Clumsy Beast, Keep Your Paws Off

This woman was none other than Mu Lihua. Beside her stood the Witch Doctor, his bony hands still stained with the dark energy he had used to terrorize the clearing.

My Lihua face twisted with a sneer as she looked at the pathetic woman who was scrawling at her feet.

And a proud feeling appears on her face. Before she started taking out all her anger and hatred on Wang Mulan, together with the whips of black energy.

Wang Mulan’s state grew pathetic, so even opening her eyes was difficult for her.

Wang Mulan’s vision blurred as blood trickled from her forehead, but she kept her eyes fixed on Mu Linghua with pure hatred.

She was disgusted by their greed. She knew their true goal: they wanted to silence her forever and take her baby’s power for themselves.

The Witch Doctor kicked her one last time, looking down at her broken form. "She’s almost dead," he muttered. "Let’s finish this."

Wang Mulan knew she couldn’t fight them anymore. She had no strength left. In a final, desperate act of survival, she used a spell to slow her heartbeat and mask her life force.

To anyone watching, it would look as though her soul had left her body. She became as cold and still as a corpse.

"Throw her in the hole," Mu Lihua commanded, her voice cold.

The tiny fox cub lay just a few feet away, its large, watery eyes wide as it watched everything. The infant was silent, paralyzed by the horror of seeing its mother treated nothing like a living being.

The Witch Doctor and Mu Lihua began to dig a shallow pit in the dirt. With a heavy thud, they tossed Wang Mulan’s limp body into the dark hole.

Su Qinglan, watching through her infant eyes, felt the world go quiet as the first handful of dirt landed on her mother’s face.

They worked quickly, covering Wang Mulan until she was buried deep beneath the earth.

They didn’t even give her a marker; they simply packed the dirt down until the ground looked flat again.

The small baby fox didn’t cry. It didn’t utter a single sound. The trauma was so deep that the child’s mind seemed to fracture.

It just stared at the fresh patch of dirt with strange, hollow eyes, watching the place where its mother had disappeared.

Mu Lihua wiped her hands and looked at the cub. "Pick it up. We’re leaving."

The Witch Doctor snatched the baby from the ground, and as they walked away into the darkness, the last thing the infant saw was the moonlight shining on the grave of the woman who had sacrificed everything to save her.

The scene shifted rapidly, like a blurred map of time.

Su Qinglan felt her infant body being carried away from the dirt grave by the cold, calculating hands of Mu Lihua.

From that day on, the lie began. Mu Lihua acted as if she were the one who had given birth to the fox cub, using the child to blackmail and tie down Su Mingxuan.

In the original memories of Su Qinglan’s body, the truth was buried under layers of fear. Su Qinglan grew up in a world of lies.

Because of the trauma she witnessed as a baby, she developed an extremely paranoid and weak character. She was a broken child from the start.

But the world only saw the surface.

To the Fox Tribe, Su Qinglan was the "pampered daughter" of the high-ranking Su Mingxuan.

They saw a father who gave her everything, but they never saw what happened behind closed doors.

They never saw how Mu Lihua treated her with cruelty or how the witch doctor used her as a puppet.

The Witch Doctor was indifferent to her life.

To him, she was just an experiment. He performed dark, evil spells on her mind, twisting her thoughts and making her behavior erratic.

Most of the time, the original Su Qinglan didn’t even know what she was doing.

The spells messed with her brain, making her appear "evil" or "crazy" to the other tribespeople. She lived in a mental cell, trapped by magic she couldn’t understand.

To ruin her reputation even further, her stepsister... Mu Lihua’s biological daughter worked tirelessly to make Su Qinglan look like an evil female.

The stepsister was deeply jealous of Su Qinglan’s natural beauty and her father’s devotion.

While Su Qinglan was being tortured by spells, the stepsister and Mu Lihua would set up scenarios to make her look like a bully.

They made it look like Su Qinglan was the one chasing after every beautiful male, harassing the weak, and acting like a spoiled tyrant.

They spread rumors that she was a pampered, useless female who only cared about her own pleasure.

Because Su Qinglan’s mind was so clouded by the Witch Doctor’s magic, she couldn’t even defend herself. She became the most hated female in the tribe, a "tyrant" in everyone’s eyes.

Su Mingxuan saw his daughter’s declining reputation and her fragile mental state.

He didn’t know about the Witch Doctor’s spells, but he knew his daughter was drowning.

By the time she turned eighteen, he realized he had to protect her at all costs. He knew that once he was gone, she would be eaten alive by the tribe’s hatred.

He decided to choose the three most powerful and intelligent men in the tribe to be her guardians.

He officially made them her fiancés: Hu Yan, the golden tiger; Han Ju, the lone wolf; and Rong Ye, the clever fox.

In the eyes of the tribe, these three were already her mates. The only thing left was the final mating ritual to make it official.

Su Mingxuan knew he was being selfish. He knew he was taking advantage of these three honorable men by tying them to a "troubled" female like his daughter. But he also knew their characters.

"They are good men," Su Mingxuan whispered to himself in the memory.

"Even if they don’t love her, they are too noble to ever bully or hurt a female. They will keep her safe when I cannot."

He chose them because they were the only ones strong enough to shield her from the tribe’s gossip.

But as Su Qinglan watched this from her soul’s perspective, she felt a wave of bitterness.

These three men had started their journey with her out of obligation and a sense of duty to a desperate father. They had been "tricked" into a life with a woman who didn’t even know what she was doing.

Even the current Su Qinglan felt it was wrong for them. If she were in their place, she would have resented the tribe leader...but these men never did.

Although they kept their distance from her, they always fulfilled their duty of protecting her and ensuring she was well fed.