Bai Li couldn’t sleep.
She tossed and turned on the bed in her rented room.
The blanket had been kicked to the foot of the bed, the pillow flattened beneath her head, and her tail swept back and forth across the sheets, mussing the neat bedspread into a mess like pickled vegetables.
For some reason, the thought of finally meeting Lin Du in the morning made her heart feel strangely excited.
‘No, what’s there to be excited about?’
She turned over and buried her face in the pillow.
‘Maybe it’s not excitement… it’s…’
she couldn’t quite describe what it was, but her heart was beating a little faster.
She pressed her fingertips against her wrist and counted.
Ninety-plus beats per minute.
Normal people ranged from sixty to a hundred.
She was still within the normal range.
‘Right. Normal. Totally normal.’
Bai Li rolled over and stared at the ceiling.
The crack up there was still the same, running from the light fixture all the way to the corner of the wall.
She stared at that crack for a long time, her mind full of all kinds of messy thoughts.
‘Will Lin Du bring me breakfast tomorrow? What kind of filling will the buns have? Beef? Or pork? Or a mix of beef and pork? If he brings too many, I can reheat the leftovers for lunch and save a meal’s worth of money…’
“Ah, no, no, no.”
Bai Li sat up abruptly and slapped her cheeks with both hands.
“What are you thinking?”
she scolded herself in a low voice.
“Is that the important point?”
The important point was…
she didn’t even know what the important point was.
She lay back down, pulled the blanket up to her chin, and closed her eyes.
“…”
The bed in the rented room wasn’t comfortable, but after experiencing the bed in the shelter, this was now acceptable.
At least it was a real bed where she could stretch out.
Couldn’t sleep.
“How annoying!”
Bai Li grabbed her phone from the nightstand.
The screen lit up: 2:43 AM.
She stared at the numbers for a moment, then sighed.
‘Since I can’t sleep, I might as well do something useful.’
She propped up the pillow, sat up against it, and held the phone in front of her face.
Her fingers tapped the screen a few times, opening the browser.
Search keywords: Blazing Knight.
She had never actively searched for that name before.
Everything she knew about the Blazing Knight had come either from Madam or from firsthand experience in combat—the kind of “experience” where she was pinned to the ground and couldn’t move.
She’d never thought there might be information about him online.
The search results popped up, dense with entries, making her dizzy.
Bai Li was momentarily stunned.
She hadn’t expected so many.
“Blazing Knight: Sighting Report Compilation.”
“Blazing Knight Ability Analysis (Unofficial).”
“Big Guesses on the Blazing Knight’s True Identity.”
“Blazing Knight Fan Club… Wait, a Fan Club? That kind of thing exists?”
Bai Li twitched the corner of her mouth but didn’t click on it.
‘Every Tom, Dick, and Harry has fans now. Why don’t I?’
She picked what looked like the most serious post and clicked.
It was long, with many photos.
At the top was a blurry picture—what you might call “door-lock quality”—taken from a low angle, as if someone had hidden in a corner and snapped a candid shot.
She would have believed it was a photo of a paranormal event.
In the photo was a silver-gray figure, leaping up from the night sky, flames coiling around the soles of his feet like a falling meteor about to strike.
She could barely make out any details in the photo, but the silhouette of that armor—Bai Li was too familiar with it.
It was the Blazing Knight.
She scrolled down.
The post organized the Blazing Knight’s sighting reports in chronological order.
The earliest was from three years ago, on the outskirts of A City, where someone had witnessed “a person in armor covered in flames chasing a monster” among the ruins.
At the time, there was no name “Blazing Knight.”
Witnesses called him “the fire man” or “the ironclad man.”
Later, as his appearances became more frequent, someone came up with the name “Blazing Knight,” based on his fighting style where every move was accompanied by fire.
Supposedly he himself accepted the name—once, when someone shouted “Blazing Knight,” he turned his head, looked at them, and nodded.
‘So that’s how it came about.’
The fact that he responded to that name showed he wasn’t the type to “become a hero on a whim.”
He really saw himself as the city’s protector.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t care what people called him.
She continued scrolling.
“According to multiple eyewitnesses, the Blazing Knight often appears from unexpected places. There’s no pattern to his appearances—sometimes on rooftops, sometimes deep in alleys, sometimes in underground parking garages. But there’s one commonality: the places he appears are usually remote corners with few people, no surveillance, and no passersby. He seems to dislike being seen in the process of appearing.”
Bai Li frowned.
‘He doesn’t like being seen appearing—does that mean there’s something in his transformation process he doesn’t want anyone to see? Or does he just not want anyone to know who he is or where he comes from?’
She continued reading.
“The Blazing Knight doesn’t talk much during fights. Witnesses say he almost never speaks unless questioned, and then only replies briefly. Several times people have tried to communicate with him, but he only nods or shakes his head, rarely opening his mouth.”
Bai Li paused her finger on the screen.
‘Doesn’t talk much…’
Suddenly, she thought of Lin Du.
Lin Du usually didn’t talk much either; he only said more when a topic interested him.
He’d spoken at length only when talking about his father.
Most of the time, he was quiet.
Lin Du’s image surfaced in Bai Li’s mind—a clean-cut face, not a particularly strong build.
He looked like an ordinary high school student.
She had never seen him fight, never seen him angry.
He was always that unhurried manner, his tone always as flat as if he were reading a textbook.
‘Could someone like that really put on that silver-gray armor and punch a monster flying with one blow?’
Bai Li shook her head.
‘Impossible.’
‘Lin Du is Lin Du. The Blazing Knight is the Blazing Knight.’
‘They’re just… just both quiet. There are plenty of quiet people. You can’t suspect everyone of being the Blazing Knight, can you?’
Besides, these past few days she’d been practically glued to Lin Du—going to school, leaving school, eating lunch, and self-study in the afternoon—he was always within her sight.
On the night of the shelter explosion, when the Blazing Knight was fighting Huang Mao on the rooftop, Lin Du should have been… asleep at home, right?
Bai Li suddenly felt a pang of guilt.
She didn’t know if Lin Du had been home that night.
She hadn’t checked, and she had no way to confirm.
‘Why am I thinking about him again?’
Bai Li shook her head hard, flinging away those messy thoughts, and continued scrolling through the post.
Someone had analyzed that the Blazing Knight was probably an employee of the Bureau of Anomalies.
Because multiple sighting records showed that after battles, he would hand things over to the containment team, and those people treated him with respect, following his orders.
Bai Li recalled the solitary confinement cell in the shelter, when the Blazing Knight had opened the door and walked in, and how the guards had obeyed his commands.
It was true.
His rank must be high.
Not just an ordinary employee—at least someone with real authority.
‘Maybe he’s a middle-aged uncle,’
Bai Li thought, and suddenly found that idea quite reasonable.
‘Middle-aged uncle, rich work experience, agile, quiet but reliable.’
A new image gradually formed in her mind, and Bai Li couldn’t help but feel pleased with her own cleverness.
‘Right. The Blazing Knight should be a middle-aged uncle.’
With this new image, Bai Li breathed a sigh of relief.
She put her phone on the pillow beside her and curled up under the covers.
‘I have to sleep now, or I won’t be able to get up tomorrow.’
…