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The reporters had only come to try their luck, but when they saw a fox with nine tails with their own eyes, they were dumbfounded.

They truthfully sent back what they had filmed, but they still had their doubts. As reporters, skepticism was in their nature.

"Professor Rabbin, could it be a fake? It would be easy enough to fake the tails."

Rabbin, who looked like a scholar, said, "Are your eyes made of plastic? I've traced myths from every country for thirty years. Do you think I can't tell real from fake?"

"Legend says a fox gains a tail every hundred years. I always thought it was merely a legend, but when I saw this Nine-tailed Fox, I felt my life was filled with meaning. My persistence wasn't wrong! Mythical creatures really do exist!"

"Preliminary observations suggest it can make people lose consciousness. Every officer who approached it lost the ability to attack. Is that something an ordinary fox could do?"

Rabbin was utterly fervent, but the reporters scoffed. In their eyes, technology had advanced, and the world was full of strange things. There were plenty of ways to make people lose consciousness.

The officers who arrived as reinforcements thought the same way. They were unwilling to believe this was a supernatural incident.

Rabbin kept tugging at an officer and saying, "Send more people! It would be best to send the military too!"

The officer had no desire to pay Rabbin any attention. He might have been a respected scholar, but he had no authority to order the police around.

The reporters had already sent back photos of the Nine-tailed Fox and footage of more than a dozen fallen officers. The news quickly spread, and Professor Rabbin from National University soon learned of it. He insisted on coming along. He was a professor in National University's archaeology department, yet instead of properly studying history, he spent all day pondering the integration of myths, legends, and history. He belonged to a school rejected by orthodox academia.

Although what had happened today was indeed shocking, based on what the police had learned from two colleagues, the killer was a Nine-tailed Fox. The deaths were simply strange. When the officers charged forward, they seemed to lose all desire to attack and foolishly collapsed.

The newly reinforced officers sneered, refusing to believe that a fox could kill people.

"It's true! We saw it with our own eyes! The reporters filmed it too!" The two officers tried to explain to their superior, but the officer simply ignored them.

"This should be a case where the murderer disguised himself as a monster to kill people. After all, this is an indigenous district, and the natives are heathens who can indulge in superstition... But you are police officers! Devout believers in Allah! How can you believe in an imported myth like a Nine-tailed Fox? Someone put several tails on a fox and used some unknown method to ambush our officers from the shadows, staging it as a monster killing people so the real culprit could escape punishment..."

"Put on riot gear immediately and force your way up the mountain. There must still be a human hiding up there. The fox is only a cover."

Following his habitual way of thinking, the officer classified the case. Before long, another dozen heavily protected officers began charging up the mountain.

They believed the officers had lost consciousness because of some concealed weapon coated in a special drug.

Lan Mu hid atop the mountain and did not care about these officers at all. He only needed to wait until the time came. Once he turned back into Hunter, he could leave easily.

"Here we go again?"

Lan Mu sneered and used himself as the source of the enchantment, luring the officers into crawling toward him in a daze.

When the commanding officer at the foot of the mountain saw his men charge onto the huge boulder, he immediately waved and shouted, "Well done!"

"Just as expected, the murderer has no way out. He can only surrender!"

However, the two young officers who had seen the same thing before shouted, "No! Something's wrong! Why aren't they firing?"

Sure enough, after the officers climbed onto the stone platform, they made no movements at all. The officer waited several minutes, but not the slightest sound came from above.

"What's going on? What are you doing up there? Bring the murderer down! What's the situation up there now?"

The command post repeatedly called the officers on the mountaintop, but there was only dead silence on the other end. The call was not connected at all.

"Damn it, what happened? You all go up too!"

The officer sent out another team, leaving only himself at the foot of the mountain.

But after this group of officers charged onto the rocky summit, there was no response again. Several officers could be seen standing at the edge of the huge boulder, neither walking nor moving, simply staring blankly.

"Respond if you hear me! Respond!"

"What's the situation up there?"

Two consecutive groups, twenty-four fully armed officers in total, protected from head to toe, had charged onto a tiny stone platform and then vanished without a sound.

An invisible fear spread through the air, and even the reporters felt that this was far too bizarre.

"What kind of drug could pass through riot gear and hypnotize people?"

At that moment, Rabbin shouted, "I told you it's a demon! They've all been bewitched by demonic magic!"

"Demonic magic? Nonsense!"

The officer stubbornly retorted, "Impossible. You're a professor too. Aren't you afraid people will laugh at you for saying something like that? There must have been an accident up there."

He hurriedly requested more support from the city, then stood blankly at the foot of the mountain.

He did not dare go up, and neither did the reporters. Night soon fell, and the pitch-black summit looked like a gaping mouth that had swallowed everyone who went up.

The standoff continued for a long time, settling into an eerie calm.

The people at the foot of the mountain did not dare go up, while the people on the mountain were grooming their fur.

"Four hours left."

Lan Mu sat upright on a rock, leisurely grooming his fur, while a ring of officers stood around him.

Some continuously stroked their guns as though caressing their dearest lovers.

Others hugged rocks, greed filling their eyes as though they were clutching huge pieces of gold.

Still other officers embraced one another, creating an exceptionally harmonious scene.

Lan Mu, who had caused all this, yawned and silently calculated when his forced transformation period would end.

He had already figured out how the Nine-tailed Fox survived. Any one of the people present could easily kill him if they drew their guns.

Yet not a single one could do so, because before the Nine-tailed Fox's talent, no one could raise a gun against him!

Lan Mu did not immediately kill the officers. On one hand, they wore riot gear, so he could not directly drain their energy.

On the other hand, he was deliberately stalling for time. Since they were enchanted, they posed no threat whatsoever.

Second by second, time passed. When two hours remained before the transformation ended—

Lan Mu noticed another large group of officers arriving at the foot of the mountain, while helicopters flew in from afar.

"Helicopters! Damn it..."

"With helicopters, staying on the mountaintop would be suicide."

Lan Mu was no fool. He hurried down the mountain, but the officers surrounding the base immediately opened fire, forcing him to duck back behind the stone platform.

"Tch..."

With a thought, Lan Mu shifted the objects of obsession of the officers he had captured on the mountain onto himself, making them form a circle around him as they retreated down the mountain.

The officers below were dumbstruck. What the hell? It was one thing not to arrest the murderer after going up there, but they were actually protecting the murderer as he came down the mountain?

"Bastards! What are you doing?" The officer flew into a rage, but his shouts could not wake them from the enchantment.

Lan Mu swaggered down the mountain with a group of officers, then darted into the forest, leaving the other officers staring in confusion.

"Chase him! Hurry up and chase him! Why aren't you shooting?"

When Rabbin saw the Nine-tailed Fox escape, he shouted anxiously.

"Are you an idiot? Can't you see my men have it surrounded? Do you want me to kill my own people?"

The officer roared, then continued issuing orders. "You, go after that fox. You are authorized to kill it."

"Send another group up the mountain to rescue people..."

"Keep an eye out for the murderer. So far, we've only seen the fox. The real culprit still hasn't appeared."

Rabbin grew even angrier upon hearing this. "You're truly foolish! How dare you order the Nine-tailed Fox killed? Do you know how precious this fox is? Even if it were only a corpse, its physiological structure would overturn modern biology and perhaps even shatter the theory of evolution. If it were alive, it would be even more valuable than a corpse. Perhaps we could breed new Nine-tailed Foxes!"

The officer impatiently shoved Rabbin away and insisted on his orders.

The officers split into two groups. One team went up the mountain and found their colleagues from the afternoon, only to discover that they had already died with their bodies utterly drained. The other team went deep into the forest in pursuit of the fleeing fox.

The officer received the report. "They were already dead this afternoon. Their deaths were all bizarre. Their blood had been drained without leaving any wounds, and their cells, nuclei, and internal organs had all failed."

"Can anyone tell me how that was done? They died from cellular failure?"

No one could answer the officer. At that moment, the officers who had helped the fox escape earlier also happened to regain consciousness and stared blankly at their colleagues.

"What were you all doing? Where is the murderer?" The officer angrily interrogated the group of officers.

But they looked at one another and talked over each other, saying they had seen lovers, treasures, even Allah... Who knew what Allah looked like?

After questioning them for ages, not one officer could provide any useful information. They had all been living in dreams.

"They seem to have been hypnotized..." one officer said to the commanding officer.

The officer had naturally seen that as well. His head immediately began to ache as he said in disbelief, "Of course I know they were hypnotized... You smelled that strange fragrance too, didn't you? Collect samples and analyze its composition. It must be some new kind of hallucinogen. Damn it! Where is the suspect? We never saw the suspect from the beginning. Where is he hiding? Don't tell me he can turn invisible!"

The police truly could not find any so-called human suspect. They turned the entire mountain upside down without finding a single suspicious person, because before the police arrived, there had been no one but Lan Mu.

Aside from Rabbin, no one fully believed that such a huge case had been caused by a fox. There had to be a person in the shadows who had done everything. As for a fox turning into a human to commit crimes, that was utter nonsense.

"Keep searching! He must have mixed in with them when they came down the mountain and hidden in the forest."

More than a dozen officers had died, yet the police had not even seen a trace of their enemy. The media had witnessed it all. It was utterly humiliating.

Humiliated and enraged, the police frantically searched the forest for the so-called suspect.

The helicopters switched on their searchlights and searched at low altitude, their powerful winds throwing the forest into chaos.

More than sixty officers conducted a carpet search. That night, countless lights flickered through the ancient forest.