What Shen Tang thought winter was: holing up like a cat.
What winter actually was: getting robbed.
"...I had people inspect the traces. It should have been wild beasts from the mountains dragging the child away while they came down to forage..." Jimò Cong was both deeply unwilling and helpless. In times like these, even living people could end up on a plate, let alone these starving beasts. What wouldn't they bite?
Shen Tang murmured, "Wild beasts..."
Looking at the several bare mountains nearby, their earth exposed, Shen Tang could guess how hard it was for the animals who depended on them for survival. The common folk had to chop firewood to keep warm through winter, yet that wood was also the animals' foundation for survival. When wild beasts grew hungry, they would risk descending the mountains to forage.
A tragic case had been reported the day before yesterday.
A child from a certain household in a certain village had been unable to sit still in the main hall and had gone off to play hide-and-seek with his friends. In the end, all the other children had returned home except him. The entire village searched the area, only to find a mutilated corpse in a pile of rubble outside the village the next day. The child's internal organs were gone, and his entire face had been gnawed into a bloody blur by beast fangs.
Experienced villagers had immediately guessed that wild beasts were responsible.
According to the rules Shen Tang had established, any such vicious incident in a village had to be reported to the authorities. That very day, the village head had selected several able-bodied young men to leave the village with him and report the matter in the city, begging the authorities to send people to eliminate the