For the rest of the day, Neil was in a very good mood, and even used his terrifying voice to dedicate a few classic verses from "Nobody Sleeps Tonight" to everyone in the common room, until he was driven away by force by his classmates.

But even so, his good mood remained until the time when he went to the Forbidden Forest in the evening to be punished.

……

"Forbidden Forest" is a very interesting name. It's hard to imagine anything else in the world for a school where kids pack up and blow up their classmates every day, but compared to the unnamed "forbidden corridor" on the fourth floor of the castle, the Forbidden Forest is a place with a bit of real things.

Even Hogwarts graduates find it difficult to tell what exactly is in the Forbidden Forest, except for the rare cases where they are punished, and they usually only have access to the mysterious creatures from the depths of the Forbidden Forest in the upper grades of the Conservation of Magical Creatures class.

However, as everyone knows, the little wizards with strong blood are never afraid of danger, or never know whether they are alive or dead, and there have been stunned young people who have tried to sneak in and explore. The vast majority of them will be chased away before they succeed, and the few unlucky ones who will be carried out after a few hours, covered in all sorts of weird and horrific wounds.

In a fit of rage, Madam Pomfrey swore a poisonous oath to erect a monument in front of the entrance to the Forbidden Forest, and to engrave the names of the students who had been carried into the infirmary for stings, bites, and arrows in the buttocks, to see if it could serve as a warning to future generations. However, judging from the current situation, the chances are slim, and she can only redouble this resentment on the Hogwarts hunting ground guards, and dissipate the pressure of her work by repeatedly accusing him of neglect.

And this poor man who has been reduced to a puff bag is Rubeus Hagrid, whom we all already know.

……

Neil stood in front of the guard's hut at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, looking at it critically.

Compared to the grandeur and historic castle of Hogwarts, this cabin, presumably built by Hagrid himself, can only be described as unconventional. By the standards of a hunter's hut, or a lumberjack's makeshift hut, which is only used during hunting season, it might have been considered unsatisfactory, though the workmanship was a little rougher, the edges of the planks were sawn crookedly, and the branches on the beams and posts made of logs were not very clean, but it was a shelter from the elements, and it was sturdy enough—as if to accommodate the sheer size and strength of the owner, and each wall seemed to have been repeatedly reinforced, clumsy but effective.

There were no flower beds in front of the hut, only a few hardy weeds growing along the walls, and it seemed that the hunting groundsman couldn't help but be informal, and he didn't love gardening as much as he did for magical creatures.

On the east wall of the house was a simple dog hut decorated in the same style as the main building, and in it lay an extremely ugly-looking mongrel dog (or some unknown canine-like magical creature, after all, this guy is too ugly as a pet), and at this moment he was leaning half of his body out of the house, and looked at Neil cautiously with his hairless neck cured.

As a watchdog, it's your duty to see anyone you don't know barking and biting – in fact, that's exactly what the dog has done so far. Hagrid is a well-natured person, but occasionally he will show an overly simplistic side, subconsciously using himself as a standard to calculate the average human bite resistance, and then come to the wrong conclusion that "even a bite or two is fine", and even see it as a sign of closeness. By the time he realized that this idea was so wrong, his pet had become an incorrigible dog.

However, the tooth neither barks nor bites today, and the animal's instinct tells it that the person should not be provoked excessively if it is not necessary. The watchdog's pride motivates it to insist on warning with a low growl, even at times like these, and intuition keeps the voice inaudible.

Neil smiled as he watched it react. Appearances aside, he would have liked the dog to have the same flexible way of thinking, rather than thinking about how to wreak havoc as much as possible within the boundaries of his master's demarcation - his plan to use them as cheap cannon fodder in the war against the monsters ended in failure, but the magic improvements made during that time raised the aggressiveness of these little creatures to a level that was difficult to recover and quite redundant, which led directly to today's bad results.

He winked at his teeth to show that he had no ill intent, and then stepped forward and knocked hard twice on the door—a door made of three thick layers of oak that could not be snapped with a single knee.

"Hello? Is anyone there? ”

There was an abrupt grinding sound in the hut, followed by the sound of something heavy falling to the ground, alternating between dull and shrill shattering, and ending with a whispered curse.

It sounds like someone got up in a hurry to open the door and accidentally tripped over the leg of the chair and kicked it over; When he tried to help him up, he turned his elbow and threw the plate on the table to the ground; Annoyed, he kicked the broken porcelain piece as if he were angry, and the flying shard shattered some glass......

Just then, the door opened, and Hagrid, who looked embarrassed and had a few pieces of broken porcelain on the soles of his shoes, appeared in the doorway. He glanced at Neil, who was wearing a student uniform, and his expression gradually changed from initial panic to wariness.

"Who are you looking for? It's dorm curfew time soon, you should ......"

"I'm here to be punished, sir."

Hagrid was stunned for a moment, as if he couldn't connect the smiling kid in front of him with the word "punished" for a while. Fortunately, he always likes to lose a screw when he has nothing to do with magical creatures, and this time he didn't strike completely, and he quickly recalled the cause and effect of this incident.

He lifted his fan-like slap and slapped it his head.

"Look at my memory...... Yes, Professor Flitwick told me about you, come in. ”

……

The interior of the guard's hut was as shabby as it looked from the outside, with only one room of the hut taking over most of the size of the gigantic furniture. At first glance, the wooden square tables and chairs look like a complete set of products, but a closer look reveals that there is still a slight gap between the specifications of the pieces – only self-taught half-baked carpenters would make such furniture, especially if they decide to start working without drawing a blueprint.

The bed was similarly poor, and with no linen or bedding of the right size, the clumsy craftsman had to go into battle again and make a bed that would cover his ankles out of countless rags.

Walls and ceilings were littered with easy-to-preserve foods like bacon and garlic skewers, as well as teeth, scales, and fluff from some unknown animal, in glass jars, possibly picked up while patrolling the Forbidden Forest—a discovery that lifted Neil's spirits, and it looked like there might be some windfall along the way.

In the corner of the room, a large open box was stuffed with the props he used as a hunting ground keeper—scissors for cutting the nails of large beasts, splints of various sizes, and so on. The piles are jumbled, but the reserves are large enough to handle the vast majority of contingencies, and are almost a perfect illustration of the character of Rubeus Hagrid.

"Just sit down." Hagrid stooped down and picked up the chair he had kicked over when he opened the door, sat down on it, and then gestured to the empty chairs leaning against the wall, "I forgot about it completely, and thought it was Madam Pomfrey complaining about something...... Oh, where are we? ”

When he was almost done, he suddenly remembered that it was inappropriate to gossip about his colleagues in front of the students, and hurriedly tried to change his words.

"Yes, patrol...... When it gets completely dark, we'll go. I don't know what happened to you to be triggered like this, but when you get to the Forbidden Forest, you have to obey my command of whatever you do, you understand? ”

Rubeus Hagrid knew that his character lacked majesty, so he had to make the most of his appearance when intimidating his students. Imagine a giant man with a mane more than four meters tall staring straight at him with unpredictable eyes, which is the only thing he usually relies on to discipline his students.

But unfortunately, even under the suppression of his all-out gaze, Neil's expression was still like a spring breeze.

"Totally understood, sir."

From the keepsake that the hunting ground keeper kept at home, Neil saw the great value of being buried in the Forbidden Forest, which gave his soul that was just beginning to wither a little bit strong again, and the whole person was as if he had been reborn in Nirvana, and his sparkling eyes made Hagrid flinch a little—you know, he himself was the one who was responsible for causing trouble and causing headaches for others in the past.

"I noticed unicorn tails in your collection, and I don't have a history of using this material in my hometown, but as far as I know, it's a fairly versatile and expensive material in the UK...... Best of all, from the section at the base of the tail, it wasn't cut by hand, but it was hooked on a tree branch or something, and according to the Ministry of Magic's regulations on endangered magical creatures, the material obtained in this case is not considered illegal gain - you know, even though I've only been here for a short time, I feel like I'm starting to like the Forbidden Forest. ”