Hong and Mu had ascended the mountain, seeking supplies. They had obtained the supplies, at the cost of two of their wallets (and Mu’s dignity), and then they had come back down the mountain.

Then the real task had begun - repairing the noodle shops.

(And the inns.)

(And the bars.)

(And the regular restaurants.)

(And the ice cream parlour.)

(Also Auntie Ping’s hot dog cart.)

As they descended the mountain, Hong made it clear by means of his usual laconic gestures that he expected Mu to watch for the first few days and learn the parameters of the job prior to providing any assistance.

Mu was glad he had agreed. He hadn’t been aware that the process of noodle shop repair was quite that… involved. He had vaguely assumed it involved showing up at the noodle shop and repairing it, but that wasn’t quite right.

The initial step in any noodle shop repair case was, of course, chasing the cultivators out of the restaurant - by force if necessary - before any repair work could take place. This was usually a speedy affair, if one which involved a fair amount of violence. (Thankfully, sometimes with actual weapons - Mu never wanted to see a sugar cube again, not after that.)

At that point one of two things happened. If the noodle shop had a #63: Regular Service Plan with the Noodle Shop Repair Sect then Hong could confirm a continuation of prior service and proceed directly to construction, all relevant details being already recorded.

If they lacked a #63: Regular Service Plan - as was normally the case - then Hong would need to draft and submit a proposal outlining the plan and steps to repair the noodle shop. This was a terrifying process to watch.

Hong had an entire storage pouch full of manuals containing construction plans, and after an initial consultation with the client would draft at speed a plan that was both structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing, indicating the extent and nature of repairs to the noodle shop, as well a preliminary analysis of projected costs.

If the client accepted the proposal then they would enter into a Design and Build Contract.

Then would follow anywhere from one to several meetings in which Hong presented samples of materials, paints, and designs for the client’s approval, adjusting his plan according to their preferences.

Mu was surprised to learn that there were good reasons for why Hong settled in an area; sure, he could build a noodle shop from the ground up in less than a day, but it sometimes took several days to finish the planning stage with a given restaurant and Hong scheduled accordingly. If he worked on multiple shops simultaneously - an easy enough proposition, given cultivators’ destructive proclivities - then he could arrange delays to his own profit, ensuring no time was wasted.

The contract thus signed, and all plans finalised with reference to the client’s wishes, Hong moved on to purchasing the needed materials.

This step could sometimes be skipped - his extensive storage pouch stockpiles included not just the normal supplies, but quite a few strange and exotic ones - but often there was a unique material needed, or a missing colour of paint, or even just more of a material than he carried. The biggest offender here was invariably wallpaper designs, which differed from shop to shop and had to be specially commissioned.

Once he had a complete picture as to the nature of his supply needs, Hong would compose and send out an order to his regular suppliers, the Family. He used a spirit relay - a type of cultivator communication device - to ensure effective and instantaneous communications, circumventing the usual difficulties with land travel.

The Family, much as Mu hated to admit it, were remarkably efficient.

Hong would send out an application, and an agent would be in touch with him within one business day. For normal materials, they promised delivery within two business days after the finalisation of an order; for wallpaper designs and unusual materials, one week; and for rare materials used only in luxury establishments, they had no set guarantee.

Once they had acquired the materials Hong had ordered, they would contact him again and arrange a meeting. Their meeting spots were more inline with Mu’s expectations of a cultivator group, if strangely broad in scope - magical clearings on the tops of mountains, mystical grottos hidden deep in the woods, the caves of dragons under the riverbed, the cloudy castles of giants, cosy gnome huts in fairyland.

Mu was not quite sure why a demonic cult had such a diverse range of business connections, all on sincerely friendly terms with them and apparently happy to meet at a moment’s notice. Still, it meant that material shipments were always delivered securely, with a minimum of fuss and bother and few concerns over interruptions (except when they used Granny Nutmeg’s place - she always brought them cookies), so he had no reason to complain.

He later asked Hong about this breadth, and was informed that the Noodle Shop Repair Sect offered discounts to locations which consented to act as meeting grounds for Noodle Shop Repair Sect disciples; a welcome offer, it seemed, since cultivators did not confine their depredations to the material plane.

The disciples sent by the Family were always teenagers, confirming what Lil Frankie had said regarding the contract being made with the younger generation. They were paid a variable cost on the materials, and an additional fixed cost was given to the teen who made the delivery. “Pocket money,” Hong called it.

Oftentimes the youth who brought the supplies was Lil Frankie herself, who would smirk at Mu as she made the exchange, and deny ever having stolen his wallet before skipping off. But there were all sorts of other youths, most of whom still smirked at Mu (but without saying anything, which made it worse). There was the one in lederhosen who fidgeted awkwardly the entire time, the guy with the slicked back hair who showed up with a girl on either arm, and the girl who posed as she flew through the air, singing, with birds twittering in her wake.

(And there was one woman who was literally glowing, her skin flickering like a disco ball. Mu had no idea what that was about.)

Once this process had been completed then finally, finally Hong could begin construction. This was the fastest part of the entire process - Mu estimated it took Hong maybe one fiftieth of the time he wasted in planning, meetings, supply acquisition, and filing.

Hong would pull out his supplies and get to work, with the unawakened watching in shock as an entire restaurant appeared out of wrack and ruin in a matter of hours (all of it Built to Code). And that was if Hong was proceeding lethargically - if he really wanted to get serious, the repairs could be done in under an hour: lengths of wood would fly through the air, nails hammer themselves in, and paintbrushes pinwheel to their proper positions as Hong stood in the centre of the maelstrom, hands dancing as he conducted his magic symphony.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

After that Hong would clean up - usually using his qi to speed up this part of the process - and they would proceed to testing. Hong would make sure that all the floors, tables, and chairs were stable, that the door hinges worked, that there were no issues with any of the stoves or cleaning stations, etcetera etcetera.

The restaurant owner and a local administrator (where possible) were also usually present for this part of the process, the restaurant owner making sure the restaurant matched what was in the plan and the local administrator cross-checking Hong’s repairs with the relevant legal codes.

If there were no problems then the restaurant would be recertified as an establishment which could serve food and beverages, and Hong would send in his invoice.

While Hong would invariably inquire if the noodle shop didn’t want to shift to a #63: Regular Service Plan, he didn’t push the matter. He did, however, clarify with the shop owners as to whether they intended to use the same plan for future purchases (after all, the three inevitabilities of life were death, taxes, and cultivators destroying your noodle shop).

If the answer was positive then he would save the files containing a record of all meetings, decisions, and plans undertaken in respect to the individual restaurant, filing it meticulously in accordance with his system.

(He employed a geographical filing system sub-categorised by type of restaurant, with the entire schema being cross-referenced across an alphabetical index - just in case anyone was wondering.)

If the answer was negative then he would still save the files, adding a memo mentioning the theoretical inapplicability of the information, and just not tell them (after all, the three inevitabilities of life were death, taxes, and cultivators destroying your noodle shop).

Later at night he would make records of these files in triplicate by hand, sending one to the sect library, another to the sect finance department, and the last to the secret second library. All were tagged with a standard file retention policy of one hundred years, although Hong would sometimes adjust this if the restaurant was owned by a cultivator or spirit beast and could expect to be in operation longer.

The only part of the entire process that made no sense to Mu was the invoice itself. It consisted of the cost of all the materials - including delivery costs - and a computation of the labour costs of Hong himself. These labour costs, however, were calculated as if Hong were a regular labourer, contractor, architect, designer, etcetera, and not as if he were a cultivating labourer, contractor, architect, designer, etcetera.

Mu’s confusion here was not a matter of simple arrogance. Hong’s construction work, his planning, his sourcing of materials - everything depended upon his being a cultivator. This included continuous training costs, both to build Hong up as a cultivator and to ensure he could use his cultivation in the context of noodle shop repair. This was to say nothing about the cultivation resources expended during the construction process, or any medical fees incurred if and when he ran into cultivators unwilling to cease their destruction without a “warning”. Hiring cultivators was expensive for a reason.

Yet the pricing of the noodle shop repair sect was done as if for a skilled labourer, and the discounts they incorporated into their service plans meant that even if Hong had been a skilled labourer, they’d have been barely turning a profit.

This bothered Mu, nagging at him, until one day he decided to ask Hong about the matter.

“Why do we have such a high discount rate?” Hong said, reiterating the question. He scratched his cheek thoughtfully.

“Well, if we didn’t, then sooner rather than later all the restaurants in our purview would go bankrupt, no? Cultivators will keep destroying them at a blisteringly fast pace, so they need to keep being rebuilt. If we charge too much then we’ll burn through the restaurant owner’s savings, and eventually there will come a day when they lack the money to request our services - or anyone else’s - again. The discount programs are to ensure that restaurants in big cities - where they might need our services anywhere from fifty-two to one hundred fifty times a year - can keep functioning, and bring noodly joy to all humanity.”

“Right,” Mu pushed, “that makes sense. But how do you keep your own sect from going bankrupt? The labour fees in your invoices are hilariously improper.”

“Same reason. We exist to restore restaurants (and help them bring noodly warmth and joy to all humanity), not to turn a profit. The labour fees are kept low intentionally, to avoid placing a financial strain on the restaurants. In fact they’re chiefly priced to ensure that disciples can rest in comfort when in the field: some of us - for instance, vice sect master Da Wang, Mung Bi, Hong Yu - favoured only charging the cost of materials and rooming in the wilds, but the sect master said that would be an unfair labour practice.”

“Which only raises my question further. Your prices do not reflect the cost of cultivator training and upkeep, nor of administration; how do you make your money?”

“Ohh, you don’t need to worry about that. We have multiple sources of income, beyond noodle shop repair.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Do you remember all those wacky adventures we had, like the one last week?”

Mu did - they’d been asked to rebuild a restaurant on the back of a giant turtle, one the size of a small island. It had to be completely waterproof, with special seals to preserve air in case the turtle submerged, and the kitchen needed to be designed so that the fire would not bother the turtle.

This had required a substantial consultation process, but additional issues had arisen during the supply process. Several rare materials requested by the client were outside of the Family’s direct purview (though they could manage the underwater sealing supplies well enough) and they needed to go on a quest to retrieve them.

Hong had taken Mu along with them, to experience the supply process (much to Lil Frankie’s mirth) and they had needed to visit three secret realms to find all the requested supplies. Unfortunately, one of them was in the middle of some orthodox cultivation contest, and they ended up contending with no less than eight sects - all of whom were trying to kill them - for the needed materials.

It had been good practice for Mu, who fought off three Young Masters and two Young Mistresses all on his lonesome. He'd been desperately holding on to the Immortal Divine Tree Branch the client wanted for their roof with one hand and fighting only with the other, and having to stave off that many experts while also climbing backwards up a mountain had hardened several battle instincts.

All of this while Lil Frankie explained - in needlessly meticulous detail - how the Family used Dual Sourcing to avoid having to offshore their procurement strategies.

And then they got back to the restaurant to begin the construction, only for the giant turtle to drift into a xuanhuan adventure story and get sucked into a wormhole.

Mu mentally remembered all this, and nodded. “Sure, I remember our adventures.”

“Right. Well apparently all those adventures are a type of intangible asset called ‘content’. There are people in other realities who, for reasons utterly beyond my comprehension, enjoy reading about how we were able to defeat the mechagoblins from beyond the moon with the power of origami, thus escaping the wormhole (giant island turtle in tow), and there’s this fellow called the Author who’s willing to pay to bring those narrations to them. He gives us a reliable sum of money for the stories of our adventures (pursuant to a Time and Materials Contract), which he then narrates to his otherworldly readers. We take that money, invest it, and use the dividends to cover training, upkeep, and administrative costs.”

“Ah, I see. And then he makes money by narrating these tales of adventure to the readers, yes?”

“No. So far as I’m aware, he does it for free.”

Silence followed this pronouncement.

“He sounds like a strange fellow,” Mu finally observed.

“Fairly strange, yes, and not all that bright, or pleasant - he’s a putrid coward, prone to fits of rage. This is without getting into his manifest defects of character: he speaks near half a dozen languages - all poorly - and has failed at a dozen arts with equal facility. Why he thinks himself a writer is anyone's guess. Of course, the whole thing is bizarre. If what he tells us is the truth then all his readers have weird names like ILoveDunghills, or BLOODLORDofCheesytown, or KnickerbockerSnifferSupreme. No clue what their mothers were thinking with those, but at any rate the coins he gives us are real enough.”

Mu blinked, and thought deeply about these matters. The world was indeed an odd place.