The puppy lifted her head from a ground full of berries and begged Mama to take her to hunt water ghosts.
Jiang Xiaoya was unwilling to be coaxed like a little child anymore. She urgently longed to grow up, to become more capable and stronger, to protect her own small home.
She wanted to say to the young man: Mama, Mama, I’m one meter sixty now. Even if the sky falls, I can hold it up a little bit.
Meeting the puppy’s gaze.
The swamp monster couldn’t refuse Jiang Xiaoya. At least for now, it still couldn’t control changes in the weather, nor could it make her smaller and tuck her into its pocket to protect her.
So even if it was unwilling, it had to admit that it must let the child grow up. She had to learn to fly.
───♡───
When Jiang Xiaoya was little, she had often been taken to hunt water ghosts as well. But back then, she would always charge in to scare the water ghosts, or follow behind Mama, teasing cats and dogs, touching this and that. She had never thought about facing danger independently. Because Mama was always there.
Although she really liked the expression the swamp monster wore when it called her baby, occasionally, there was also a bit of unwillingness. She was one meter sixty, you know. Standing on tiptoe, she could reach the treetops of tall trees. She had finished changing her teeth many years ago. Now she had iron teeth, copper Xiaoya! She didn’t want to always be that little baby.
Throughout the entire vacation, she followed the swamp monster as they moved through the depths of the swamp.
For the first time, she fought several low-tier water ghosts without Mama intervening. When teaching, the swamp monster was calm and unfamiliar. The colossal creature squatted in a corner, teaching her the survival rules of the swamp—things it had had to face when it was young just to stay alive.
The young man’s gaze was inhumanly cold, his brows and eyes carried a ferocious edge, and his gloomy long hair was like dangerous blackness within the swamp.
But every time it finished a segment of those ferocious words, it would lower its head and add one more sentence:
“Did you understand, baby?”
The puppy felt underestimated—before it even finished speaking, she charged in. She killed, killed, killed!
However, every day, after she successfully completed the hunt for water ghosts, the swamp monster emerging from the slaughter would praise the puppy as the bravest puppy in the world. Even it, when it was young, was inferior to her by three parts.
She immediately felt light and fluttery with pride. Happily heading home, saying she wanted to eat beef and spicy rabbit heads.
When she was holding the young man’s hand, she suddenly realized that she seemed to have been hopping and bouncing just now, and immediately stopped.
Putting on a serious face.
Oh dear, oh dear—Mama didn’t notice, right.
The puppy quietly lifted her head and discovered that the young man wasn’t looking at her, and let out a sigh of relief.
She tried to set up a big signpost on the road of growing up, drawing a clear line—an unmistakable boundary.
The first time hunting water ghosts alone, the first time learning to fire a gun on her own… every time she came home, her wrists would be numb and her muscles sore. High-intensity exercise easily strained muscles, and during the growth period it was also easy to get bumps and bruises.
The swamp monster watched the puppy secretly rub her legs when she got home, heard the sounds of her baring her teeth and grimacing in the bathroom. These were the hardships one had to endure to grow up. They were even far better than when it had once been covered in blood. At least, under its protection, she had never bled or been injured. Even so, the swamp monster still felt heartache.
Perhaps it wasn’t a very good parent or guide after all. It doted on the child too much.
At night, it would always sit by her bed, aching for her for a long while.
The tall, fierce young man even felt a sour tightness in his chest.
It had completely forgotten that many years ago it had wanted to train Jiang Xiaoya into the second most ferocious little monster in the swamp. It had even thought about throwing her into the water ghosts to fend for herself—time truly was a butcher’s knife.
The ferocious, cold-blooded monster had completely turned into the shape of one who doted on a child.
The behemoth searched up ways to deal with sports injuries and strains, racking its brains to help her ease the soreness after exercise. Even so, seeing the puppy limp, the tall young man still tied on an apron, squatted down, and coaxed her:
“Baby, Mama will help you rub your legs, okay?”
What it really wanted to say was: Let’s not train so hard anymore, okay?
—It wouldn’t be burned to death by the sun anytime soon. There was no need for her to immediately become some kind of Ultraman Zero.
But adolescents couldn’t be reasoned with. The more the swamp monster coaxed her, the more she wanted to prove to Mama how capable she was. Blushing, she refused to have her legs rubbed; she wouldn’t even let it coax her into soaking her feet. Enduring the muscle soreness, she loudly insisted that it didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt.
However, only she knew that within that sense of responsibility to protect Mama, there were also some things that even the puppy herself couldn’t quite put into words. She secretly stole glances at how the young man’s fierce brows and eyes had softened a lot out of helplessness, then ran over to sway back and forth in front of it.
Time and time again, the puppy pretended to accidentally bump into the doorframe, extremely casually showing off her one-meter-sixty tall figure.
Daya, Daya, I’ve grown up, you know. I’m not a child who needs you to coax anymore.
But she swayed around for a long time, and the tall young man peeling apples for her didn’t notice at all.
That small sense of loss was like a butterfly fluttering over, landing on the puppy’s nose.
───♡───
The little beagle threw herself energetically into the grueling training. She had been full of energy since childhood, and now she was even more like a little calf, charging around among the water ghosts. Strains, bumps, and knocks became everyday occurrences.
Jiang Xiaoya didn’t understand a parent’s worry at all—she only felt that she was running faster and had grown stronger.
She spotted a camp in the distance surrounded by low-tier water ghosts, and confidently assured Mama that she could take them all out by herself. Then, under the swamp monster’s worried gaze, the puppy grabbed her gun and rushed out.
Would she get hurt? Would she fall?
Had the bandage on the place she’d bumped the day before yesterday come loose?
The terrifying behemoth capable of destroying an entire city thought about these trivial, tiny matters, plodding along slowly behind her. After following for a bit longer, it stopped where it was, unable to go any farther—because the puppy had said Mama wasn’t allowed to follow.
So what else could it do?
───♡───
The puppy went crack-crack killing at random, the puppy charged straight through. Like a bull, she slaughtered all the water ghosts! She crawled in and out of the ruins, and after checking and finding that the surrounding water ghosts were pretty much all dead, she casually wiped her puppy fur and ran out excitedly. The exhausted puppy couldn’t wait to tell Mama that she could kill so many water ghosts on her own now—she had become very impressive.
A puppy in the growth period is contradictory.
She relied on and loved her Mama so much. Yet she was uncontrollably drawn to the young man Jiang Ze, as if her soul had been torn in two—one half wanting to be Mama’s good baby, the other half unwilling, yearning to grow up and prove to him that she was no longer the child behind him.
She was smart and pretty, sensible and clever.
She didn’t understand where that intense longing came from. Perhaps it was because the young man’s gaze was too gentle. She couldn’t wait to hope that her own figure would appear within it.
But standing on tiptoe, prying open his eyelids to take a look—oh. Inside there, what was held was still a little baby.
───♡───
The puppy came charging back just like that, dusty and disheveled.
Mama, Mama, look at me—see how amazing I am!
Sure enough, her head was patted, and she received the praise she had been expecting. But when she lifted her head with a grin, she discovered that Mama wasn’t smiling.
Why wasn’t Mama relieved, why wasn’t Mama smiling? Had she missed one water ghost?
She looked at his eyes in confusion, and noticed Mama’s gaze resting on her forehead. Following his line of sight, she touched it and discovered a bruised patch that was seeping blood. When had it happened? Even she herself hadn’t noticed.
The behemoth examined its filthy little puppy.
How could it bear this? From childhood until now, it had never even let her carry anything heavy.
And now she had to crawl and tumble like this—must hurt a lot, right? When she was little, even falling once would make her cry for ages.
Being stared at for too long, the puppy felt a bit uncomfortable.
Under that kind of gaze, she became very small, very small, a little at a loss and wanting to lower her head.
Even the moonlight reflected in the lake wouldn’t be gentler than this.
She wanted to curl up into a little earthworm, burrow into the mud on the ground, and hide from that tender, pitying gaze.
She didn’t manage to burrow away, because the young man pulled her into his arms. And so she smelled the grassy scent of the swamp under the moonlight, carrying moisture. The young man silently, carefully kissed her bruised forehead.
She froze.
Would moonlight dote on a puppy?
Moonlight did just that, gently shining upon the puppy.
