A Poor Rider

If there was room for an explanation, then explaining was fine. But if there was no room for one, and anything you said would just sound like an excuse, then why bother explaining? Just show them where you stood through your actions!

Watching Zheng Yichen act like, "You can't beat me, so what are you going to do about it?" the people gathered there thought he was terribly rude and completely lacking in manners. Still, if he hadn't been rude, they wouldn't have been speaking so politely to him now.

Zheng Yichen also took back what he'd thought earlier: there sure were a lot of guns in this town!

"Let's contact the police..." After the people with power in town got together to discuss it, they made their decision. Zheng Yichen was a Demon Hunter, not a police officer, and so far, there was nothing abnormal about his behavior—at least, nothing that seemed abnormal on the surface.

But he was still a stranger whose origins were unknown, and there was another victim in town. Whether or not Zheng Yichen had anything to do with it, this wasn't something they could handle. They should leave it to the professionals.

"That must be a misunderstanding," Katrina said angrily by the river.

"A lot of people don't see it that way. I'm planning to spend two days in the forest. Does anyone here know the forest well?" Zheng Yichen stood up. Nobody would believe it was a misunderstanding, so he might as well bring back proof.

He'd kill the Headless Knight.

"Some of the older people in town know the forest well. Why don't I go with you?" Katrina gazed at Zheng Yichen expectantly.

Zheng Yichen looked at the girl, at a loss for words. Come on, a girl being this forward could easily get her into trouble. And going off to the forest alone with a man, especially in this rather backward era... If they went together, what if he had a few impure thoughts?

"Your family definitely won't agree, and it'll be dangerous anyway. I'll go by myself." Zheng Yichen waved her off and left the riverbank. Watching him go, Katrina hesitated. She really did want to go with him.

Even if her family didn't approve, Zheng Yichen felt different from any of the young men in town. Most of them wanted nothing more than to spend their whole lives there; they'd never had any bigger dreams.

But Zheng Yichen was different.

In the forest, Zheng Yichen studied the twisted trees. The faint mist and vines dangling from the branches made the whole place feel even more eerie. With a Fishing Rod in one hand and a gun in the other, he searched the forest for clues.

He was looking for hoofprints. It was hard to spot tracks at night, but much easier during the day. The Headless Knight rode a horse, and that horse couldn't walk through thin air. If he found some tracks, he'd be able to uncover more clues.

The sound of hooves rang out in the distance. Zheng Yichen looked toward it and saw a girl in a white cloak riding toward him. She had brought another horse with her.

"..." Zheng Yichen appreciated the girl's kindness, but there was one problem: he couldn't ride a horse. As a typical young man who'd grown up in the city, he could ride a bicycle or a motorcycle without a problem, but horses were a rare sight in the city.

Longcheng had a riding school, but he wasn't rich enough to go there for fun.

"If we run into the Headless Knight, it'll be hard to catch him without a mount, won't it?"

"Catching him is one thing. The main problem is that I can't ride a horse."

Zheng Yichen was completely serious. The girl's composure immediately crumbled, and she stared at him in a daze. A Demon Hunter who couldn't ride a horse? Wasn't that a basic skill?

"You might not believe me, but it's the truth." Zheng Yichen was at a bit of a loss himself. He really couldn't ride. Sitting on a horse was no problem, but he had no idea what to do after that. It wasn't as though he could do what he'd seen in movies: squeeze the horse's sides and shout, "Hyah!"

Then he'd just look straight ahead and leave the rest to the horse.

"Th-then why don't you ride with me?" Katrina climbed down from her horse and patted the other one beside her. The horse trotted off toward the edge of the forest on its own. They weren't far from town, and everyone there knew her family's horses. It could make its way home from here, and no one would try to stop it.

"You ride it for now. I still need to look for clues." Zheng Yichen didn't ride with her. It wasn't that he didn't want to; he was here to take care of business. How could he do that from horseback?

Watching Zheng Yichen search for clues, Katrina saw something else new about him. He took a little box out of his Backpack. Inside was a propeller, like a tiny version of the blades on a windmill. After assembling it, he attached a small device to it.

To her amazement, it promptly took off.

Zheng Yichen watched the camera rise into the air. The Flight Component had come free with the purchase. It couldn't compare with a drone, but its advantage was that it was portable, and its battery life wasn't bad either. The downside was that he couldn't control it freely like a drone.

Its flight mode was very limited. If it hadn't been smaller than a pencil case when folded up, Zheng Yichen might not have brought it along. A drone would have been useless in the Southern Forest, but now he regretted not bringing one.

Still, this would do. Zheng Yichen watched the camera feed come through on his phone and nodded slightly, switching it to Follow Mode.

"Is that some kind of magical item? It can even fly."

"Hm? No one in this world can fly?" Zheng Yichen asked.

"Well, I've read that some vampires can turn into bats and fly. I don't think anyone else can," Katrina replied uncertainly. She'd never imagined that shrinking the blades of a windmill and spinning them fast enough could make something fly.

"If this thing were big enough, could it carry a person too? Like the props in those 'movies' you showed me?"

"Of course, but there are a lot of problems to solve. Spinning a stick fast enough won't make a person fly." Zheng Yichen watched the footage from the camera. With its help, the search went much faster. Things he couldn't make out from the ground showed up perfectly clearly on the high-definition camera.

After searching for a while, he really did find something, though it wasn't what he'd been looking for.

"Does someone live in a place like this?" Through the camera carried by the Simple Drone, Zheng Yichen spotted a cave. Caves in a forest weren't unusual; places like this were generally home to bears and similar creatures. But there were signs of human activity around this one. There weren't any animal bones nearby, either, and when he adjusted the camera angle, he could see an old wooden door inside.

"Someone lives here? Who would live in the forest?" Katrina was puzzled too.

They made their way to the cave.