Chapter 429: Rebel

Hanging on the wall, bold as could be, was a poster from the old film *Kung Fu Hustle* — the mute girl in Stephen Chow's arms, both sides gazing at each other with deep affection.

"You bastard Huang, you'd better make this clear to me!"

Snapping out of her shock, Zhong Xiuxiu's face filled with fury. She pointed at Stephen Chow on the poster and demanded, "Who painted me onto this? And who is this old codger?"

Huang Zhicheng's mouth was filled with bitterness right now.

Since there had been no internet or cell phones in Fujian before, as soon as he got back two days ago, he went to the Intelligence Bureau, fired up a computer, and smugly posted on the forum: "Ah, accidentally knocked up my little sister. I'll treat the brothers to a one-month celebration drink later."

At the time, beneath the post, a perfectly uniform row of replies quickly appeared: "Congrats, congrats. A fine gift will be delivered shortly."

Huang Zhicheng understood now. These bastards with their fake, well-wishing gifts had been holding in their mischief all along!

Before his eyes now, he could almost see a group of dark figures grinning savagely: "We've been putting up with you for a long time!"

"My dear wife, this is a misunderstanding. Please, hear your husband's explanation."

Sweat beading on his forehead, Candidate Huang's mind raced. After stammering twice, he realized he truly had no good excuse, and in the end could only confess honestly: "The person in the picture is not my wife. They are merely a pair of actors."

"Actors." Zhong Xiuxiu gave a cold laugh. "How strange. Why would an actor look exactly like me?"

"A coincidence."

"A coincidence? Then this poster here — did it also just happen to appear by coincidence?"

"Perhaps the theater troupe has a new play and sent people out to put up posters to draw a crowd?"

"My husband seems quite familiar with theater troupes... How wonderful. Since we have nothing else to do, I shall go with my husband to see a play right now. It will help pass the time."

"Well..." Huang Zhicheng realized he had fallen into a trap of lies: the more he lied, the bigger the holes became.

Seeing Candidate Huang tongue-tied and speechless, Zhong Xiuxiu was no longer angry.

Waving a hand to shoo the household staff out of the room, she shut the door. Zhong Xiuxiu sat cross-legged on the bed and wordlessly pointed at the sofa beside it.

Like being caught with an old flame's text messages, Candidate Huang now looked at his expressionless wife, and every survival gene in every cell of his body was screaming a warning... Yet he could only feign calm, slowly step forward, and sit down, while his brain raced at high speed to think of a countermeasure.

Eyes met. After quietly watching Candidate Huang for a moment, Zhong Xiuxiu sighed: "Husband, how long do you plan to keep hiding it from me?"

"Hiding? Hiding what?" Candidate Huang's voice grew loud, as if he were full of righteous indignation.

Zhong Xiuxiu then gave a soft smile, but pulled the topic a thousand miles away: "At the end of last year, when you went to Quanzhou to visit a friend, we unexpectedly had guests at home. The ones who came were your old hometown fellows from Taishan."

Zhong Xiuxiu paused here and sighed again: "Ah, it must have been hard for that group, traveling across prefectures and counties, all the way from Hangzhou to Fuzhou, to find our door."

"Huang Ping." Zhong Xiuxiu asked with a faint, unreadable smile, "Did your mother have any siblings?"

"Oh... there was an uncle, but he died of illness long ago."

"Yet among that group of farmers, there was a descendant of your maternal aunt, the same age as you... The aunt was sold off to Lin County when she was seven or eight. Don't you find that strange?"

Huang Zhicheng shivered. "They must be imposters. I've never heard anything about this."

"Fine, fine. Let's say they were imposters."

Zhong Xiuxiu seemed to accept her husband's explanation.

After throwing out a question that seemed completely unrelated, Zhong Xiuxiu then shifted the topic again, saying leisurely: "I originally thought that the strange accent my husband occasionally revealed was perhaps the local dialect of the Taizhou countryside. I never imagined that a few days ago, upon hearing my husband chat intimately with the General's trusted men, I would realize how wondrous the world is."

At this, Zhong Xiuxiu fixed a piercing gaze on her own husband: "Those old brothers under the General — surely they aren't all your hometown fellows, from the same nest of bandits on Taishan?"

"Cough, cough, cough..." Master Huang began coughing violently. After a long while, his face flushed red, he said: "As your husband serves as an Advisor in the Grand Coordinator's Office and frequently interacts with these men, it stands to reason that I might inadvertently pick up some of their accent."

"Mm, whatever my husband says." Zhong Xiuxiu had absolutely no intention of pursuing this hole-riddled testimony.

The young woman sitting on the bed now turned her face to look at the poster on the wall, her expression tinged with reminiscence, and began another story: "I remember it was mid-year the year before last. We were newlyweds, and soon after went together to Fuzhou City. My husband was on assignment for Xiong Daque, and I did nothing each day but wait for my husband to finish his duties so we could go out and enjoy ourselves."

"Unexpectedly, one night, my husband was roused from bed and told there was an urgent matter outside the residence."

Recalling this, a sly smile appeared on Zhong Xiuxiu's face: "I watched the lantern from my window and knew my husband had not left the residence, but had gone first to the study."

"I was still young then, full of mischief, and knew nothing of discretion. So I changed clothes, circled around through the garden, and crouched beneath the study window."

"No wonder my husband usually forbids anyone from entering the study, not even me."

Zhong Xiuxiu turned her face back, smiling brightly at Candidate Huang: "My husband must have worked so hard to keep it hidden all this time. That strange accent of yours — that was the first time I heard it in full."

Candidate Huang's mouth hung half-open, his face pale, cold sweat pouring from his head, his mouth and tongue dry, utterly unable to speak.

"What? A mole leaked the intel and is heading out of the city to tip off Zheng Zhilong? Damn it, what the hell is your Fuzhou Station doing? Weren't you keeping them under close surveillance?"

In the next moment, Zhong Xiuxiu lowered her voice and mimicked the first sentence she had overheard that night.

Hearing this, Huang Zhicheng immediately recalled — that was the night before the ambush on Zheng Zhilong, when an emergency had arisen. He had been using pure Mandarin to discuss countermeasures with Fuzhou Station Chief Song Jia over the walkie-talkie.

Zhong Xiuxiu then spoke the second sentence: "What do you need me to do? Mobilize troops to seal the city? Then you'll have to send someone to notify Lao Xiong first, and then I'll rush over to back him up."

Huang Zhicheng had given up on any remedy by now, because he remembered his third sentence from that night, the most critical one: "Move fast and kill all the moles. I'm telling you, don't screw up again. Me suddenly jumping out like this to clean up your mess makes it way too easy to get exposed. Don't treat Ming officials like idiots."

After hearing Zhong Xiuxiu repeat that third sentence, Candidate Huang's back no longer ached, his sweat stopped flowing, and his expression actually calmed — now that his cover was completely blown, what was there left to panic about?

And at this moment, Zhong Xiuxiu stared fixedly into her husband's eyes, and word by word, forced out a sentence through clenched teeth: "Huang Ping, Huang Zhicheng, you are a rebel!"

"Hahaha." Candidate Huang now stood up, first striking a pose and laughing three times, then bowing with clasped hands to Zhong Xiuxiu on the bed: "Reporting to my wife, your husband is indeed a rebel."

"Hahaha! I knew it!" At that moment, Zhong Xiuxiu, sitting cross-legged on the bed, suddenly leaped up and threw her arms around Huang Zhicheng's neck: "Quick, bring out that box that can transmit sound a thousand li, and that glass box that can show shadow plays. Don't think I don't know about them."

Huang Zhicheng was dumbfounded. He now felt this woman was probably suffering from pregnancy syndrome and could no longer distinguish the important from the trivial: "Uh... my dear wife... your husband is a rebel!?"

Zhong Xiuxiu then said gently: "Marry a rooster, follow the rooster. I have long been a member of your Huang Family, and now I carry your child in my belly. So what if you're a rebel? The worst that can happen is confiscation of property and beheading. I have no regrets."

Seeing the moved look in Huang Zhicheng's eyes, Zhong Xiuxiu asked again: "The one you rebels are protecting and supporting is that Pirate lord, isn't it? I wonder what benefits he promised, for a distinguished Candidate like you to loyally risk your life for him."

"Cough..." Huang Zhicheng had to offer some explanation now: "My dear wife, you guessed one thing correctly just now. We are all from the same hometown, which is why our accents are all the same."

Later that evening, Comrade Huang Zhicheng posted a pinned thread on the forum. The post first viciously cursed out the bastards behind the prank, and Master Huang also threatened to go after their mothers.

Next, Master Huang informed everyone: his cover as an undercover agent was blown, seen through by his wife. What to do? How much inside information should he actually tell his wife? Waiting online, urgent!

On the same corridor, while utter chaos erupted on Huang Zhicheng and his wife's side, in another hospital room, Master Huang and his wife had also been very busy these past few days.

An intern sent by the Hospital began giving the couple a lesson. The content was simple: an introduction to the entire embryo transfer process and its general principles.

In later generations, this sort of content would be considered basic popular science. But for Master Huang, who had absolutely no concept of a modern scientific framework, this was pure fantasy.

On top of that, the intern's own theoretical level wasn't high; she was just reciting from a textbook, so the effectiveness of this entire lecture was truly mediocre.

However, this was already enough for the Huangs. Especially when they looked through the microscope, they finally understood that the surfaces of all seemingly clean things were covered with countless tiny bugs.

So, after using their own life wisdom to reach a judgment, Master Huang and his wife decisively accepted embryo transfer — also known as the test-tube baby treatment — on a suitable day.

The treatment was personally performed by Director Dong Qiang. Although the entire process involved little pain, the timeline stretched rather long.

After simultaneously retrieving sperm and egg from both spouses, the doctor first had to perform in vitro embryo combination. This process usually requires several days. After this, the doctor would transfer the best-developed candidate embryo into the mother's uterus.

Next came the waiting — on the 14th day after embryo transfer, serum HCG would be measured to determine whether pregnancy had occurred.

This entire procedure Dong Qiang performed on the Huang Family couple differed little from later generations. The only difference was the sex of the fetus.

In later generations, selecting embryo sex was generally not permitted, even though doctors had long mastered the technique for determining sex... Previously, when transplanting "imported" cattle embryos at the farm, this technique had been used.

But in the case of the Huang Family couple, considering that Huang Xie Shi was already of advanced maternal age and, under current conditions, would be unlikely to conceive again, she had to carry a boy this time.

A female infant held little significance for the Huang Family, which urgently needed a male eldest son to inherit the line. Once Lady Huang carried a female infant, what followed would instead be endless trouble — if other wives or concubines conceived male infants, this would herald back-residence warfare and brutal "son-snatching" and the like.

Therefore, what Dong Qiang transferred into Lady Huang's uterus this time was a male embryo.