"Yaya."
The woman's gaze was complicated.
At first, when she heard that the child had gone to the place where she'd seen the big leopard, she was furious.
How many times had they told this child?!
Don't bring up the big leopard again!
There was no big leopard!
It was all made up!
The child only had to listen to them!
All she had to do was believe the big leopard was imaginary!
Why wouldn't she listen?!
Why did she still have to look for traces of the big leopard?!
This child...
Was she really going to do exactly what Chen Jing wanted?!
But as the woman listened to the child's halting account...
Her anger slowly faded.
The child was clever.
And decisive.
Once she had an idea, she acted on it.
That didn't quite fit the soft, sweet image the woman had of her.
But it was a side of the child she was glad to see.
The child was still so young...
Though at times, the woman felt she was too shy and timid, and that her inability to refuse others and gentle nature would leave her at a disadvantage.
But she'd realized...
The child wasn't as easy to push around as she'd thought.
The child had her own ideas.
And the resolve to act on them.
That was good.
Really good.
Realizing this eased the woman's anger at the child for getting tangled up in the matter of the big leopard again.
The child had questions.
The woman knew that.
No matter how much they said...
No matter how much the child trusted her parents...
It was hard to "lie through her teeth."
In the child's mind...
She really had seen the big leopard.
She couldn't understand why her parents said she'd been mistaken when