When This Matter Was Settled

Inside the birthing room, the midwife was drenched in sweat, her hands smeared with blood, her throat already hoarse from shouting.

She bent down to examine her, and her eyes suddenly lit up as she cried urgently:

"It's coming out, it's coming out! I can see the head!"

Then she gritted her teeth and reached both hands inside. After much pushing, kneading, and pressing, until her back ached and her waist felt broken, she finally felt the fetus's head.

But at once, she realized that head was round and plump, slick and greasy, more than a full size larger than an ordinary infant's. She could not help adding:

"This child... is truly huge."

Yet the young man in green robes beside the bed seemed deaf to it all. He only clutched the woman's wrist tightly with both hands, his lips trembling as he called for his wife again and again.

The woman could no longer answer. Only a faint wisp of breath remained in her throat, there and not there.

At that moment, the midwife gritted her teeth and exerted all her strength.

The woman let out a miserable scream, her body arching violently before crashing heavily back onto the bed.

Borrowing that force, the midwife clamped down hard on the fetus's head and yanked it outward.

"It's out!"

The midwife was about to offer her congratulations when she realized something was wrong with the sensation in her palm.

That thing had no limbs and made no cry. It was bluish-gray all over, and looked astonishingly like an enormous lotus seed.

Her pupils contracted sharply, and her soul nearly fled in terror.

Her legs immediately gave way. Her eyes rolled back, and she fainted stiffly to the floor.

The husband thought it was merely a stillborn child and paid it