After the Old Man said that, the Courtyard Owner was still holding the freshly filled bowl of rice, standing at the kitchen door without moving.
Jing Zhen did not immediately reply.
He only rolled up the protective belt he had just untied and placed it beside his sword, then lowered his head and ate two more mouthfuls of rice.
After the Old Man finished the bowl of water himself, he followed the direction he had been looking earlier and glanced north.
“What’s in the mountains?”
“Demon.”
The Old Man said it quickly, then felt that this was as good as saying nothing, thought for a moment, and added, “She’s lived there for many years. White hair, looks like a woman. She was already there when the village elders were still alive.”
The Courtyard Owner put the rice on the table and pulled over a chair to sit down.
He had clearly heard these things many times.
After the Old Man mentioned it, he was not very afraid, only saying that people usually did not dare go too deep into the mountains to the north.
When chopping wood or gathering herbs, they tried to stay near the outer edges.
If they really encountered that woman, they should not shout, not chase, not touch anything near her, and just keep their heads down and walk on.
Usually nothing would happen.
“Usually?”
Jing Zhen picked up a bite of food.
It was indeed saltier than the Old Man had warned.
He drank some water before continuing, “Are there times that are not usual?”
This time the Courtyard Owner did not rush to speak.
The Old Man instead began counting off the things that had happened in the village over the past few years: the Li Family Girl’s disappearance, the three men who went into the mountains and died in the forest, the white shadow someone saw at night by the Old Well.
Going further back, there were also someone’s missing sheep, someone’s dog that chased something into the mountains and only returned the next day.
The more he talked, the more mixed up it became.
After the neighbors who heard the commotion came over to join in, even the cured meat that someone had left drying in their yard the year before last and had been snatched away was almost blamed on that demon in the mountains.
Jing Zhen put down his chopsticks after hearing all this.
“Who has seen with their own eyes that she eats people?”
The room quieted a little.
Someone said the Li Family Girl was taken away by her.
Jing Zhen asked where the body was, and no one could answer.
Then someone brought up the three men who died in the mountains.
This time bodies had indeed been seen, but they were all intact, with no signs of being gnawed on.
In the end, the Old Man waved his hand and shooed away the ones whose stories were getting more and more absurd.
“I don’t know whether she eats people or not, but people have definitely died.”
Jing Zhen did not argue with that.
The Old Well was not far from the lodging.
After finishing the meal, the sky was not yet completely dark.
He asked the Old Man to lead the way and take a look.
The Old Man said verbally that this kind of thing could wait until tomorrow morning, but his feet moved quickly.
After passing two rows of low houses, they reached the west side of the village.
A stone well that had been abandoned for many years was hidden behind weeds.
Two wooden boards were pressed over the well mouth, and half a length of old, blackened well rope still hung beside it.
“On the night of the seventh, someone got up to relieve themselves and saw her standing over here through the courtyard wall.”
The Old Man pointed beside the well with his cane.
“White clothes, hair also white. She was looking down at something, and when people were called out, she was gone.”
Jing Zhen did not touch the well cover.
He first walked a circle around the area, and finally crouched beside a moss-covered stone.
He used his fingernail to pick out a bit of dried black substance from a crack.
It was very thin, and after rubbing it open, it still had a faint smell of rotten water.
He also looked at several spots on the well’s edge that were slightly darker, and let his hand rest on them for a moment.
The residual was already very weak.
But there had indeed been a haunting.
And it had already been cleaned up completely.
“Has something happened at this well before?”
Jing Zhen wiped the black residue off his hand.
The Old Man thought for a while, then said that recently chickens and ducks had refused to come near the well, and at night some people had heard the sound of water.
But the well had long been dry.
Later, after the white shadow appeared once, all those strange things stopped instead.
Jing Zhen stood up again.
“At least that night, she wasn’t here to catch people.”
He said it casually, but the Old Man was taken aback.
Seeing that the Old Man was still staring at the well mouth, Jing Zhen casually explained, “There was a haunting here, and someone already dealt with it. The timing is about right.”
The Old Man opened his mouth, and after a long while muttered, “Then she doesn’t even tell anyone.”
“Did you ask?”
The Old Man was stumped.
Jing Zhen did not press further.
On the way back, he asked about the Li Family Girl again.
The matter was much simpler than the rumors just now.
The girl was nine years old the year she disappeared.
Her family said she was taken away by a demon in the middle of the night.
At the foot of the mountain, footprints that did not belong to a human and a bit of Demon Aura were indeed found.
Other than that, there was no blood, no corpse, and no one had seen her killed with their own eyes.
Just as he said this, the Courtyard Owner caught up from behind to bring a lamp.
His expression became a little unnatural when he heard the Li Family name.
Jing Zhen took the lamp casually and did not ask right away.
Only when the Old Man continued, saying the girl had been in poor health since childhood and often ran outside, did he turn his head to glance at the Courtyard Owner.
“Did she not have a good life at home?”
The Courtyard Owner paused in his steps.
“The Li Family does have a bit of a bad temper.”
In the end, that was all he said.
Jing Zhen nodded and did not ask again.
At most, this could only be considered a missing person case.
The three dead men were different, however.
The bodies were found by villagers.
The location was just behind the second slope of the Northern Mountains.
All three had carried crossbows and knives.
The Old Man said they were hunters from out of town.
They had bought dry rations in the village before going into the mountains.
They did not return the next day, and only on the third day did someone go in to search.
When they were carried out, the things on their bodies were basically all still there.
“What were the wounds like?”
Jing Zhen asked.
The Old Man could not describe it clearly.
He only remembered that one of them had his chest caved in by something, while the other two did not have much blood on them but had many broken bones.
Jing Zhen did not comment after hearing this.
He then asked if they had brought cages, iron hooks, or rope snares.
The Old Man thought for a long time, then said there seemed to have been an iron cage, but later he did not know who took it away.
“It’s normal for hunters to carry cages, isn’t it?”
The Courtyard Owner walked beside them holding the lamp.
Jing Zhen glanced at him.
“You don’t use that kind of iron to catch rabbits.”
The Old Man in front slowed a step.
Jing Zhen did not continue this line of talk.
Just as the group returned to the courtyard, there was a sudden commotion outside.
First, the dogs at the village entrance all began barking.
Then someone ran over from the north shouting for help.
The Courtyard Owner put the lamp on the table and went out.
Jing Zhen followed him out the door.
Before they reached the courtyard entrance, they saw two people supporting a mud-covered man coming this way.
The man’s left sleeve was soaked through with blood, and he clearly did not dare put weight on one leg as he walked.
He was still saying nonstop that there was a demon in the mountains.
The man was quickly helped into the courtyard.
Jing Zhen had him sit down.
He first cut open the sleeve and took a look.
There was a long scrape-laceration on the outside of the arm.
The real trouble was the shoulder joint, which was clearly dislocated.
The leg wound was actually not serious, just badly swollen after being swept by something.
“The White-Haired Woman.”
The man’s forehead was covered in sweat from the pain.
When the people beside him asked what had happened, he rushed to say that he and his companion had gone into the mountains during the day to gather herbs.
After reaching the northern slope, they suddenly encountered a White-Haired Woman.
She attacked without saying a word.
His companion was knocked into the forest, and he only managed to run back and barely survive.
Soon people in the courtyard began saying again, “It’s her.”
Jing Zhen did not respond.
He only supported the man’s arm and tested the position.
“Bear with it.”
“What?”
After a crack, a scream rang out in the courtyard.
Jing Zhen reset the shoulder and casually used a nearby wooden board and cloth strips to secure it.
The man’s lips turned white from the pain.
He lowered his head and panted for a long time before noticing that the bag hanging at his waist had split open, with a section of thin iron chain dangling to the ground.
Jing Zhen reached out and picked it up.
The end of the chain was connected to a half-palm-length iron hook.
The tip of the hook curved inward, and three thick Demon-Suppressing Runes were carved on it.
The workmanship was poor, but it was enough to trap some weak demonic creatures.
“What kind of herb gathering requires carrying a Demon-Locking Hook?”
Jing Zhen put the thing beside the man’s leg, and casually pulled out a small bundle of thin rope from the split bag.
A few tufts of light yellow fur were stuck to the rope.
“And this.”
The man’s face turned even paler than before.
The people around, who had been chattering nonstop, gradually quieted down.
Jing Zhen did not pressure him.
He only asked the companion’s name and where they had last separated.
The man hemmed and hawed and gave a location.
As for why he had brought these things, he kept avoiding the answer.
Jing Zhen could not be bothered to waste more time.
After treating the remaining wounds, he told the Courtyard Owner to find a place for him to lie down.
“Don’t go up the mountain tonight. I’ll go take a look tomorrow morning.”
“What about the other one?”
The man finally grew anxious.
“He might still be in there.”
“How long have you been separated?”
“Almost 4 hours.”
Jing Zhen glanced outside.
The mountains were already completely dark.
He had originally planned to go now, but the man by the door suddenly added that the White-Haired Woman was very powerful, saying she could break a tree in one strike, and told Jing Zhen to be extremely careful.
After hearing this, Jing Zhen only asked one question:
“How long did she chase you?”
The man was stunned.
“What?”
“If she really wanted to kill you, how did you run back?”
No one in the courtyard spoke.
The man opened his mouth, then finally lowered his head.
Jing Zhen did not wait for an answer either.
The next day at dawn, he went into the Northern Mountains alone.
The man who ran back last night had been bleeding the whole way, so the traces were not hard to find.
After passing the first slope, even the footprints began to become clear.
Jing Zhen followed them for a while and soon found the first broken Demon-Catching Trap behind a patch of low shrubs.
The metal teeth had been pried completely open, and beside it was a small tuft of yellow fur, the same as on the rope last night.
Further ahead, there were even more things.
Two broken Demon-Locking Hooks, a wooden cage that had been crushed flat, and a section of fine netting stuck under a tree root.
There was still blood in the mesh, a very small amount.
Beside it was a trail of paw prints only the size of a baby’s palm, going from the cage edge all the way into the deeper shrubs.
Jing Zhen crouched down and touched the bit of blood.
It was not human.
The real signs of struggle were more than ten steps away.
A tree as thick as a bowl was broken in half at the waist.
There was a large patch of flattened grass on the ground.
One person had run downhill from here, while the other had gone deeper.
The latter had fallen twice along the way, and the final footprints extended all the way to the side of a shallow ditch.
The person was right below.
When Jing Zhen looked over from the slope, the man was curled up asleep in a crack between rocks.
He had only one shoe left, one side of his face was swollen, and he was still clutching half a piece of dry rations tightly to his chest.
When he heard movement above, his first reaction was to shrink further inside.
Only after seeing that it was a person did he almost burst into tears.
It did not take much effort to get the man up from the ditch.
This one was less injured than the one from last night.
Aside from a blow to the face, his injuries were mostly from bumping himself when he rolled down the slope.
He sat on a rock and finished the water Jing Zhen handed him.
Before being asked much, he told the truth himself.
The two of them had heard that there were many lesser demons in the Northern Mountains, and that some could be sold alive for money.
Yesterday they had good luck and actually caught one with a net.
Just as they were about to put it into the cage, the White-Haired Woman arrived.
“She didn’t ask anything?”
Jing Zhen took back the water skin.
The man shook his head, then hesitated.
“She asked.”
“Asked what?”
“She asked what we were catching it for.”
“What did you answer?”
The man fell silent.
Jing Zhen glanced at the wooden cage beside them that had already been crushed flat, and did not urge him.
After a while, the man filled in the rest himself.
They said they were going to sell it for money, so the woman told them to let it go.
The two refused and even pointed their crossbows at her.
What happened after was very quick.
The crossbow broke, the cage was ruined, the one who escaped last night took a blow to the shoulder, and he himself was kicked down the slope.
At the end, he only heard the woman standing above say one word.
“Get lost.”
That did seem very much like a demon who would live in these mountains.
Jing Zhen pulled the man up.
On the way back, he returned to the area from last night to take another look.
The tree was badly broken, and the demonic power left on the ground was very heavy.
The other party clearly had enough power to make both Demon Hunters stay there forever, but there were no signs of pursuit at the scene, and all the injuries avoided the places that would truly be fatal.
She had indeed held back.
When the two were halfway down the mountain, Jing Zhen suddenly paused.
The man from last night had lied.
The one in front of him was not some innocent herb gatherer either.
The matter of the Old Well was a misunderstanding by the village.
There was no evidence that the Li Family Girl was dead.
But those three men from a few years ago had truly died.
If the demon in the mountains only injured people when she lost control, these matters would actually be simple.
But the way she was behaving now was clearly not that.
She knew when to merely drive people away, and she also knew how to hurt an ordinary person badly without killing them.
The fact that those three men could die there made it seem even less like an accident.
The mountain path split into two ahead.
One went toward the village, and the other continued upward.
The man from last night had said the White-Haired Woman came from up there.
Jing Zhen stood at the fork and looked for a while.
The Demon Hunter behind him thought he was trying to recognize the way, and pointed to the downhill path.
“The village is this way.”
“I know.”
Jing Zhen adjusted his sword at his waist and glanced at the other mountain path, most of which was already covered by grass.
“You go down first.”
The man was stunned.
“Then what about you?”
Jing Zhen looked up along the mountain path.
The morning mist had not yet dispersed, and nothing could be seen deep in the forest.
“I’m going to take a look.”