi asked carefully: 【Didn’t you use contraception?】
Xu Sui was rich in relationship experience and shouldn’t be so bewitched by a man’s sweet words that she’d skip the condom.
On her end Xu Sui typed and deleted, revised it several times over, and only then replied: 【We did use it, but there’s no guarantee against accidents.】
They should have used it every time, right?
Xu Sui thought hazily. The last time she clapped for love was several months ago. She had drunk too much that time and only cared about feeling good, and it seemed she was the one who found it uncomfortable and took her ex-boyfriend’s condom off halfway…
Seeing her best friend’s reply, Jiang Zhi let out a breath of relief for her. Good, she probably wouldn’t happily become a mother the way she had.
“Mom?”
Duan Heyu blinked hard. Hadn’t he been arguing with Jiang Zhi? How had his mom suddenly flashed in?
Luo Xuexian, sitting by the bed: “My daughter-in-law called me and said you argued and disturbed the fetus, and you fainted.”
Duan Heyu was dumbfounded.
Damn, he could actually disturb the fetus??
Wasn’t that something TV screenwriters wrote blindly with their backsides…
“Then what about Jiang Zhi? You didn’t do anything to her, did you?”
His mom had always valued him more than her own eyeballs, and he was worried she would take her anger out on Jiang Zhi.
At his words, Luo Xuexian raised a hand and gave his arm a hard pinch, saying indignantly, “Rotten kid, what kind of person do you take your mother for, one of the wicked mothers-in-law on Gold Medal Mediation?”
Duan Heyu hissed from the pain. “Mom, go easy, your son is still a patient.”
Luo Xuexian withdrew her hand and shot him a white-eyed look, snorting coldly with the resentment that iron wouldn’t turn to steel. “They say once you have a wife you forget your mother, and they really weren’t wrong. All those years of loving you for nothing.”
When she first heard the content of Jiang Zhi’s call, she panicked and thought her son was about to kick the bucket, and she really did feel some blame toward her prospective daughter-in-law.
But on the way over, after she forced herself to calm down, she felt there was no reason at all to take her anger out on Jiang Zhi.
The girl’s grades over four years of university were excellent enough to win a scholarship every year. She spoke and acted with poise, was sensible and polite, and her parents’ speech was courteous too, which showed the family’s upbringing was fine.
And this one who came out of her own belly had been spoiled rotten by her since he was little. With that dog temper, never mind that his own father was angry enough to want to cut off the father-son relationship, even she sometimes secretly regretted having given birth to him to plague other people.
So when she got to the hospital, she didn’t go see Duan Heyu first but tended to Jiang Zhi’s feelings first, telling her not to overthink it and not to blame herself.
Duan Heyu put on a thick face and curried favor with Luo Xuexian, holding her hand like a child and making faces at her, saying a whole basketful of nice things.
He finally coaxed a bit of a smile out of his mom. Looking at this plague she had given birth to, Luo Xuexian’s feelings really were complicated.
She sighed slowly, lowered her head, and rubbed the quilt between her fingers as she went on, “Heyu, you’re a person about to start a family. Mom can’t dote on you like a child the way she used to, so you have to learn to rein in your temper and think more before things happen, understand?”
If he hadn’t happened to be staying in the hospital where emergency care came in time, what the consequences would have been half an hour or an hour later, she was frightened just thinking about it.
Luo Xuexian touched Duan Heyu’s forehead, told him to rest properly, and got ready to leave.
“Hey, wait.”
Duan Heyu called her back, scratched his scalp, and said sheepishly in a small voice, “Mom, call Jiang Zhi over for me.”
Luo Xuexian understood and snorted a laugh. “Wait, then.”
While waiting, Duan Heyu one moment turned to check his reflection in the window and the next was drafting a speech in his stomach.
Mainly, fainting in the middle of an argument was a bit of a loss of face, it made him, a big tough man of one hundred eighty-six, look very frail.
While waiting, Duan Heyu kept his ears open in all eight directions for movement at the door. Hearing a faint scraping sound there, he lay straight back down and half closed his eyes in sickly weakness.
Out in the corridor, Jiang Zhi looked at the door handle and drew a deep breath, paused a few seconds, then pushed the door open and went in.
The moment she entered: “What did you want me for?”
Duan Heyu: …Good question.
“What, are you very busy?”
Any other time Jiang Zhi would definitely have snapped at him, but today she just stood silently by the bed, neither answering nor giving him a face.
Her expressionless look made Duan Heyu nervous.
When he had rolled his eyes back and fallen over, Jiang Zhi thought he was playing tricks again and started to walk off, but out of the corner of her eye she caught specks of blood seeping through at his crotch.
Her face changed completely on the spot and she quickly shook people awake for emergency help.
After a good round of soldiers and chaos, the situation finally stabilized.
“A pregnant man shouldn’t have great joy or great grief, he should keep his emotions as stable as possible. Disturbing the fetus is not a small matter, it very easily causes premature birth. Fortunately it was found in time this time and no disaster was brewed.”
When she heard Duan Xiao’s words then, Jiang Zhi went cold inside.
Even now the fear lingered.
She had never thought that one day she would make Duan Heyu so angry that he fainted, so angry that he disturbed the fetus.
For the first time she felt such strong regret toward him, regret that she shouldn’t have been so stubbornly set against Duan Heyu, shouldn’t have been so forceful, that she had given no thought at all to Duan Heyu’s status as a pregnant man and had still treated him according to his pre-pregnancy physical condition.
The more Jiang Zhi reflected, the more her expression looked full of bitterness and deep grievance.
Duan Heyu: “…I’m still alive.”
Staring at him like that was rather creepy.
Jiang Zhi lifted her eyelids, opened her palm and held up two fingers. “How many is this?”
Duan Heyu: “…”
“What’s two plus two?”
“…” Duan Heyu’s face was complicated with “are you taking me for an idiot.” “Is your brain all right?”
Jiang Zhi’s lashes blinked and her eyes reddened in an instant. His mouth was still that annoying, which meant nothing much was wrong.
As she said it, a hazy mist gathered uncontrollably in her eyes. While Duan Heyu was dazed, he felt a weight sink onto his chest.
Jiang Zhi lay on top of him, held his neck, and drew a deep breath.
Duan Heyu was too dazed to sort out the situation in front of him, but being held by Jiang Zhi, whatever discontent he had was gone, and instead his chest felt sour and astringent.
“You fainted.”
“Yes.”
Duan Heyu was very troubled.
His last memory was the sorry sight of himself clutching his heart like Xi Shi, bent over with a hand to his head.
If it were possible, he would pay a heavy price to delete this piece of dark history from Jiang Zhi’s mind, so as not to affect his tall and mighty tough-man image.
And thinking again of how she had stabbed a knife into his chest with a smile all over her face before he fainted, his throat felt as if several fishbones were stuck in it, unable to be spat out or swallowed down, very stifling.
“And you disturbed the fetus.”
“You nearly lost your life.”
Damn, it was that close. “…Fine, that’s enough for this young master to brag about for three days.”
The scene he made really had nearly frightened Jiang Zhi out of her mind, especially when Duan Xiao’s face was serious as he performed all the emergency care and examinations on Duan Heyu. The panic that surged up in her was as painful as being burned.
If something happened to him, if he ended up missing an arm or a leg, the Duan family definitely wouldn’t let her off, and she would blame herself to death too.
Jiang Zhi let go of his neck and sat back, staring dejectedly at her toes, unwilling to look at him.
Duan Heyu’s face was wooden. He couldn’t stand this gloomy side of her. What was it? He hadn’t died.
He wasn’t good at comforting people, and what came out was dry. “I’m the one it happened to and I’m fine, so what are you so upset about?”
“Never mind that for now. Have you added my WeChat back?”
Jiang Zhi nodded a small arc. “I added it.”
She had known he would ask when he woke up, so how would she dare not add it?
That was more like it.
Duan Heyu snorted a laugh and was about to open his mouth to give her a couple of words of praise when he suddenly remembered the fuse of this whole business. His smile slowly froze and he asked grimly, “What about that pretty boy? You didn’t add him back too, did you?”
Jiang Zhi shook her head. “No, how could I? He’s already deleted.”
They weren’t close to begin with and had no real friendship.
The reason she hadn’t been willing to delete Xu Yancan then was only that she wanted to probe a little information out of his mouth, but thinking about it afterward she felt it was completely unnecessary.
Rather than probe him for information, she might as well ask Duan Xiao directly. He was at least a doctor, so didn’t he know more than Xu Yancan?
Duan Heyu nudged her and pursed his lips toward a certain direction. “Get my phone for me.”
The first thing Duan Heyu did once he had the phone was open the WeChat verification, and confirming she really had added him back, he let out a breath in secret.
“You said before you’d add every one you see.”
“That was said in anger.”
She wasn’t a tentacle monster, how could she manage that many?
Duan Heyu: “You called me a pretty boy.”
Jiang Zhi: “You called me an ungrateful wolf.”
Well, hadn’t he spoken without choosing his words in a fit of anger? Who told her to defend that pretty boy like that?
Duan Heyu was still a bit angry, but not much.
“I #%. *&.”
“Mm?”
“I said I… ahem, this young master was wrong!”
Jiang Zhi was slightly stunned, her almond eyes rounding without her noticing.
She craned her neck toward the window. Had the sun come up in the west today?
She had already been prepared to apologize to him and let the petty man have his triumph for a while.
Seeing her little neck-craning move, Duan Heyu couldn’t help feeling his cheeks warm, thoroughly flustered with embarrassment. “What are you looking at? This young master is thirsty, go pour me a cup of water.”
Jiang Zhi stared straight at him.
Duan Heyu’s heart jumped and he abruptly realized that this girl hated being ordered to do chores most of all, and was probably thinking about where would be best to start on him.
But who knew Jiang Zhi would obediently turn around and pour a cup of water for him.
Mm??
He hurried to test her, pointing at the fruit basket and smacking his lips. “This young master has a craving, I want fruit.”
Jiang Zhi turned around and did as told.
Holy crap? This obedient? Duan Heyu’s eyeballs immediately started rolling around.
“My legs are so sore. It would be great if someone would rub them for me.”
Neither Zheng Wan nor Jiang Qingshan was in very robust health. One of the couple had a herniated disc and the other frozen shoulder, and when they flared up the pain was murder.
To ease their suffering, Jiang Zhi had specially gone to a Chinese medicine clinic to learn massage technique, and now Duan Heyu got the bargain.
That flowing-clouds-and-running-water pressing was so comfortable he let out pig grunts.
Having tasted the sweetness, Duan Heyu couldn’t be reined in.
He had long heard the brothers around him brag hundreds of times about how happy it was to have a gentle, considerate, endlessly obedient girlfriend, and he had been green with envy for a long time.
The wind and water take turns. He, Young Master Duan, had made something of himself. He, Young Master Duan, was a salted fish that had flipped over!
Duan Heyu smiled until his teeth showed and his eyes didn’t, lying comfortably and watching Jiang Zhi spin back and forth as busy as a top, now and then waving her over to rub his feet.
When Duan Jingguo and Luo Xuexian came in, what they saw was the picture of Jiang Zhi huffing and puffing as she pressed Duan Heyu’s legs and kneaded his feet.
—The two parties came face to face.
Duan Heyu, with the manner of an old-era landlord: “…”
Jiang Qingshan and Zheng Wan, following right behind: “…”
A soul-shaking roar: “Bastard!! What are you doing!!”