The morning light crept slowly over the jungle canopy, golden rays melting the mist and banishing the cool blue hue of dawn. Han hadn't wasted time. He'd left the cave quietly, letting the panther cub—Zhao, as he'd mentally started calling him—sleep undisturbed in their makeshift den.
The river glinted in the rising light, and Han crouched at its edge, sleeves rolled up, fingers caked in damp soil. He was knee-deep in trying to build a rudimentary fish trap—stones, sticks, a few strips of vine—something sustainable. The fish here were quick and shiny, darting like ghosts beneath the surface.
But then, something strange caught his eye.
Two oddly-shaped silhouettes rested at the riverbed, partially buried beneath silt and river muck. Han narrowed his eyes. Rocks? Bones?
No.
He took a deep breath, braced against the slow, steady current, and dove.
The water was cold but gentle. He swam clumsily, lungs already burning as he wrestled the objects free and kicked toward the surface. Breaking through with a gasp, he flopped onto the muddy riverbank, coughing and wheezing.
"Hah… hpf—okay… I seriously need to work on my stamina. Almost drowned for some river junk."
He caught his breath, then examined his haul.
One was a throwing knife—small, triangular, with a circular pommel. A kunai.
The other was a cleaver. Heavy, iron, broad-bladed—meant for hacking through bone and armor alike.
"A cleaver I can get behind, but a kunai? Who the hell uses a kunai in a xianxia world? This isn't Naruto, man!"
He laughed, a real, absurd laugh, momentarily cracking under the ridiculousness of it all. The sudden intrusion of modern weeb nonsense into a brutal cultivation isekai felt like the universe playing a joke.
But the laughter stopped just as quickly.
A thought hit him.
His eyes drifted toward the massive corpse of the panther still lying by the tree line. Bloated. Still bleeding. Still useful.
Without a word, Han stood and approached the beast, the cleaver heavy in his hand. He didn't flinch. This wasn't the first time he'd been covered in blood.
He'd interned at a local hospital. He'd helped nurses clean up bedpans and piss-soaked linens. He'd seen the mess of car accidents, of broken bones, of bodies cracked open.
So the sight of blood? The stench of gore? It didn't stop him.
He got to work.
The cleaver sank into the panther's flesh with a sickening thunk. Blood—dark and sluggish—splashed across his arms, soaking his shirt, but Han didn't stop. He hacked and hacked, slicing away limbs, organs, thick slabs of meat. By mid-morning, the right legs were gone, the torso halved, and what was left looked more like butchery than a kill site.
He worked methodically, breaking down everything—muscle for meat, bones for tools, unusable parts diced finely and scattered along the riverbed as bait for fish or scavengers.
The smell was unbearable. But he didn't flinch.
He set up a crude drying rack: sticks wedged between rocks, dangling cleaned sinew to dry in the sun. It could later be twisted into thread or cord. The tanning process was incomplete, but he had enough rubbing alcohol in his first aid kit to bleach the fur once he washed it.
A few meters away, he'd already begun smoking the meat inside the cave, suspended above the fire on elevated skewers made from spears and stripped branches. He'd used the snake scales to line and disguise his traps—the natural camouflage of the serpent would still fool prey.
It was starting to feel like survival.
When the work was done, Han knelt beside two small mounds he'd scraped into the earth. He'd made crude graves for the snake and the panther—skulls atop the piles as markers, skeletons buried beneath with the scraps that couldn't be used.
He whispered a short prayer—not elegant, not holy.
"Rest easy, you crazy bloodthirsty bastards. May you get reborn into something nicer next time."
He dusted off his hands and crossed the river again—but this time, he didn't need to swim. A makeshift bridge of panther rib bones and sticks now spanned the water. It wobbled, but it worked.
Once inside the cave, he ducked near the fire, grabbing one of the skewers and pulling off a still-sizzling cut of meat. The scent was rich and gamey.
Further inside, Zhao rolled lazily on his back, belly in the air, paws twitching. Yes—Han had checked, and unfortunately, he was a "he."
"Tch. Freeloader."
He tossed a chunk of cooked snake meat toward the cub. It hit the ground with a soft thud—white and tender, like greasy chicken with a hint of reptilian slime.
Han took a bite out of his own panther steak, chewed thoughtfully.
"Not bad," he muttered through a mouthful. "Weirdly... smoky. Almost bitter. Probably shouldn't be eating apex predator meat, but hey, gotta bulk up for my cultivation arc somehow."
Zhao purred.