[IMG] [https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.thosCR04qjHd_BvgUsYvsAHaHa]
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Lin Xiaorui felt miserably sick and exhausted.
She rolled out from under her bed sheets, and the shades in her bedroom were drawn low even though it was still daylight outside. Wincing, Xiaorui placed the back of her palm on her forehead to feel her temperature.
It felt scorching hot.
Xiaorui felt sweaty, weak, and her body ached all over.
Why wasn't it surprising at all that Fenghua's medicine that was supposed to cause "fake sickness" would actually make her develop a real fever?
That poisonous snake always seemed to mix up counterfeit vs. genuine. When it came to dealing with that bitch, it was never clear which was which. You could never be quite sure what promises were lies and what words were honest. It was also precisely why Xiaorui hated that woman. Every single sentence the snake uttered was a half-truth filled with manipulative ulterior motives.
Of course it was just like that woman's rotten personality to choose the most ruthlessly effective method available in her arsenal.
Why trust an "enemy's" acting skills to fake a stomach bug when the far more flawless method was to actually give the real thing?
Xiaorui laughed bitterly at herself.
She couldn't believe that she had actually been led to believe Fenghua earlier in the day.
She felt the nauseous feeling arise in her stomach again and she felt the urge to run to the toilet.
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Several minutes later after dry heaving multiple times, Lin Xiaorui crumbled to her knees on the bathroom floor despite nothing coming out.
Her abdomen was cramping and she almost wanted to clutch her insides and tear the aching pain out.
The bathroom tiles felt as cold as ice touching against her feverish flushing skin.
Xiaorui practically limped as she pulled herself up from the floor, and dropped her lower body onto the toilet seat. She didn't exactly feel an enormous urge to use the bathroom, but Xiaorui almost felt too exhausted to make her way back to the bed. For now, she'd rest here while she caught her breath.
Xiaorui pulled down her shorts and underwear as she sat down on the toilet seat, sweating and feeling slightly lightheaded from all the effort that she had exerted retching on an empty stomach seconds ago.
She closed her eyes as she leaned on her elbows, hanging her head as she tried to block out the cramping abdominal pain.
This really was such a nasty stomach bug.
When Xiaorui slowly opened her eyes, her gaze caught a certain suspicious smudge on her underwear that definitely wasn't there in the morning.
It was somewhat like clear-yellowish mucous, kind of slimy and paste-like in texture.
......
What the fuck was that?
Xiaorui stared blankly at the discharge on her underwear completely lost for words.
This was clearly not something that Xiaorui was experienced with in the past, especially as the male genitalia she formerly owned did not particularly have the habit of spontaneously producing weird viscous substances.
Xiaorui had no idea at all what this was.
Was the uterus that had somehow magically appeared in Xiaorui's body last night defective somehow?
This wasn't related to the abdominal pain and the fevers, right?
Xiaorui suddenly felt quite a lot more concerned than before.
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After forcing herself to limp back to the bed, leaving the stained underwear abandoned on the bathroom floor, Lin Xiaorui crawled back under her sheets, halfway shivering.
All this time, her thoughts raced, rapidly flipping through all the different possibilities she could think of.
Back in 2008, 16 year old Lin Xiaorui had not yet received a smartphone from her parents. Cellphones, let alone smart phones, were still rather rare among the youth in that day and age, and only especially privileged children were able to flaunt them in front of their friends at school. The infamous Apple iPhone had not been released in China yet, and WeChat [1] had not yet to come into existence. It would still be another five or so years before the fad of smartphones truly kicked off in China.
There was never a time like now when Xiaorui wished she had her (future) smartphone with her.
The only computer in the Lin family apartment was in Xiaorui's parent's office, and Xiaorui hardly felt she was anything close to a living state capable of crawling all the way across the apartment to her parent's office. Even though Xiaorui knew that she desperately needed to get onto Baidu [2] to check the Internet, Xiaorui was also hesitant about attracting excessive attention from her family members.
Xiaorui was still reluctant at this point involve her family in her present dilemma regarding the inexplicable change of her genitalia. In fact, even though she hadn't spent too much time thinking about it, she was absolutely adamant about hiding it for the time being.
Lin Xiaorui was not oblivious to the fact how traditional Chinese culture strongly valued sons over daughters. While it might be difficult for Westerners to understand, there was a period of time when there were notorious reports of female infanticide while the one-child policy [3] was active -- in extreme cases like those, these were stories of parents murdering their first-born daughters so they had the opportunity to give birth to sons. This is just one example of how the gender of children is no trivial laughing matter to traditional Chinese families, so it was naturally a given that Xiaorui felt that telling her parents about her gender change was completely out of the question.
Besides, if Xiaorui had magically gained a vagina, perhaps it was possible to have it magically reversed as well.
Xiaorui still needed more time to figure out what was exactly that she wanted.
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By the way, it did in fact occur to Lin Xiaorui that perhaps all the abdominal cramps was possibly related to the infamous "Great Aunt Flow". [4]
Xiaorui was no stranger to female MC or gender-bender novels, nor was she an idiot.
Menstruation was inevitably a key plot feature of many of these kinds of stories.
However, a key feature of menstruation was bleeding, and unless Lin Xiaorui was somehow blind, there was obviously no sign of any bleeding coming out of any of Xiaorui's lower holes as far as she could tell.
Could you have a period without bleeding? Was that even possible?
Xiaorui was quickly coming to the realization that female bodies made preciously little sense. The experiences she was having with the “real thing” was nothing like anything that Xiaorui had read about in the popular stories online.
Nobody talked about yellowish vaginal discharge or weird sticky fluids staining underwear.
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There was a knock at the bedroom door.
Lin Xiaorui flinched in bed as a voice transmitted through the wooden door.
"Rui-Rui, Fenghua is here to see you. She'll be coming up in a moment," Xiaorui's grandmother called.
Xiaorui went wide-eyed for a moment as he sat up in bed.
Li Fenghua? The snake? Why was she here?!
Didn't she already succeed with carrying out her scheme to fruition? Was she just here to gloat or something?
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Xiaorui felt a complex mixture of exasperation and anger. He was about to shout back that he didn't want to see that hateful woman, but another voice spoke up through the door before Xiaorui had a chance to protest.
"I'm coming in~" Fenghua's sickeningly sweet voice called.
"Wait! I'm not ready yet!" Xiaorui shouted back as he stumbled his way out of bed with a loud thump, tangled in the sheets, halfway collapsing onto the floor.
He hadn't put any underwear back on yet, and there was absolutely no chance that he was letting the snake into his room with the current complicated status of... this situation.
Xiaorui half bounded in lightning speed to the bathroom where he quickly slipped into his shorts where he had abandoned them on the floor, going commando for the time being due to the lack of time.
As for the stained underwear, he rapidly tossed it into the cabinet under the sink for now.
"Rui, are you okay? I heard a loud noise."
The bedroom door opened at this moment, and both Li Fenghua and his grandmother poked their heads in.
They found Lin Xiaorui panting while soaked in sweat, wobbly and leaning weakly with his arms propped against the entrance to the private bathroom connected to Xiaorui's bedroom.
Both Fenghua and Xiaorui's grandmother had concerned looks on their faces.
Li Fenghua gave a glance to Xiaorui's grandmother and spoke. "Lao-Lao, thank you for letting me in. I can take care of him from here. I don't want you to catch a cold from Rui since it would be bad for your body."
"Are you sure, Fei-Fei? [5] Will you be okay with him?"
"Yes, I brought some medicine from my mom's place, and I also went to the convenience store."
"Please let me know if I can get you anything, okay? I'll be making porridge downstairs. Would you like me to make you anything?"
"Don't worry about me, Lao-Lao. Please focus on Rui and yourself first."
"You're such a sweet young lady," Xiaorui's grandmother chuckled. "There really shouldn't be any need to be so polite with us. You're practically family to all of us already. I'll make an extra portion for you anyways, so I hope you'll stay for dinner."
Xiaorui's grandmother soon closed the door behind her as she left, leaving Fenghua alone in the room with Xiaorui.
Their eyes met again at that moment.
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Xiaorui was about to open his mouth to say something rude, but before anything came out, Fenghua had already walked over and placed a hand on his forehead.
"You really are burning up," she muttered, and then immediately stuck a thermometer into Lin Xiaorui's mouth.
This silenced anything Xiaorui was about to say, but his fierce eyes burned nonetheless with accusative anger, his gaze alone capable of conveying everything that he felt.
Fenghua said nothing as she helped her "boyfriend" back to bed. Then she wordlessly started unpacking various things from the plastic bags that she brought, including several sports drinks, towels, and even a stethoscope.
Xiaorui still felt incredulous.
"I know you hate me," Fenghua suddenly said.
"And I hate you in ways you can't possibly imagine," she continued, her hands still moving and preparing the equipment that she brought.
"But this wasn't me. It wasn't the pills. I really didn't intend to give you anything to make you like this."
"I got worried when I heard you actually got a fever and came as quickly as I could. And you really do look horrible right now. Even though you didn't actually look this bad this morning, I guess you really did have some kind of illness this morning, and it was stupid of me to have given you that medicine on top of that. I'm sorry, I was dumb and not thinking clearly."
Xiaorui remained wide-eyed with a thermometer in his mouth, still doubtful whether to believe anything the poisonous snake said.
Fenghua brought her piercing gaze to meet Xiaorui's eyes.
"I can see what you're thinking. I know that you don't fully trust me, which is understandable."
"However, I'm taking care of you right now, and it doesn't matter what you think. I have my own pride too. You know that I'm studying to go to medical school to become a doctor just like my mom. So for now, just shut up and sit quiet, okay?"
The thermometer started beeping and Fenghua immediately pulled it out of Xiaorui's mouth.
"38.8 C [6]" Li Fenghua read aloud, her voice completely emotionless.
"Open your mouth now," she said with a pen flashlight in her hands.
Xiaorui did not respond.
The freckled girl sighed and repeated herself again.
"Just do it, please. Don't make this any more difficult for either us."
"..."
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Fifteen minutes passed, and Li Fenghua rattled off one question after another after eventually coaxing Lin Xiaorui to cooperate with her very brief exam.
"Any diarrhea?"
"No."
"Any black or bloody stool?"
"Not really."
"Any difficulty breathing?"
"No."
"Anyone else around you or in the family sick?"
"No."
Fenghua stopped at this moment and looked down at the notes she collected.
She glanced back up an instant later and gave her frank impression.
"I don't think you have strep throat, and this also doesn't sound like an allergic reaction either. I don't think it's likely that the fever has anything to do with the medications I gave you. To me it sounds like you might have some kind of gastroenteritis, which is the fancy word for a stomach bug."
She paused there.
"Are you sure you don't have any other symptoms?"
Lin Xiaorui suddenly thought back to the weird discharge that had come out on his underwear and hesitated for a split second.
However, he quickly shook his head.
This wasn't something he could share with Li Fenghua. That was just beyond stupid, giving that kind of information to somebody like the poisonous snake who was apt to instantly turn it around and use it as blackmail.
Fenghua looked carefully at Xiaorui's eyes for a long moment, and then sighed.
"I don't think they would do anything for you if you went to the hospital anyways," she said. "You're probably dehydrated though. You should drink a lot of water and rest. And take some tylenol. Normally I don't recommend nasty stuff like sports drinks because all that sugar really isn't that great for regular people to drink on a regular basis, but since you vomited quite a bit earlier, the salts in sports drinks are actually somewhat helpful for repleting electrolytes for once."
She stood up from the ground and began collecting her stuff.
A short while later, she pulled a chair out from Xiaorui's desk and sat down. Fenghua cleared some space for herself on the cluttered desk and pulled out one of her own textbooks to begin studying.
"I'm over here if you need anything," Xiaorui heard a distant voice say.
Some time after that, Lin Xiaorui slowly drifted off to sleep.
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Author's Notes:
1. WeChat: The largest mobile social media network in China.
2. Baidu: The equivalent of Google in China.
3. One-Child Policy: A government policy in China active from 1979 to 2015 restricting each family to have only one child to control over-population. Technically, the only penalty for having more than one child was to pay a fine, so more privileged families were actually capable of having more than one child. There were also numerous exceptions and waivers to the rules, so the majority of mainland Chinese families today actually have one or two children.
4. Great Aunt Flow: Slang in Chinese used by girls for menstruation.
5. Fei-Fei (飞飞): Li Fenghua's nickname. Li Fenghua (李凤华) has the meaning of a "phoenix", and it happens to be that her childhood nickname became Fei-Fei ("fly-fly").
6. 38.8 C: 101.8 F, which is a fever.