Culinary God in Wilderness

"Andre?"

Lin Chen looked around, confused. "What are you doing bathing here so early in the morning? Aren’t you afraid of getting targeted by Yukon Wolves?"

"What’s there to be afraid of? I already heard from Robert. A couple of days ago, you faced a pack of more than ten wolves, killed four, and got away unscathed!"

"You’re always active around this riverbank. The area is saturated with your scent, so the wolves will assume it’s your territory. They won’t enter casually, to avoid any unnecessary conflict."

’I guess that makes sense.’ He scratched his head, almost instantly convinced by Andre.

He understood the logic, but he didn’t dare to be so optimistic. He always felt it was safer to prepare for the worst. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

After all, he was inexperienced when it came to wilderness survival. The words of a veteran like Andre, who had twenty to thirty years of experience, were far more credible.

"Then why aren’t you bathing on the other side of the river?"

"?"

Andre gave him a puzzled look. "Lin, do you remember what day today is?"

"The twenty-eighth day."

"Exactly!"

"So?"

"What day did we first meet?"

"Uh..." Lin Chen frowned, thought for a long moment, and said uncertainly, "The nineteenth?"

"The eighteenth!!"

Andre rolled his eyes and counted on his fingers. "We finished our first team-up at noon on day nineteen. The new count started on day twenty."

"Oh, right. So logically, shouldn’t you have come on the twenty-sixth? Why are you two days late?"

If Andre hadn’t brought it up, Lin Chen would’ve thought he was coming tomorrow. Without a clock, watch, or phone in the forest, it was easy to lose track of time.

’Looks like I’ll have to start keeping track of the days when I get back.’

"I wanted to come on time, but this is a rare opportunity. It would be a waste to show up without preparing the ingredients, right?"

"Plus, there’s a routine inspection today that’s going to cause a delay, so I decided to come two days later."

"So you’ve already prepared the ingredients? Where are they?"

Andre smiled mysteriously. "Want to meet the big guys?"

"Just now, after Robert announced the ’professional perks,’ he also told me that the general locations of the four pro contestants’ shelters will be revealed to the others. That means more people might come looking to team up with you."

"You need a lot of meat to trade for seasonings. I’ve thought about it. It might be too difficult for one person, but with two of us, we’d have a fighting chance. With your current archery skills, you’re good enough to fight alongside me. I knew I wasn’t wrong about you. You have a real talent for this."

"Wait, hold on." Lin Chen held up his hand. "You’re saying you want me to go hunting with you?"

"Yes. The things are pretty big, and they live in herds..."

"I’m not going."

Lin Chen cut him off, refusing without a moment’s hesitation.

He held up his bandaged hand.

"My finger’s injured, and Ariana told me to rest it. Plus, the blisters on my feet haven’t gone down yet. For the next few days, this is the farthest I’m willing to go."

"Anyway, we don’t have a deal yet. Take your time with your bath. Feel free to think it over back at your place. You’re always welcome to drop by with your own ingredients~"

With that said, he started strolling along the riverbank on his own.

He hadn’t been here for a few days, and the riverbed had changed.

A few massive, dead fish lay scattered in the crevices between the rocks. Their backs were silvery-black, their bellies snow-white, and their bodies were covered in dense black spots.

That’s right. They were the finest of the salmon species: King Salmon.

Unlike Red Salmon, King Salmon don’t change color when they migrate upstream to spawn; they retain their original coloring, making them easy to identify.

’The perfect time to set a net.’

He nodded in satisfaction, found a dead log in the woods, and dragged it to the bank. Then, he took the gillnet line out of his pocket.

First, he wrapped the line around the log, then wove it back and forth in a fish-scale pattern, leaving a series of lemon-sized holes.

In just a few minutes, a gillnet over three meters long was finished.

He found a curved bend in the river, sank the net into the water, and propped the log on the rocky bank. All that was left was to come back tomorrow and check his haul.

The principle behind a gillnet is simple: it intercepts the fish’s path, causing them to swim right into it. They either get tangled while struggling or get their gills caught when they try to pass through the mesh.

In short, by controlling the size of the mesh, one can selectively catch fish of a specific size.

King Salmon are the largest of the salmon family. The ones returning from the deep sea average over a meter in length, and it’s not uncommon to see them reach a meter and a half.

At his old job, he used to process dozens of salmon a day. Man, half a fish was as long as your arm. One was enough to feed a grown man with a big appetite for three or four days.

Someone with a smaller appetite could make it last a week, no problem.

And that wasn’t even counting the much larger King Salmon.

"A gillnet?"

At some point, Andre had finished dressing. His face was red from the cold, and he kept sniffling.

"You can just stun them with an Engineer Shovel, but a gillnet is easier. You don’t have to go into the water yourself to retrieve them, which is a big plus in the winter."

"You look like you’ve got time on your hands." Lin Chen washed his hands in the river and filled his pot with water. "I’m heading back. You can hang around here on your own."

While setting the net, he’d already noticed there was clay nearby. Once he was done dealing with Andre, he could come back to dig it up anytime.

But he still hadn’t solved his water source problem. Hauling water back and forth like this wasn’t a sustainable solution.

If worse came to worst, he would just have to hold out until it snowed.

The weather was unusually warm this year, several degrees higher than average. A few days before the competition began, it had just been National Day back home. The Cold Dew solar term had already passed, yet temperatures in the south were still a staggering 100°F! In previous years, the temperature would have already dropped below 86°F by that time of year, cool enough to wear a jacket in the evenings.

According to the provided information, it should have already started snowing in Alaska back in October. But now it was November, and there wasn’t a single snowflake in sight.

Andre didn’t follow. He just sat on a rock by the gillnet, lost in thought.

’This is a real headache. I wanted to ask Lin to hunt a young Musk Ox with me, but if he won’t go, I definitely can’t do it alone. If I piss off the mother and father, a single charge from one of them could probably uproot a tree. It’s just too dangerous.’

’If a Musk Ox is a no-go, I can’t just keep eating birds and fish, can I? That’s so boring. Isn’t there some other species out there, something that would really make an impression...?’

As he sat on the rock, deep in thought, two striking white figures shot out from the woods about two hundred meters downstream, mixed in among a crowd of gray and brown shapes.

At first, Andre thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. He rubbed them, stared intently, and a look of wild joy flashed across his face.

He pinched his thigh—hard.

"My God, are those sheep??"