The two of them went to the kitchen and, like hamsters stocking up on food, quickly wound up with all sorts of snacks and drinks piled in their arms.
Xu Jingheng glanced at the chips he was holding and laughed. “I wonder what Xing Si will do when he gets back and finds all his snacks gone!”
Xu Shichu took two more bottles of cola from the fridge. “It’s all junk food. He’s still young, so eating this stuff is bad for him. I’m different—I’m already this old. Every day I eat it is one less day I get to enjoy it.”
Xu Jingheng couldn’t bear to hear her say things like that. He could still remember Mom lying in a hospital bed, her face utterly pale, when he was little. His expression turned cold at once. “Don’t joke about your health!”
Realizing how worried her son was, Xu Shichu quickly spat, “Pah, pah, pah! I shouldn’t have said that. Tuantuan, don’t be mad.”
Xu Jingheng was still unhappy, but he would never lose his temper with Mom. So the boy, who had been quiet to begin with, became even less inclined to speak to anyone.
Xu Shichu found it rather amusing. She reached out and poked his cheek, then gave his arm a little pinch.
Before long, the sulky little dolphin had deflated, and he was back in good-boy mode.
In the dim home theater, the two of them lounged in their seats with snacks in their arms, their eyes fixed on the animated movie currently playing to packed audiences.
Xu Shichu opened every kind of snack, took a bite herself, then fed one to her son. If it tasted good, she had a few more bites; if it didn’t, she passed the rest to him.
Now that thirteen years had gone by, there were a lot more kinds of snacks—and they tasted better than before, too.
Xu Jingheng refused nothing. If Mom fed it to him, he ate it.
As the movie played, Xu Shichu was swept up in the action one moment and laughing out loud the next. Her excitement soon had Xu Jingheng enjoying himself, too.
After watching for nearly two hours, Xu Shichu began to feel sleepy.
She stood and stretched, then looked at Xu Jingheng beside her, still smiling. She gently put her arms around him. “You should head back and get some rest.”
“Good night, sweetheart.”
Xu Jingheng’s ears turned faintly red, and a pleased smile tugged at his lips. “Good night, Mom.”
The next day, when Xu Shichu got up, Xu Jingheng had already left for the office.
After breakfast, she followed her memories to the study.
Its layout was much the same as before, with hardly anything changed.
Her gaze passed over the bookshelf, and she walked over to it.
A few books she rarely read sat on the top shelf. She carefully pulled them out, revealing the safe behind them.
She slowly entered the combination. The safe clicked open, and a small white porcelain bottle came into view.
When she removed the lid, half of a black pill lay inside. It was only the size of a fingernail and looked like half a chocolate-covered bean someone had left behind.
This was the Son-Bearing Pill—the culprit behind Xu Shichu’s pregnancy.
She narrowed her eyes, remembering the Son-Bearing System that had been with her for more than twenty years.
The Son-Bearing System had bound itself to her the moment she was born.
According to the system, it had originally meant to bind itself to her mother. That way, as soon as Xu Shichu was born, it could earn a nice pile of points. Who could have guessed it would end up bound to Xu Shichu while she was still an embryo?
The Newbie System, resentful that it couldn’t break the bond, had nagged her about having children from the time she was little. After hearing the same thing over and over, Xu Shichu would argue with it—and as soon as the argument was over, they would make up again.
You could say that she and the system were natural-born adversaries, a perfect rivalry duo. Their daily routine was either bickering or trading barbs.
Then, when she was twenty-one, Xu Shichu finally found a man who suited her—Jiang Li.
They said third time’s the charm. By the third time Jiang Li struck a pose and tried to charm her, Xu Shichu had had enough. She simply dragged him back to her own nest.
The two of them lost themselves in each other, oblivious to the world around them.
At last, the system seized its chance and started urging her to have a child again.
Immersed in her lover’s embrace, Xu Shichu snapped at it impatiently:
“Babies, babies, babies—you only ever talk about babies! If you’re so capable, why don’t you have one yourself?”
“I hope you get pregnant with eighteen sons in one go, and every last one of them is a little monster!”
So the rebellious system promptly produced a Son-Bearing Pill and shoved it into Xu Shichu’s mouth.
【Eighteen sons, is it? I’ll make you have them yourself. Heh heh heh…】
Xu Shichu reacted quickly. The instant the pill entered her mouth, she spat it out—but it melted as soon as it touched her tongue. No matter how fast she was, she still ended up pregnant with five babies.
The half pill in the safe was the piece she had spat out.
The pill was so extraordinary, and Xu Shichu worked in pharmaceutical research, so she couldn’t help being intensely curious about it.
But it had one fatal flaw.
The Son-Bearing Pill did everything it could to protect the fetuses, at the expense of the mother’s body.
When Xu Shichu first learned she was pregnant, she had planned to keep the baby and get rid of the father. She could give the Xu family an heir, and then her father would stop pressuring her to come back and take over the family business.
But not long after she became pregnant, she realized that her body was growing weaker and weaker. The babies were absorbing all the nutrients. She couldn’t even have an abortion or reduce the number of fetuses, because either would severely damage her health.
That was why she had chosen to marry Jiang Li and entrust the children to their biological father.
If she really didn’t make it, at least her children would still have their father.
In the blink of an eye, eighteen years had passed. Her “thirteen sons” were still lying quietly in the porcelain bottle, completely unchanged from how they had been eighteen years ago.
As she stared at the pill, the bold idea she’d had years ago rose up in her mind again.
Perhaps she could extract the active ingredient from it!
Then she could mass-produce countless Son-Bearing Pills!
They had side effects when used on humans.
But what if she used them on animals or plants instead?
What if she studied them thoroughly and reduced the side effects to a minimum?
Could there one day be a pig that gave birth to 108 piglets at once?
Or a super crop that could yield as much as an entire acre’s worth from a single plant?
The more Xu Shichu thought about it, the more excited she became, her blood practically boiling.
Seeing that the pill was still intact, she put it back and forced herself to calm down.
She had already fallen far behind the times. The knowledge she’d had back then might have been updated and superseded long ago. For now, she needed to focus on studying.
She dug out all her old books and searched online for plenty of courses. The online material wasn’t comprehensive enough for some subjects, so it looked as though she would have to find a chance to visit her old teacher again.
At noon, Xu Shichu left the study.
She sat down at the dining table and watched the servants coming and going. Something about their expressions seemed strange.
She stopped the butler and asked, “What’s happened?”