And so, on their wedding night, Ruan Xi's husband's nightmare began.
Every night, Ruan Xi dragged her husband into the pleasures of fish and water. Apart from those few days of her period, her husband could practically be said to work year-round without a single day off.
Fortunately, she became pregnant in their second month of marriage.
If it had taken her two or three years to conceive their first child, she might even have gone everywhere seeking divine aid and remedies.
After giving birth to her first child, before her postpartum discharge had even cleared, she dragged her husband back into making babies. Her new body also conceived easily.
If she had not lost a few pregnancies, and had carried them all to term, she would have had more than six children by her current age.
Even in modern times, childbirth was dangerous for women.
And Ruan Xi, who had come from the modern world, was living proof that a high level of education did not necessarily mean a person's thinking was progressive or open-minded.
Her ceaseless childbearing over the years had not been without lasting consequences.
Urine leakage when she walked, back pain, hair loss, and other problems had plagued her all along.
Even her gait had become visibly distorted.
Yet none of these ailments could extinguish her desire to gain others' approval by bearing children.
She kept giving birth, and giving birth, and giving birth, all the way into her sixties, maintaining an average of almost one child every two years.
By the time she had her last child, her older children were already old enough to be grandparents.
The delivery of her last child was difficult, and the midwife asked her children and husband whether to save the mother or the baby.
With the last of