All for the Sake of Justice!

Vampires?

Mo Fan had only ever encountered such creatures in books and movies, and in those they were invariably portrayed as devastatingly handsome — just like himself.

"Hold on," Mo Fan said. "You said earlier they prey on women?"

Huo Tuo nodded. "These vampires have refined taste. Preying on women is just the start — they handpick their victims, and those victims have to be what we'd consider beautiful. Different vampires have different preferences: some like women with long flowing hair, some prefer virgins, and some go for fair, smooth skin."

"Are you sure they only drink blood?" Mo Fan asked, one eyebrow arched.

"How would I know?" Huo Tuo said, perfectly deadpan. "What I've heard is that the feeding process is slow. They tend to find somewhere secluded and take their sweet time. As long as dawn hasn't broken, those fangs of theirs can do whatever they please to a woman's body."

"Bastards!" Mo Fan snapped. "To think creatures like this actually walk the earth — have they no respect for me, Mo Fan, whatsoever?"

As the hidden guardian of young women lurking beneath this vast city's blanket of night, Mo Fan could tolerate many things — but not something like a vampire.

If he couldn't root them out completely and wipe them from existence, he'd be a disgrace to his self-styled title as Magic City's unofficial enforcer.

Seeing that Mo Fan seemed genuinely interested, Huo Tuo pressed on. "What I need is a fang — a vampire's fang. The bounty I posted with the Hunters' Alliance still hasn't been claimed. People assume this kind of creature simply can't exist, but I know better. Magic City already harbors these beings who can pass for ordinary humans, and they've been preying on city women for quite some time."

"Then I want to know — are vampires human, or are they Demon-Beasts?" Mo Fan asked.

Huo Tuo gave a faint smile. "Does that question even matter? Whether it's a Demon-Beast or a human — if what they do is intolerable, they deserve to be punished. Maybe vampires carry more human blood in their veins, but their behavior is no different from any Demon-Beast's."

Mo Fan looked at the old man, a flicker of genuine surprise crossing his face. He hadn't expected something this thought-provoking to come out of that mouth.

And he wasn't wrong.

"Since nobody's claiming the bounty, it must be a high-level one," Mo Fan said. "I'll get you your vampire fang — but in exchange, you waive the crafting fee. I'm just a student. I'm broke."

"Two fangs." Huo Tuo held up two fingers.

"You're more of a vampire than they are," Mo Fan shot back, irritated.

"Are you stupid, or just stupid? If you track down a vampire, you think it only has one fang?" Huo Tuo said.

Mo Fan stood there blank-faced. *Completely valid point. I have absolutely nothing to say to that.*

"If veteran hunters can't even find this creature, you'd better give me something to go on," Mo Fan said. "Magic City is enormous and packed with people — how am I supposed to track it down?"

"My leads are thin," Huo Tuo said. "It happened one night when I missed my last train and ended up waiting on the platform for a long time. By sheer bad luck, I witnessed a vampire in the middle of feeding. I didn't manage to save the girl — by the time I got her to a treatment center, she'd bled out. The doctor's diagnosis was sudden cardiac arrest; blood loss, apparently, wasn't determined to be the primary cause of death. I reported to the Hunters' Alliance and the Magic Association that she had been attacked by something that looked human, but when they reviewed the surveillance footage, there was no trace of the attacker anywhere. They told me I must have been seeing things. But I know — we may not have such creatures native to our country, but in the West, vampire legends are real. They came here to hunt, and they happened to cross my path. I'm no crusader for justice. I did what I could for that girl, and I was ready to leave it at that — until I came across an old Western tome on smithing and learned that a vampire's blood fang is a perfect crafting material..."

"So the only lead you have is the dead girl?" Mo Fan's voice sharpened.

Huo Tuo nodded. "Of course. If it were easy, it wouldn't be worth that much. I'll give you the girl's name — everything else is up to you. Bring me the blood fang, and I'll hand over the Armor Enchanted Gear you want. Otherwise, you can pay me sixty million outright. Not a coin less."

"One more question," said Mo Fan.

"Go ahead."

"You're this good at bleeding people dry, yet you couldn't spring for a cab? You rode the subway?"

Huo Tuo's mustache bristled as he fixed Mo Fan with a glare. "What do you know, boy? It's called being frugal."

After such a lengthy back-and-forth between Mo Fan and Huo Tuo, Ah Li Junnan, who had been standing off to the side this entire time, finally ventured a quiet mutter: "I... I also have a question."

Neither Mo Fan nor Huo Tuo spared him a glance. Ah Li Junnan looked thoroughly pained.

He still hadn't figured out what made snake scales without snake markings worth anything at all.

Mo Fan did the math. Only seven days remained until the second Challenge Week. If he wanted to be wearing that Armor Enchanted Gear by then, he had seven days to track down the vampire and knock out its fangs.

For something like this, he'd need Lingling's help. The bounty's difficulty was sky-high — just old man Huo's crafting fee alone ran to twenty million, never mind that threefold-rate business of his. A bounty worth tens of millions typically required a High-Level Mage to complete, and usually a full team on top of that.

Still, Huo Tuo was no fool — at his level of cultivation, he could read Mo Fan's strength clearly enough. The fact that he'd handed the job to him suggested the vampire probably wasn't overwhelmingly powerful in combat. The real challenge was finding it. At least the Scale-Skin Mother Demon he'd faced before had the decency to transform into a monster. But according to Huo Tuo, vampires were indistinguishable from ordinary humans — unless you caught one mid-feast, there was simply no starting point.

Come to think of it, the Scale-Skin Mother Demon had been fond of drinking human blood as well. He wondered vaguely whether there was some connection between the two.

Either way, best to finish the bounty as quickly as possible. With the Armor Enchanted Gear, his power would climb another rung — he could challenge higher-ranked opponents, accumulate more resources... Wait, no. A man of his caliber — how could he possibly stand by while vampires preyed on innocent young women in this city full of life and beauty?

*All for the sake of justice!!!*

"Lingling, we've got a job — big money!" Mo Fan announced.

"Tell me where you are — I'm on my way!" Lingling's tone carried its usual composure, that rain-washed calm wholly incongruous with her age, but the speed with which she arrived said everything: the girl had been going stir-crazy for days.

With Lingling in tow, Mo Fan set off to call on the family of the young woman Huo Tuo had witnessed being killed, hoping to turn up something worth pursuing.