"The pork belly on this thing is going to be phenomenal. The fat-to-meat ratio is perfect for a slow-braised red pork dish!"

Blue stood a few paces away, his hands resting casually behind his back, watching her work with a faint, indulgent smile. "I merely provided the opening. Your strike rattled its brain. You are a formidable warrior, Brother Ji’an."

"I am a chef who hits things very hard," Ji’an corrected, expertly separating the beast’s glowing purple core from its chest cavity and tossing it into a collection pouch, before getting to work on the premium cuts of meat. "There is a difference."

As Ji’an enthusiastically butchered the boar, wrapping the best cuts in preservation talismans and storing them in her ring, the ambient noise of the jungle slowly began to change.

The buzzing of the giant, iridescent swamp mosquitoes ceased.

The distant calls of the canopy birds went dead silent.

The air grew heavy, thick with an oppressive scent that overpowered the metallic tang of the boar’s blood and the swamp.

It smelled like ozone, raw musk, and feral violence.

Blue’s dark eyes narrowed instantly.

The indulgent smile vanished from his face, replaced by a cold mask of calculation.

He recognized that aura.

He took a step closer to Ji’an, his body subtly angling to place himself between her and the dense wall of twisting Banyan trees to their left.

"Ji’an," Blue said, his voice dropping to a low, warning hum. "Step away from the carcass, fellow cultivator."

Ji’an froze, her carving knife embedded in a massive ham hock.

She didn’t question him.

The tone of his voice triggered every survival instinct she had honed over the past few months.

She ripped the knife free and scrambled backward, her hand dropping to the heavy cast-iron spatula strapped to her thigh.

CRASH!!!

The wall of dense jungle foliage didn’t just part; it was obliterated.

Massive, splintered trunks of ancient trees were thrown into the air like toothpicks.

A towering figure stepped out of the shadows and into the dappled sunlight of the clearing.

Lin Ji’an’s breath hitched in her throat.

Standing before them, looking like a literal nightmare dragged from the deepest pits of a mythological hell, was Hu Yanlie, the Beast Lord.

He was a terrifying sight.

He stood well over six and a half feet tall, his heavily muscled torso completely bare and covered in a fresh, glistening layer of dark, viscous monster blood.

His wild, untamed hair clung to his face in sweat-soaked, bloody strands.

But it was his eyes that truly paralyzed the soul; they were a blazing, feral, glowing amber, with slitted pupils that locked onto Ji’an with the focus of an apex predator spotting its prey.

He was breathing heavily, his chest heaving, the blood dripping from his clawed fingertips onto the swamp mud.

He had clearly just finished slaughtering something massive, and he was still riding the high of the kill.

"Well, well, well," Yanlie rumbled, his voice a deep, gravelly vibration that shook the leaves on the trees.

He wiped a smear of gore from his jaw with the back of his forearm. "I thought I smelled garlic and spices on the wind. If it isn’t the loudmouthed cook of the Celestial Sword Sect..."

Ji’an’s heart hammered a frantic, terrified rhythm against her ribs.

Of all the people to run into in the middle of a deserted, lethal swamp, it had to be the guy who had threatened to snap her spine in the sect dining hall a few months ago? 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

’Why is he here?!’ Ji’an’s inner monologue shrieked. ’This is a map the size of a continent! What are the statistical odds of running into the Beast Lord in a random mud puddle?!’

"Hu Yanlie," Ji’an replied, forcing her voice to remain steady, projecting her arrogant young-master persona like a shield. "You look terrible. Did you lose a fight with a mud-wrestler, or did you just forget how to use a bathhouse?"

It was a stupid, suicidal thing to say.

But it was her defense mechanism.

If she showed fear, the predator would strike.

Yanlie’s amber eyes flared.

A low, genuinely terrifying growl tore from the back of his throat.

He didn’t walk toward her.

He blurred.

The physical speed of the Beast Lord was something the human eye couldn’t track.

It was the unadulterated explosive power of a supreme beast lineage.

Before Blue could even raise a hand, or Ji’an could even twitch her fingers toward her spatula, Yanlie crossed the forty-foot clearing.

The impact was like being hit by a speeding carriage.

Ji’an gasped as a massive, blood-slicked hand closed entirely around her throat.

She was lifted entirely off her feet, her boots dangling in the air.

SLAM!

Yanlie violently pinned her against the massive, rough trunk of a towering Banyan tree.

The impact knocked the wind completely out of her lungs, black spots dancing at the edges of her vision.

"Lin Ji’an!" Blue roared, his voice fracturing, the disguise slipping for a microsecond as the absolute zero aura of the Flawless Ice Root threatened to detonate.

"Stay back, you rogue bastard," Yanlie snarled over his shoulder, not even looking at Blue, unleashing a wave of suffocating pressure that forced the red-haired man to halt his advance or risk tearing the very fabric of his disguised Qi apart.

Yanlie turned his attention back to the boy pinned against the tree.

He leaned in, his massive frame completely caging her in.

The overwhelming physical disparity was terrifying.

Ji’an was strong, but Yanlie was a mountain of muscle and beast-blood.

The smell of the gore coating his skin was nauseating, but beneath it, the raw, pulsing heat of his Yang energy was suffocating.

Yanlie’s amber eyes bored into her silver-flecked ones.

He saw the panic, but he also saw the unyielding, stubborn defiance.

The cook wasn’t begging him to let go and preserve his life.

Instead, she was glaring at him, her hands coming up to grip his massive wrist, trying to pry his fingers from her throat.