I rubbed my hands over my belly, aching a little. Really, it was a bit unfair of Aunt Xiang to force us to carry to term, even if there were no right or good choices in the situation.

A kick, then two others in different spots. Ow. Doubly so because she’d have known we were carrying triplets at that first examination. Her qi senses are absurd.

I was doing what I could around the house at this point, looking after my younger siblings and cooking up as many rabbit dishes as I could in frustration. Chen would drop by with her twin, and we’d read and talk, sometimes handle some of the clothes that needed mending. I could almost throttle her sometimes, being able to at least get around the village when I could hardly move. Stupid tiny mother passing on her size impediment.

Well, there were upsides to Chen having that foot of extra breathing space on her frame. She was able to visit from time to time, letting us… relieve some frustrations. Seriously, why do you want to mate so much while you’re pregnant? It feels a bit redundant.

We were also under orders to cultivate as much as possible, even if we were forbidden from doing so in a way that would let us break through and advance our cultivation. I’d inherited mother’s fire affinity, and Chen had a strong affinity for wood, so the domestic chores helped. Not that I hadn’t spent a few nights stripping down and meditating in the fireplace…

Speaking of my mother… I was pretty deeply worried about her. I’d always had to help out with household chores, but even at her most flighty... mom helped.

She was bedridden now, taking those vile potions once a week and needing vast amounts of food to keep functioning. And I couldn’t even deliver it to her, because they’d had to put her bed in the pottery kiln. I could only imagine how little she was getting out of it from my own issues, and could only lean hard on Chiaki and warn her not to be next, no matter how much she wanted to mate, or how convinced she was that she was in love with Chang.

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She blushed, stammered, but I wasn’t in the mood to beat around the bush. I’d been forced into this as an object lesson, I might as well pass the lesson along.

It had been about seven months now, and the news I got was that things were settling down outside. Farms across the northlands had started their first planting in years, for all the effort it had taken over the winter to build shelter and put battlefields to rights. Herds of cattle and sheep were being raised near Rivermill, and vast fields of wheat, barley, rye, and oats.

I could practically taste the bread already.

Closer to home, the surrounding mountains and forests… well, more meadow than forest these days, though Aunt Xiang had plans to fix that when she could. But they were a lot livelier than almost anyone I’d talked to ever remembered them being, and with the diaspora of population now that we didn’t have to hide we found ourselves able to eat a lot better than we had in years.

Which was good, because mother wasn’t the only one who needed near-constant snacking to feed what she’d done to herself. I had nightmares about these three eating their way out of my stomach sometimes, and it was highly unpleasant to think about. Aunt Xiang and Chen were lucky, the wood element fed them far better.

I… really should’ve mentioned that wood was the element I still needed to cultivate to Aunt Xiang. Felt like I couldn’t get enough fuel no matter how much flame I drew in, and my energy was leaving me a lot faster every day. I’d known qi cultivation was stunted by pregnancy, as the energy you took in was redirected to help build a new life instead of merely sustaining your own… but it’s one thing to know something in theory, and another to experience it first-hand, with triple the standard detriment.

Another series of kicks, followed by a surge of hunger and feeling very drained. I grabbed a haunch of bunny, pulled off the loose robe I’d started wearing in lieu of actual clothes, then stoked the fire up.

Time to do this all over again.