Precious Root and Golden Egg - Chapter 1

I am Lady Houtu.

After three thousand years in seclusion, I decided to spend some time in the mortal world.

I had scarcely been born when someone grumbled beside my ear.

“Another girl.”

Splash.

I fell into water. An instant later, I was back in the underworld.

Appalled, I immediately summoned its senior officials. They opened the Mirror of Heaven and Earth to show me what had happened next.

My infant body bobbed in a bucket of steaming water.

Beside it, my grandmother cursed the bad luck. My grandfather picked up the bucket and tipped me into a freshly dug pit in the hills behind the house.

As he shoveled in the earth, he chanted curses.

“Girl ghost, girl ghost, stay away from our door! Come back again, and we’ll cut you into a thousand pieces!”

That was how I learned that both the mortal world and the underworld were deeply dissatisfied with the current reincarnation system.

Down below, some baby girls had been reborn more than a dozen times without ever getting a chance to grow up. Up above, some women had given birth seven or eight times without getting the child they wanted.

So the problem was poor communication between Party A and Party B!

Easy fix.

I waved a sleeve and revised the reincarnation model. From now on, every infant spirit could discuss supply and demand with its prospective parents before being born.

That night, the mortal parents I had selected had a dream.

In it, we sat facing one another.

“You go to the temple every year to pray for a child,” I said. “Why drown the one you finally managed to conceive?”

“You’ve got it wrong!” Dad said. “We wanted a boy!”

“That’s all? You should have said!”

I spun around on the spot and transformed into a boy.

My parents lit up. Then they asked, “Can you turn into a genius, too?”

I shook my head.

“An unborn soul can only change attributes that have no inherent rank—sex, race, skin color, that sort of thing. Physique, intelligence, looks, health, and so on have to be paid for with karmic merit.”

Of course, my refusal to be born a genius wasn’t because I lacked the merit.

They did.

But they didn’t dwell on that.

“Fine, fine! As long as you can carry on the family line!”

Ten months later, I returned to the mortal world as a baby boy.

And in those ten months, the human race had produced almost nothing else.

Every newlywed couple had a boy on the first try. Couples who had struggled with infertility for years finally got their sons. Couples with eight daughters asked for a son—and got one.

Boys packed every street and alley, thick as weeds.

Every household was delighted.

Except our neighbors.

The couple next door had once had an older daughter whom they adored. Tragically, she had died of an illness.

Now that the underworld had changed its reincarnation rules, they met the child from their new pregnancy in a dream—and discovered it was their lost daughter.

The three of them were so busy celebrating their reunion that they forgot to select a sex.

So the woman next door was carrying another little girl.

By then, even clothes and shoes for baby girls were getting hard to find. And once the neighbors heard what she was having, they all came knocking, eager to cultivate a connection.

Even the itinerant knife sharpener who stopped by to sharpen her cleaver joked about marrying their children to each other.

Shifty strangers began loitering around the house, making earnest inquiries about her due date.

The visitors came day and night. Terrified, the couple quietly moved away a few days later.

When Mom told us about it, I was sitting on Dad’s shoulders, giggling.

“What if nobody has daughters anymore?” she asked him. “What will our son do if he can’t find a wife?”

Dad snorted.

“You worry too much! There are so many people in the world. There’ll always be idiots like our neighbors who have girls!”

Grandma clapped her hands, beaming. “Exactly! Our precious boy has to marry a high-ranking official’s only daughter. Then all her family’s money will be ours!”

Nevertheless, there were fewer and fewer girls on the streets. Families with daughters kept moving away.

And that wasn’t all.

Back when a baby’s sex was random, a son had been a nuclear weapon. With sons, you could seize crops, wells, houses, and other people’s daughters. You could even have them take the blame and go to prison for you.

Now every household could produce sons.

The mortal world officially entered the arms-race era.

One son: your line is as good as extinct.

Two sons: you’ve disgraced your ancestors.

Three sons: a laughingstock.

Four sons: doesn’t count.

Five sons: child’s play.

Six sons: a dwindling household.

Seven sons: nothing special.

Eight sons: ordinary folk.

Nine sons: a flourishing family.

Ten sons: the elite of the elite!

Three years later, our family had worked its way up to laughingstock.

But my parents swore they would join the elite.