If there’s room for explanation, then explaining is fine, but if there’s no room for explanation, how is explaining to others anything but making excuses? So why bother explaining? Just make a statement with your actions!
Watching Zheng Yichen with that ’you can’t beat me, so what can you do to me?’ attitude, the people gathered here found him very rude, not at all elegant. But if Zheng Yichen weren’t rude, they also wouldn’t be speaking as nicely as they were now.
Zheng Yichen also revised his previous thought: There sure are a lot of guns in this small town!
"We might as well contact the police..." The people with authority in town gathered to discuss and made a decision. Zheng Yichen was a Hunter-Demon, not a policeman, and so far there was nothing abnormal about the other party’s behavior, at least not on the surface.
But he was ultimately a man with an unknown background, and with a new victim in town, no matter if it was related to Zheng Yichen or not, it wasn’t something they could handle. This was a job for the professionals.
"It must be a misunderstanding," Katrina said somewhat angrily by the river.
"Many people don’t think so. I’m planning to go to the forest for a couple of days. Does anyone here know the forest well?" Zheng Yichen stood up. Others might not believe in misunderstandings, so the best thing then would be to come up with evidence.
Take down that Headless Knight.
"Some of the old folks in town know it very well. How about I go with you?" Katrina looked at Zheng Yichen with a hopeful gaze.
Zheng Yichen looked at the girl somewhat speechlessly. Girl, you’re being too forward, it’s easy to run into trouble, not to mention going into the forest with a man; and given the more backward era, if we actually went together and I had impure thoughts...
"Your family definitely wouldn’t agree, and it’s dangerous. I’ll go alone," Zheng Yichen waved his hand and left the riverbank. Watching Zheng Yichen leave, Katrina hesitated. She really wanted to go with him.
Even if her family didn’t agree, Zheng Yichen gave her a different feeling from any of the young men in town, most of whom only thought about living in the town forever and never had many other thoughts.
Zheng Yichen was different, however.
In the forest, Zheng Yichen looked at the twisted trees, the faint mist, and the vines dangling from the trees, making the whole forest feel even more eerie. He held a fishing rod in one hand and a gun in the other as he searched for traces in the forest.
He was looking for hoofprints. They were difficult to find at night, but much easier during the day. The Headless Knight rode a horse, and that horse couldn’t walk through the air, so if he found some traces, he should be able to uncover some new information.
The sound of hoofbeats approached from a distance, and Zheng Yichen looked towards the source. A girl, wearing a white cloak, was riding towards him, bringing another horse with her.
"..." Zheng Yichen appreciated the girl’s kindness, but the problem was he didn’t know how to ride a horse. As a standard city-dwelling young man, he was fine with bicycles and motorcycles, but horses were exotic creatures in the city.
Hazy City had equestrian centers, but he wasn’t the kind of rich person who would go there to pass the time.
"Facing the Headless Knight without a mount would make it tough to catch him."
"One thing is chasing, but the main point is I don’t know how to ride a horse."
Zheng Yichen was dead serious, and the girl’s expression immediately crumbled, looking at him somewhat dazed. As a Hunter-Demon, he didn’t know how to ride a horse? Shouldn’t that be a basic skill?
"You may not believe it, but the fact is indeed so." Zheng Yichen also felt a bit of a headache. He really didn’t know how to ride a horse. Sitting on a horseback was not a problem for him, but how to operate it afterward was beyond his notion—it’s not like he could simply mimic what he had seen in movies, clenching the horse’s sides with his legs and shouting ’giddy up.’
After that, he simply looked forward, leaving the rest to the horse he was on.
"Then, how about you ride with me on one horse?" Katrina dismounted, patting another horse beside her, which took off towards the outskirts of the forest. Their proximity to the town meant almost everyone knew her family’s horse, and at this short distance, it could make its way home on its own; no one would stop it.
"You ride first; I still need to search for some traces." Zheng Yichen didn’t ride with the girl on one horse—it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but he was there on official business. How could he conduct his business while riding a horse?
Katrina watched Zheng Yichen as he searched for clues. She saw something novel on him again as he took out a small box from his backpack, which contained what seemed to be a reduced-size windmill blade. After he assembled the device, he hung a small object on it.
Then, to her amazement, the object flew straight up.
Zheng Yichen watched the camera take off. The attached flight component came as a freebie with the gadget. It was no match for a drone, but apart from flying, the device’s advantage was its portability, and it had a not-too-shabby battery life. It just couldn’t be freely operated like a drone.
The flight mode was very basic; if this thing wasn’t smaller than a pencil case when not expanded, Zheng Yichen wouldn’t necessarily carry it with him. Drones were useless in the southern forest, but now he regretted not preparing a drone.
The device would work in a pinch. Zheng Yichen, seeing the image synced to his phone from the camera, nodded slightly and set it to follow mode.
"Is this some kind of special tool that can actually fly?"
"Huh? No one in this world can fly?" Zheng Yichen asked.
"Well, I’ve read in books that some vampires can turn into bats and fly, but I don’t think there’s anything else," Katrina said, not entirely sure herself. She had never thought that the blades of a windmill, when reduced and spinning fast, could carry things and take off.
"If this thing was big enough, could it also carry people and fly? Like the props in those ’movies’ you showed me?"
"Of course, it can, but there are many problems that need to be solved. It’s not as simple as spinning a stick fast enough to lift a person into the air." Zheng Yichen, looking at the footage captured on the camera, accelerated the search process. What was unclear from the ground, the high-definition camera could capture crystal clear.
After some searching, he indeed found some things, though not what he was looking for.
"There are people living in such a place?" Zheng Yichen saw a cave through the camera hooked to the makeshift drone. Caves in the forest were not unheard of, and such places were usually inhabited by creatures like bears, but this one showed signs of human activity, with no animal skeletons nearby and, after adjusting the angle, an old wooden door could even be seen.
"People? Who would live in a forest?" Katrina was also puzzled.
They arrived at the cave.