Chapter 279: People in the Ward
“What I meant,” Mother Pan clarified, letting out a sharp breath, “is that Huzi will be left with your grandparents across the lane. The Sheng elders are up there in years—do you really think they have the stamina to chase after a baby?”
She began ticking points off on her fingers. “Huzi is at that mischievous, hyperactive age. You have to feed him, coax him to sleep, change his messy diapers, and soothe him whenever he throws a fit. He’s a handful. With the elders being as old as they are, it’s a real question whether their backs can even take it. Did you even stop to think about that?”
As she listened to her mother’s blunt breakdown, Pan Yue’s confidence wavered. There was a lot of truth in what she said; her son really was a tiny terror lately. Now that his little limbs were getting stronger, his favorite hobby was grabbing her hair, and it hurt like absolute hell. Whenever she tried to change his diaper, he squirmed and kicked so violently she could barely pin his legs down.
“Oh, Mom… what should I do then?” Pan Yue asked, her voice dropping into a panicked whine. She had already given Mother Gu her word, so backing out now was out of the question.
“What should you do? What should you do? You leap into these things without consulting me first, and now you’re asking me how to fix it!” Mother Pan glared at her daughter, muttering under her breath about how children were nothing but a life debt.
“I must have owed you a massive debt in a past life,” she sighed. Reaching out, she poked Pan Yue’s forehead with a finger, thought it over for a long moment, and decided it was finally time for her to step in. “What else can we do? I’ll just have to swap shifts with someone.”
Mother Pan was originally scheduled for the early daytime shift this month. Her only option now was to trade with a colleague for the night shift, which ran from seven in the evening until six the following morning. That would free up her entire afternoon to stay across the lane and look after little Huzi.
Pan Yue’s face instantly lit up. “Mom, you truly are a visionary! You always see the big picture.”
“Oh, hush!”
With her mother taking the reins, the heavy weight on Pan Yue’s shoulders evaporated. Since Mother Pan was still on the clock, she didn’t linger to chat and hurried back down the corridor to finish her rounds.
A few minutes later, Mother Gu returned to the ward balancing a freshly filled thermos of hot water. Since Sheng Wanyan was perfectly stable and rest was her priority, there was no need for a massive crowd to hover around her bed. Seeing that the situation was well in hand, Pan Yue bid them goodbye and headed back to the compound to get lunch started; after all, she had two elders and a hungry baby waiting for her at home.
Not long after she left, Auntie Xie came bursting into the room, eager to deliver her hard-won intelligence. The moment the implicit good news left her lips, Sheng Wanyan let out a long, shuddering breath, a wave of profound relief washing over her.
Originally, her mental deadline had been for Gu Tingxiao to return within three months. As the deployment dragged on, she had adjusted her expectations, praying only that he would make it back before she went into labor. But lately, in the quiet, terrifying hours of the night, her standards had plummeted to the absolute floor: she just wanted him to come home alive. To hear confirmation that he was safe and on his way back was everything.
“Wanyan, sweetheart, I can finally breathe easy now,” Mother Gu murmured, her own eyes misting over with relief. “Just keep your mind peaceful, stay patient, and focus entirely on taking care of yourself and the baby.” As long as her son was returning safe and sound, nothing else mattered.
Sheng Wanyan nodded rapidly, the massive boulder that had been crushing her chest for months finally falling away. Thank goodness the long delay was simply due to tactical complications during the extraction phase, and not because Gu Tingxiao had met with an accident.
“Thank you so much, Auntie,” Sheng Wanyan said, reaching out to press Auntie Xie’s hand.
Auntie Xie waved her off dismissively. “Oh, don’t stand on ceremony with me. We’re military wives; helping each other out through these stretches is just what we do. Besides, I didn’t actually do any elite spying. My husband just let a detail slip, and I did a bit of blind analyzing on the walk over.”
With the psychological burden lifted, Sheng Wanyan’s spirits improved drastically. Her appetite returned with a vengeance, and she actually began to enjoy her hospital meals.
She remained monitored in the maternity ward for a full week without showing a single sign of active labor. When the obstetrician came by for his rounds, he noted that the baby had entirely calmed down. There was still a week left until her official due date, and the medical staff agreed it would be ideal if the child stayed put until the exact deadline; full-term infants were invariably huskier and healthier than those born prematurely.
One quiet afternoon, Sheng Wanyan was propped up against her pillows, idly flipping through a newspaper to pass the time, when the woman in the adjacent bed suddenly let out a sharp cry.
“Quick! Hurry up and call the nurse! My precious grandson is on his way!”
The pregnant woman next door was panting heavily, her entire body trembling as waves of pain rippled through her. Sweat saturated her hair, pooling on her forehead. The duty nurse hurried in to check her progress, but after a brief examination, she declared the woman was only five centimeters dilated and would have to endure the contractions a while longer.
Having lived in the four-person ward for a week, Sheng Wanyan had naturally figured out the dynamics of her three roommates.
The expectant mother stationed nearest the door hailed from a relatively affluent background. She was the eldest daughter-in-law of a wealthy production team captain from a nearby village. This was her first pregnancy, and having successfully delivered a healthy baby boy two days prior, her family was on cloud nine. They spared no expense when it came to her postpartum recovery meals; after all, she had secured the family’s eldest grandson. They constantly flooded her bedside with fresh, local eggs sourced from the countryside to build up her strength. They were a traditional, hardworking rural family, and with the father-in-law wielding significant local authority, their resources were comfortable.
The woman occupying the second bed presented a stark contrast. She was painfully thin, her complexion a ghostly, hollow pale, and her cheekbones protruded sharply from her sunken face. The clothes she wore were a patchwork quilt of dozens of coarse fabric repairs, and she looked so fragile that she seemed to sway slightly whenever she attempted to walk down the corridor.
Her family belonged to a deeply impoverished nearby village, and she was burdened with an notoriously harsh, tight-fisted mother-in-law. Because every able-bodied person in their household was required to labor in the fields to earn work points, the mother-in-law only popped into the hospital for brief windows to deliver basic rations. Every single time the old woman arrived, she would lean over the mattress and hiss venomous reminders into the pregnant woman’s ear, muttering that she had better produce a grandson this time, otherwise the family’s precious grain would have been wasted on her. This was the poor woman’s third labor; her previous two children were both girls, causing her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law to treat her with utter disdain. Her timeline closely mirrored Sheng Wanyan’s, with her official due date landing just two days ahead of her own.
The third roommate, positioned in the bed directly beside Sheng Wanyan, also hailed from a surrounding village, though her household circumstances were significantly better than average. Her husband had secured a coveted apprenticeship in the city, pulling in a reliable monthly cash salary that elevated their standard of living. While her parents-in-law harbored the typical traditional preference for grandsons, this was the woman’s second pregnancy. Her firstborn was a healthy boy, an achievement that had allowed her to plant her feet firmly within her husband’s household. Regardless of whether this second child turned out to be a boy or a girl, her position was secure, and no one dared treat her with cruelty.
Her water had broken earlier that morning, and her extended family was currently clustered around her bed in a state of high excitement, desperately praying for a second boy.
Sheng Wanyan watched as the bustling family members next door bickered and fussed over the laboring woman, knowing the ward wouldn’t see peace for hours. But she felt nothing but empathy; the woman’s amniotic fluid had broken, so a bit of chaotic noise was entirely natural.
Whenever she grew restless between her reading sessions, Sheng Wanyan would chat amiably with the woman in the next bed. Through their conversations, she picked up an astonishing amount of colorful countryside gossip. Women were natural gossips by design, but a group of pregnant women confined to hospital mattresses with absolutely nothing to do took it to an entirely elite level.
The woman would lean over the gap between their beds, her eyes wide as she relayed whispers about how a notorious village widow had been caught trysting with a local man in a collapsed, abandoned shack in the dead of night…
Sheng Wanyan and Mother Gu could only listen in stunned, wide-eyed silence. Mother Gu, in particular, felt her cheeks flush with a bit of aristocratic embarrassment. My goodness, the drama in these villages is truly something else, she thought.
Fearing the crude storytelling might cause her sophisticated daughter-in-law some form of prenatal psychological distress, Mother Gu stood up and smoothly drew the privacy curtain between the beds, blocking out the wild environment.
“Wanyan, let me peel a fresh apple for you to snack on,” she suggested, wanting to shift the atmosphere.
Sheng Wanyan nodded happily, a sudden craving hitting her. Mother Gu carefully shaved the skin off a large, crisp apple, but because Sheng Wanyan’s stomach was compressed by the baby, she could only manage half before passing the remainder back to her mother-in-law.
Shortly after Mother Gu finished the fruit, the afternoon hour arrived, and Pan Yue walked through the ward door to relieve her. Mother Gu gathered her things and headed back to the compound to rest her feet.
Pan Yue had brought along a container of roasted melon seeds and a pound of traditional sweet pastries, but since Sheng Wanyan had just consumed the apple, she couldn’t manage a single bite.
“Sister-in-law, please help yourself,” Sheng Wanyan insisted, pushing the tin back. “I’m stuffed.”
“Don’t be silly, these are explicitly for you,” Pan Yue countered, setting the pastries firmly on the bedside table. “I’ll leave them right here so you can nibble on them the second you feel a pang of hunger.” She wasn’t a stingy person who would pinch pennies over a pound of sweets. A pregnant woman’s metabolism was frantic, and at this late stage, Sheng Wanyan required several small meals a day to keep her energy up.
Confinement in a sterile hospital ward was naturally a far cry from the unvarnished luxury of their customized apartment, and Sheng Wanyan was frequently jolted awake during her afternoon rests by the ambient noise of the building. The moment she woke up, her primary instinct was to hunt for food, a demand that Pan Yue and Mother Gu anticipated flawlessly by keeping a steady rotation of snacks within arm’s reach.
“Wanyan, do you want to close your eyes and try to get a bit more sleep?” Pan Yue asked, leaning over the mattress.
“Ahhhhhhh!!! Merciful heavens, it hurts!!!”
Before Pan Yue could even finish her sentence, a piercing, agonizing shriek shattered the quiet from the adjacent bed.
Pan Yue winced, her eyes darting toward the curtain. “Is the woman next door finally going into active labor?”
