Are you feeling wronged, are you heartbroken—then cry out loud in Mama’s arms.
Being blamed, being scolded doesn’t matter. No matter how old you are, at this moment you are still a child clutching the hem of Mama’s clothes.
The little mud-covered puppy that found Mama has been picked up and taken home.
Her hair was dripping wet, her clothes were filthy. Just like that, she obediently followed instructions to go bathe and change, to dry her hair clean. She felt a large hand, a little cool, rubbing through her soft, fine hair. Like a puppy being petted, she let out happy purring sounds.
The puppy lifted her head to look at the young man. Woof-woo, woof-woo.
She wanted to look at Mama every single moment, wagging her puppy tail as she enthusiastically nudged toward her. Until the swamp monster covered her head with a towel to wipe the hair on her forehead—she refused. She immediately burrowed out from the cloth used to dry her hair, insisting on looking at Mama.
The young man paused for a moment, subconsciously wanting to pin down the unruly child like before, but then he stopped, and silently continued blowing dry her puppy fur.
Mama, Mama, I’ve suffered so many grievances. When you weren’t around, the days were really hard.
But once the wet puppy was wiped clean and dried, it felt like nothing was hard anymore.
The swamp monster noticed that some changes had occurred on the puppy’s body, as if the fluffy down of early youth had all molted away, replaced by a new layer of feathers. And so it understood—baby must have endured a lot of hardship. It wanted to pull her into its arms. But it was afraid she would refuse; they had argued over this too many times.
So the young man squatted in front of her and asked: Baby, can I hug you?
Outside the window, a long-unseen heavy rain was falling, and the humid summer felt kind for the first time. The puppy couldn’t understand why she had ever refused to be loved. She lunged into the young man’s grass-scented embrace, fluffily turning her head, begging Mama to cook her something delicious.
Jiang Xiaoya had eaten rice balls for far too long—she missed Mama’s big prawns so much!
The child had grown a bit thinner from hunger, but had also become much more well-behaved and sensible. Yet when entering the kitchen, the young man felt not the slightest bit of happiness.
The swamp monster was very powerful, but its power was also restrained by the sun. This was probably because it had not yet reached adulthood. It would have to undergo at least one more molting period before it could truly become a fully mature form.
This apex predator was so ferocious and arrogant—how could it understand human negative emotions? A monster capable of obliterating an entire city with overwhelming force—what could it possibly feel guilty about? What could it feel inferior about?
And yet, when facing its baby, that feeling grew out like moss.
It felt guilty for being unable to control the sun.
For the first time, the young man so desperately wished his shoulders could become a little broader, wished to be a little stronger, to grow up a little more.
The monster that grew in the swamp didn’t understand how it had come into being, nor how it had become what it was now. It only knew that it yearned to become strong, and so in its first molting period it broke free of its chains; it yearned to see Xiaoya, to tell her face to face those feelings of liking her, and so it grew bright eyes and a throat capable of producing human speech. Just like that, it went from incomplete to whole.
Now it had a new yearning.
The monster looked at the heavy rain outside the window. It wished it could control the weather.
To conjure up a dark cloud that would always follow behind Xiaoya, raining wherever she went.
That way, whether desert or blazing sun, it would never leave baby behind.
───♡───
After Mama returned, Jiang Xiaoya no longer had to go hungry, and she could finally set down burdens far too heavy for a child. But those days of running wild all day, quarreling and bickering with Mama, would never come back again.
Halfway through the preparatory program, Jiang Xiaoya was almost sixteen, and it was time for her to choose which direction she would develop toward in the future. Because even within the combat division, there were distinctions—logistics, vanguard, sentry, and the like. She began to consider the base’s battlefield military medical department.
There was actually no other particular reason. It was just that, when she had gone back and forth again and again with towels, trying to make the swamp monster feel a little better, she had been far too afraid of losing her Mama. Even though she didn’t know whether studying this could cure anything, it was still better than being able to do nothing at all.
When she returned home, she saw beneath that terrifying, gloomy curtain of long hair the young man’s still-youthful face, looking not much different from the older boys in high school.
Occasionally, one or two streaks of blood would appear between the young man’s brows, adding a wild, ferocious edge.
But when he cooked noodles, those fierce brows and eyes softened, diffused gently in the rising steam.
Holding her hand as they walked home, the young man’s palm was cold, yet his back felt steady and reliable.
In the past, she had taken Mama’s care and protection for granted, rarely thinking about the fact that Mama wasn’t actually very old either, and had only matured because of bearing the responsibilities of a family.
After the summer drought incident, she felt a sense of crisis. Something heavy pressed down on the puppy’s heart. She knew that human hospitals would not accept an abnormal being whose blood flowed green. In this world, aside from Jiang Xiaoya, no one would care about this big, big monster.
On the night she filled out her applications, the puppy tentatively asked Mama—what if one day you get hurt and are about to die?
In the swamp monster’s world, there seemed to be only survival of the fittest.
It told her that even if it withered, cracked apart, and disappeared completely, when the next heavy rain came and the swamp revived, it would be able to go home. So she didn’t need to choose a military medical major for its sake. The puppy liked charging at the very front—choosing something that allowed exploration would be quite good.
But the puppy didn’t abandon that thought.
The swamp monster didn’t care. It had long been accustomed to the survival rules of the swamp—so long as it didn’t die, everything else, pain and the like, wasn’t worth mentioning. But the puppy cared.
Jiang Xiaoya was a simple little puppy. She wasn’t as enthusiastic about the outside world as one might imagine; she only wanted to protect her own small home well. To live happily in this swamp, year after year.
She handed in that application, like a puppy captain setting sail.
A sense of responsibility settled onto the puppy’s shoulders. The puppy walking along the swamp path no longer bounced and hopped about, but stepped forward with steady strides, able to cross two ditches in a single bound!
Jiang Ze, Jiang Ze, you have to bring an umbrella when you go out!
Jiang Ze, Jiang Ze, don’t come home late tonight!
Jiang Ze, Jiang Ze, the weather forecast says the sun will come out in two hours—hurry home!
She was getting more and more familiar, without any sense of distance. Usually she called him Jiang Ze, Jiang Ze; when angry, she called him Jiang Daya.
She began to enjoy managing her parent from the top down instead.
The wristwatch turned into a pager. Every time he stepped out the door, the chatty puppy’s calls just wouldn’t end. The young man went from feeling flattered at first to gradually feeling a bit helpless. Even the ferocious young man had no way to deal with her—he could only raise his brows and lower his eyes, listening as Xiaoya nagged on.
Yet just when he had finally managed to hang up the call, after a while the swamp monster saw the message she had sent:
Daya, Daya, if you run into danger don’t force yourself. Xiaoya can’t live without Mama.
So the colossal creature squatting atop the ruins, ready to unleash a massacre, turned into a great big marshmallow.
—Mm, Xiaoya can’t live without Daya.
Back home, the puppy handed it a towel. The young man was taken aback, flattered beyond expectation. Had the sun risen from the west?
The puppy attentively brought over a bowl of ginger soup that had been left to cool.
The fierce behemoth’s eyes rounded, growing moist.
It was overcooked. So awful to drink.
But its Xiaoya—she could already cook soup.
And so the swamp monster stayed home with her for a period of time, no longer going far away. Perhaps human parents would sigh in relief, pleased that the child had finally become sensible and learned to be filial. But the behemoth, with its extraordinarily keen sense of smell, detected a different kind of scent.
Its baby had been frightened badly.
Like a little puppy that had once been abandoned, desperately trying to run a little faster, so that she would never lose it again. After suffering some fright, she became sensible and obedient.
Its guilt was like a swamp overgrown with wild grass. The swamp monster wove a flower crown for the puppy from wild grasses. The young man’s hands were large, but after raising a child for so many years, he had learned how to do such delicate work. His somewhat fierce brows and eyes fixed on the grasses, patiently winding them round and round.
Watching the child run again across the grassland, the desire in its heart—to have a dark cloud—grew stronger than ever before.
It took her to play in the lake, just like when she was little. Picking wild fruits, even turning up tutorials from the trees on how to make jam and fruit wine. Thinking about how the base’s supermarket lacked sweets, the swamp monster patiently led her deep into the forest to search.
