Once upon a time it was a grey and balmy night.

“Crap,” said Hong, who'd accidentally stepped on his watch.

He leaned down to pick it up from where it had fallen, brushing grass out of the shattered gears.

He had gone to the hill outside of town to sit under the sinking sun and think.

It was a habit of his, to sit in the wilds at night, which he'd increasingly inculcated over the years as his qi-infused body needed less and less sleep. He enjoyed entering a world where all was aslumber and contemplating the star-spattered heavens, alone with only the crickets for company.

He pulled out an old-fashioned (and just plain old) storage pouch, dropping the broken watch inside.

Hong didn’t hold with storage rings. They looked nice, but got in the way of your fingers, and were annoying when trying to do detailed work during repairs.

This done, Hong plopped down on the ground. It had been five days since Magistrate Su (Hong had finally asked him for his name) had asked him to find the cattle muncher, and though Hong had acquired an increasing amount of data it had done little more than confirm his earlier suspicions.

The beast was conscious, and its strikes were intentional - of that Hong was certain.

He took a drink from his thermos as he looked over his notes. Having verified the features of the case, he had attempted to contextualise them by studying the small city of Xiǎo Chéngshì, to see if he could understand the cattle muncher by situating it in its history.

This was standard policy for noodle shop repair - “a noodle shop serves the community, and should reflect the community,” in the words of his sect master - and it had served him well enough as a guiding principle when solving cases such as this one.

A monster was no less a member of the community than a man, however much it may be outside it, and it was no less outside its influence than was the man. This was true even if it was completely unintelligent; its activities would simply be reactive, rather than intentional.

So Hong had thought, and so he had acted.

For such a small and out of the way city Xiǎo Chéngshì was a remarkably turbid place, something worthy of remark if not especially remarkable. This close to the Central Plains one encountered quite a few people who were hiding, or on the move, or had some other situation that precluded an honest account of their circumstances.

Consequently much of Hong’s investigation had consisted more in determining what people weren’t telling him than parsing what they had.

Many were unwilling to talk, leaving Hong’s knowledge fragmentary and his conclusions tentative. He still had only a rudimentary idea of the how often the cattle muncher attacked, and his attempts to place its movements on a time scale were proving difficult - records improved after the current magistrate took over, but though he could trace it back a little over a year, maybe three, at that point it merged into the general stream of ‘monster attacks’ and became totally unidentifiable.

Work had then carried him outside the city, to nearby small towns and villages like Xiǎochéng and Xiǎo Cūnzhuāng. He had carried his queries with him, to little effect.

***

“Mysterious monsters murdering moo-cows?” Yue had responded, when Hong paid a visit to her house. He was on his way to repair three inns that had been accidentally maliciously annihilated by a gang of cheerful rogues (off wandering in search of adventure), and was stopping at the farmers along the way.

Yue considered the question as she sat on her front porch, the bees buzzing busily about the flowerbeds.

“No, sorry, we only moved here a little over two years ago.”

Then she put one finger up in the air, as she thought of something very important.

“Do you think the monster is a fan of realistic, hard science fiction, like xianxia?”

***

“Cattle muncher? We don't even keep cattle here,” said Contrary Carl, as one of his cows mooed softly behind him.

An entire herd of cattle milled about in the field as Contrary Carl squinted his eyes at Hong.

“You're not one of them tax collectors, ain't ya? Or somebody else with the government?”

Hong stared blankly, not even bothering to pull his notebook out of his toolkit.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“No sirree, I have nothing to do with any government figures,” he deadpanned, his government investigator's seal pinned to his coat.

***

“Don’t be ridiculous - you can’t possibly be a cultivator, not when you’re wearing cotton,” Ouyang of the Platinum Pansy Sect declared, his tone half surprised and half arrogant disbelief.

Hong’s brows came together. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Why, you just got lucky when you defeated Zhao. He was always weak,” Ouyang continued, completely ignoring Hong’s remark as he gestured to the one third of Zhao’s body that was still discernible.

The other two thirds were nowhere to be found. Zhao had made the mistake of informing Hong that he had no plans to fight outside of the noodle shop; a mistake Zhao’s erstwhile foe Ouyang was in the midst of repeating.

“The question,” Hong growled, but Ouyang charged. His blade swung straight for Hong’s neck.

Hong made a mini sword with two of his fingers and parried. Undeterred, Ouyang wheeled his blade back around and tried to slash Hong in the side.

Hong’s mini finger sword idly deflected it, and the two entered an exchange of thrusts.

Ouyang’s blade sparked like a wildfire, gouts of qi spitting and hissing as his sword swung again and again, seeking to strike Hong dead. His face contorted more and more in rage, his body burning as much in anger as with qi.

Hong’s mini finger sword moved slowly, with sinewy grace, as he repelled Ouyang’s attacks with consummate ease. His expression was totally blank, his fighting arm moving almost independently from the rest of his body, which stood firm with his right hand behind his back.

It was the complete lack of any visible qi on Hong's part that finally did Ouyang in, however. Losing himself, he cried in fury as his sword blurred in an arc for Hong’s head.

Hong’s mini finger sword blocked it head on, before Hong pushed the blade to the side, leaning into the attack and causing Ouyang to pass over him. Hong’s right hand moved.

Hong’s hammer came up, slamming home just below Ouyang’s Qugu acupoint.

Ouyang’s knees came together, his mouth formed an O, and he slowly toppled over.

As he fell back Hong grabbed him by the leg, foisting him into the air.

“Now, once more: are you the one eating the organs of cows in the middle of the night?”

Ouyang wheezed out a ‘nooo,’ tears dripping from his eyes. He had no idea why the crazy youth in old cotton robes had stopped him from destroying the noodle shop, or why he was obsessed with the idea of eating cattle organs at midnight. All he knew was pain.

Hong cursed, stroking his wisp of a beard. “Darn, well there goes that hypothesis. I’d been wondering if it might not be a cultivator - it’s not like any of you have respect for food in the first place - but having asked a dozen different sects I think we can rule out that one.”

Ouyang was vaguely aware he should be incensed, and started whispering a ‘you dare’… but having finished his questioning Hong had finished his business, and unceremoniously dropped the cultivator on his head, repeatedly.

***

“Eat a cow? I would never!” Remarked Fu Kyu, a restaurant owner in Xiǎo Cūnzhuāng, as Hong replaced her tables. A aggressive Young Master had faced off with a protagonist there that morning, and based on the sounds coming from just outside they weren't quite done yet.

Hong tried to explain that it was the monster eating cows he was after, and he suspected her of nothing, but he'd touched a nerve. Fu Kyu raged on, a tiny fist raised in the air.

“It's all well and good to kill cattle, but eating them is quite another matter. They have feelings. They hurt too. How could you make them suffer like that?”

“No, I'm not-”

“And just because you're tired of eating well-cooked, warm food, that's no reason to go and invite the rest of us to eat raw cow intestines in the middle of a field at midnight. Fie on you sir, fie on you!”

At that point the two cultivators from earlier rolled back into the restaurant, shrieking about courting death, and as the protagonist had affinity with all five elements the entire restaurant was promptly obliterated all over again.

***

And those were the normal ones. Then there was the one who tried to induct Hong into his disco dance cultivation path, the one with the magic underwear, the girl with a tattooed dragon… It had been an irksome search, one made all the worse by the fact that cultivators apparently had nothing better to do than destroy noodle shops all day.

The resulting picture was… less than satisfactory, which necessarily complicated his case. Was the cattle muncher’s timing consistent? He couldn't say; it was now, but who knew if that was only a recent development. Likewise for the matter of the money - for all Hong knew, Magistrate Su was right, and it was only coterminous with the start of reliable records that the mysterious money man began leaving his gifts.

But there was one thing Hong absolutely did know - one horrible tragedy, which was now terrifyingly and depressingly undeniable: the cattle muncher’s activities were impacting the town’s stock of noodle shop beef.

A whole one point two four three percent of the year’s noodle shop beef had been lost because of the decrease in available cattle.

Hong’s blank eyes took on a milky cast as he considered this calamity. The machinations of the cattle muncher had placed noodle shops in a difficult position: deprive one and a quarter out of every hundred beef-eating restaurant goers of their tasty beef noodles, or shrink the portions of all beef-eating restaurant goers by a little bit over one percent.

Hong finished his tea and stood up, hands folded behind his back. A noodle shop should be a place of rest and repose; but how could one relax if the meal they had hoped for was unavailable? It was, so far as he was concerned, an intolerable situation.

Hong walked down the hill, ancient robe fluttering in the wind, and contemplated the stars. He would settle the matter by the end of the night - he could not permit this tragedy to continue. Of this there was no doubt, for though Hong had little information, he had enough.

He reached the bottom of the hill, facing the woods on the opposite side of the town, and waited. He did not have to wait long, before he heard something big padding about the woods.

“Looks like my leads were correct,” he said laconically, “and you really were here.”

The something growled.