“As I was saying,” Hong continued. “We should continue on to the fortress, whether it’s there or not, and resolve my contractual obligations.”

Mu raised one eye sceptically. “And I stand by my initial counterargument - we don’t know which building they want repaired, and anyway, they probably want to kill us even more now that one of us has burned their castle down.”

“‘One of us’? Yue is just a client - I claim no legal responsibility for anything she does.”

Yue dabbed.

“Still, she’s associated with us in their minds - she even said they quizzed her about you.”

Hong shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Worst comes to worst I’ll just hold them down and carefully explain things to them while you try and find out which building they feel I have failed to fulfil my contractual obligations to.”

“I feel you’re too serious about this,” Mu moaned.

“Of course I am. My word is my bond; if people don’t trust me to fulfil my bonds, how can they trust my words? Trust is built on responsibility and constancy - in fact, it can even be held to be the same as them, in some sense. Was that not what Zisi was trying to point out in his The Doctrine of the Mean?”

“Wait, hold up, didn’t you say there’s an exception for improperly constructed buildings where damage is sustained as a result of cultivator activity? Would that not necessarily entail that any contractual obligations held in respect to the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect are now null and void?”

“If the building we had an obligation to repair for the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect was the fortress in question - which is doubtful, since I’ve only repaired one fortress in the past century that wasn’t owned by fairies, giants, or space aliens.”

“Fair enough, I suppose - wait, hold on a moment,” said Mu, as he noticed something, “did you just call them ‘the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect’?”

“Yes? What about it?”

“Not the incendiary tripe sect, or the charred and crispy knishe sect, or the horribly burning haggis sect?”

“Who are those?” Hong asked. Mu stared at him incredulously.

“Those are all names you’ve used to refer to the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect.”

“Oh, have I? I don’t recall that.”

“You couldn’t recall their name at all until a mere few moments ago.”

“Oh, well, they’re our clients now. Remembering the name of a client is the least I can do.”

“Or they’re clients who are trying to kill us,” Mu remonstrated.

“We can’t know that for sure until we see the paperwork,” Hong replied doggedly.

“There probably isn’t even paperwork! - Oh, forget it,” Mu said, giving up. “Let’s find the castle and see if any of them are still there. Yue, you remember where it was?”

“Yep,” Yue said, and began to skip back the way she came. The ex-torturer groaned, and slowly trailed along behind her as she went back to the fortress which they’d only just escaped from. Hong and Mu followed, continuing to debate the merits of proactivity in discharging potential breaches of contract, and how alacrity and promptness were signs of sincerity in acknowledging that you’d done wrong and were seeking forgiveness.

The castle looked about what they expected it would - which is to say, it was now gone, nearly in its entirety. The basement was still apparently whole (thereby preserving the rare yeren relief carvings), but otherwise only the foundation of the building remained, with smoke drifting up out of the stone. Around the entire mess was a vague aura of a warm and cosy noodle shop.

“Hmmm. Well, even if the structure they needed you to repair is gone, at least we can make reasonable income from repairing this massive noodle shop,” Mu said, momentarily forgetting that said massive noodle shop was actually a fortress which had been metaphysically identified as a noodle shop.

Hong was about to reply, when the quartet found themselves cut off and rudely interrupted.

“Don’t joke!” A great, booming voice intoned, the echoes of his rage nearly throwing Mu off his feet.

The massive, musclebound monster strode out of the forest near the swamp. His huge body - cords of muscles chaining together like iron, and straining against a giant frame, all beneath a bulbous and hideous head - was strangely coated in ash and mud, his clothes ripped, and his body covered with light wounds and bruises.

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Several dozen demonic cultivators followed him out of the woods, their bodies in more or less similar stages of ill condition. A few were even nursing more serious wounds - missing or broken limbs, deep gashes, concussions, and all manner of brutally harsh injuries.

The hulking brute stood before them, body heaving with rage. His anger was so deep that the demonic energy being unconsciously released by him was burning the very ground, his hands balled up into fists.

“To think, you bastards would have the gall to make jokes about the evil you unleashed on our base,” the man swore.

Hong blinked innocently. “Evil? So far as I’m aware, my student merely set up a formation identifying your base as a noodle shop - and there’s no evil involved in noodle shops.”

“Isn’t there?” The man practically screeched. “Isn’t there? Do you even know what those cultivators did to our fortress - do you even have any idea? They didn’t just destroy it; they shattered every object inside, irreparably crippled the foundations, and even burned it down. All of it down.”

“Well, that’s fairly normal cultivator behaviour,” Hong remarked. “They do that everywhere.”

“They even burned down the stonework - the stonework, of all things! You’re not even supposed to be able to burn rocks - they’re supposed to melt, not combust!” The man cried. “How do you burn stone? What sort of monsters are they?”

“Ohhh, so you got some plucky young protagonists mixed in there.” Hong said, tone as blank as if he were discussing the weather. “Still pretty normal, if I’m being honest. I’ve seen them set fire to weirder stuff.”

“Monsters, that’s what they are, monsters,” the man continued to curse, as if Hong wasn’t speaking to him. “Clearly, noodle shops bring out the worst in cultivators - it makes you pity the poor delusional morons who decide to repair them.”

The poor delusional moron blinked.

“And you!” The man declared. “You were the one who unleashed them on us, through the medium of the disciple we abducted and imprisoned.”

“That seems like a slightly unfair charge,” Mu observed, practically to himself.

“So now, now we will have our revenge!” The behemoth said. “Now, you will die for having dared to defy, to anger, to oppose, to defile, to damage, and to humiliate - the Flaming, Bloody, Organs, Sect!”

Silence fell over the ruins of the fortress after this stunning pronouncement, the last echoes of the demonic cultivator’s promise reverberating through the quiet.

At last, Hong spoke. “So, just to clarify here… you did not actually call me here to deal with an improperly repaired noodle shop, restaurant, or similarly related structure such as an orphanage?”

“No,” the man replied. “Why would we do that? We of the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect burn orphanages and restaurants everywhere we go - why, if it hadn’t been our fortress, we would have burnt it down ourselves when we thought it was a noodle shop.”

There was nervous coughing from behind the man, from several other demonic cultivators who had decided to burn their fortress down under the misapprehension that it was a noodle shop, and not their base of operations.

Hong’s eye twitched, but he preserved his neutral expression and tone. He pulled out a bundle of papers, scanning it over as he spoke brusquely. “So, to clarify: when one Ke Sou, of the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect, got in touch with Hong Yu of the Noodle Shop Repair Sect, and informed him that the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect (aforementioned) had, under a shell corporation, contracted Hong Yu of the Noodle Shop Repair Sect (aforementioned), to repair a noodle shop, and that, said repairs having been done improperly, Hong Yu was needed to come and redo them - pursuant to the stipulations in his contract vis a vis improper construction - to reiterate, when all this was done, it was done falsely, under false pretences?”

The massive demonic cultivator blinked several times as he parsed Hong’s run on sentence. “That is a rather unwieldy way of putting it, but I suppose that it’s the case that- wait-”

He looked at Ke Sou, who was trying to surreptitiously blend in in the background.

“You told him we had signed a contract with the Noodle Shop Repair Sect?”

Ke Sou coughed. “That’s correct.”

“So he’s here to fulfil his contract, and not to settle our feud?”

Ke Sou coughed. “That’s correct.”

“What feud?” Hong asked innocently, prompting the musclebound demonic cultivator to spit blood.

“What do you mean, ‘What feud?’ You, Hong Yu, have damaged the honour - and, more importantly, the income - of the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect. Through your efforts to fireproof orphanages, you both crippled our immediate income, and, by making a public mockery of us, destroyed our potential future income.”

“Hmmm. Potentially defamatory on my part, to be sure, although as your income was derived unjustly in the first place I’m afraid I can’t find it in myself to be too distraught about my actions - as Apuleius said, ‘Honour is like clothing; the shabbier it gets, the worse it is treated.’” Hong replied.

Unconcerned - it’s not like he really had any honour - the demonic cultivator continued his tirade. “Then, you proceeded to assault numerous agents of the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect, defeating and killing our members in multiple encounters, and even crippling our shell corporation, the Kindness and Love Sect, by massacring several of their chief disciples.”

“Oh that’s right - you were the ones behind the Kindness and Love Sect, foremost among the demonic sects. In that case, I definitely feel no worries about damages inflicted.”

“So you see, it's time we settle this feud, and end the threat you pose - a settlement which I, Gan Mao, am willing to enforce personally,” and the demonic cultivator drew a grimy blade.

Hong grimaced and withdrew a sword from his storage pouch, holding it out to the side. He began to circle Gan Mao. “In lying about the substance of our contract, you're guilty of fraudulent misrepresentation; hence, I am more than happy to settle this with you.”