Li Wei's corporate job had never prepared him for combat.
Spreadsheets? Yes. Passive-aggressive emails? Absolutely. Political maneuvering in meetings? He could write a book. But fighting a giant carnivorous rabbit in an ice cave? That particular skill had been conspicuously absent from his resume.
So when the Frost Rabbit lunged, Li Wei's body moved on pure instinct, and by instinct, he meant the panicked flailing of someone who really didn't want to die.
He threw himself sideways, and the rabbit's teeth closed on empty air where his throat had been a second earlier. He hit the ice hard, pain shooting up his arm, but he was alive. Alive and scrambling backward on hands and knees while the rabbit turned for another pass.
"Think think think think think" he chanted under his breath. "It's just a rabbit. A big rabbit. With big teeth. That wants to eat me. FUCK."
The rabbit pounced again.
This time, Li Wei's hand closed on something, a chunk of ice, broken from the wall. He swung it like a baseball bat, connecting with the rabbit's skull mid-leap. Ice shattered. The rabbit yelped and tumbled sideways, shaking its head.
It wasn't seriously hurt. But it was angry now.
Li Wei scrambled to his feet, backing toward the wall. The rabbit circled him, growling, its red eyes fixed on his throat. It was faster than him. Stronger than him. And it had absolutely no intention of letting him leave this cave alive.
This is it, a small part of his mind whispered. This is how you die. Eaten by a rabbit in a frozen hole. They're going to find your bones next to that other guy and think it's some kind of tragic coincidence.
Then another part of his mind, the gamer part, the part that had spent thousands of hours learning boss patterns and optimizing DPS rotations, spoke up.
It's just a tutorial mob. You have abilities. Use them.
Frost Aura.
The cold around him intensified. Not by much, maybe a few degrees, but the rabbit noticed. It paused mid-circles, its fur ruffling as frost formed on its whiskers. Its movements became slightly slower. Slightly clumsier.
It was working.
Okay, Li Wei thought. Aura slows it down. Now I need to hurt it. But I don't have weapons. I don't have skills. I have...
Cocoon of Stillness.
The ability description flashed through his mind. Encases target in frozen time. Duration ten seconds. Cost fifty Soul Essence.
He had one hundred twenty Soul Essence total. Two uses. If he missed, he was out of energy and dead.
No pressure.
The rabbit lunged again, and this time Li Wei didn't dodge. He stood his ground, hands extended, and activated the ability.
Time stopped.
Not literally, Li Wei could still move, still think, still breathe. But the rabbit... the rabbit froze mid-leap, suspended in the air like a taxidermy project gone wrong. Its eyes were still open, still glowing, but they didn't move. Its fur didn't ruffle. Its heart didn't beat.
It was trapped. Perfectly preserved. Completely helpless.
For ten seconds.
Li Wei didn't waste time admiring his work. He grabbed the largest chunk of ice he could find...a jagged shard as long as his forearm... and drove it into the rabbit's eye with all his strength.
The ice penetrated. The rabbit didn't even twitch.
He pulled back and stabbed again. And again. And again.
The ten seconds ended.
The rabbit dropped to the ground... dead. Very, very dead. Its skull was a ruin of blood and fur and bone fragments, its remaining eye staring at nothing.
Li Wei stood over it, breathing hard, the ice shard still clutched in his trembling hand. Blood... blue-ish, because of course cultivation world rabbits had weird blood...dripped onto the frozen ground.
"I... I did it," he whispered. "I actually..."
He didn't get to finish the sentence. His legs gave out, and he collapsed beside the corpse, his whole body shaking with adrenaline and delayed terror.
[Ding! Enemy Defeated: Frost Rabbit (Low-Grade)]
[+25 EXP]
[Soul Essence Detected. Absorb? Y/N]
[Shadow Echo Available. Extract? Y/N]
Li Wei stared at the notifications through a haze of exhaustion and relief. Then he started laughing, a high, slightly hysterical laugh that echoed off the ice walls.
"Absorb" he wheezed. "Extract. Both. All of it. Give me everything."
He didn't know how to consciously accept the prompts, but apparently the system could read his intent. A warmth spread through his chest as the rabbit's corpse began to glow. Wisps of blue light rose from it, swirling together into a small, shimmering orb.
[Absorbing Soul Essence...]
[Soul Essence absorbed. Cultivation base strengthened.]
[Soul Essence: 120/150]
The orb split. Half of it flowed into Li Wei's chest, settling somewhere deep inside him like a second heartbeat. The other half... the other half solidified into something else. A small, shadowy figure...a miniature version of the rabbit, made of darkness and frost.
[Shadow Echo Extracted: Frost Rabbit (Low-Grade)]
[Echo stored in Shadow Vault. You can now manifest this echo for 60 seconds. Cooldown: 1 hour.]
Li Wei lay on the ice, staring at the ceiling, and grinned like an idiot.
"Tutorial boss defeated..." he said to no one. "Loot acquired. Levels gained. This is literally just a game now. I'm literally just playing a really immersive, really painful VR game."
He forced himself to sit up. The adrenaline was fading, and in its place came a bone-deep exhaustion...and hunger. His stomach growled loud enough to echo.
'Right. Food. I still need food'
He looked at the rabbit's corpse. It was still there, still dead, still technically edible if he could figure out how to cook it.
"Please tell me this world has basic fire-starting skills..." he muttered, dragging the corpse toward a relatively flat section of the cavern floor. "Please tell me I don't have to eat raw rabbit."
Chen Feng's memories provided an answer: cultivators could generate heat by circulating their spirit essence. It was a basic technique, taught to all outer disciples. Even cripples like the original owner could manage it.
Li Wei focused on the new energy inside him...the Soul Essence he'd just absorbed...and tried to push it, the way Chen Feng's memories described. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing.
Come on. It's just like... like flexing a muscle you didn't know you had. Focus. Breathe. Push.
On the third try, warmth bloomed in his palms. Not much...just enough to take the edge off the cold...but it was something. He pressed his hands against the rabbit's fur and focused on maintaining the flow.
It took an hour, but eventually he had cooked meat. Charred in some places, raw in others, but cooked. He tore into it like a starving animal, barely tasting it, just grateful to have calories in his system.
When he finally finished, the system pinged again.
[Quest Progress: Survive (33%)]
[Sub-Objective Complete: Find Food]
[Reward: 10 Sovereign's Coins]
"Thirty-three percent..." Li Wei repeated. "So food was one part. Shelter is another. And escape is the third. Makes sense."
He looked around the cavern. The ice walls were thick, the ceiling high, it would hold against the wind, at least. And there were no other exits visible, which meant anything coming in would have to come through the same way he did.
"Okay. Shelter here, then. But I need to make it safer. I need..."
He trailed off, because his eyes had landed on something he hadn't noticed before.
In the back of the cavern, half-hidden by a curtain of ice, was a door.
Not a natural formation. An actual door. Wooden, ancient, covered in frost so thick it looked like part of the wall.
"What the hell?" Li Wei approached slowly, his heart rate picking up again. A door meant someone had been here before. Someone had built something. And in cultivation worlds, "someone built something" usually meant either treasure or death.
He pushed the door. It didn't move.
He pushed harder. Still nothing.
He focused his Frost Aura on the ice sealing the door, hoping the cold might weaken it. Nothing.
Finally, in desperation, he activated Cocoon of Stillness on the ice itself.
The ice froze, not physically, because it was already frozen, but conceptually. For ten seconds, it became the idea of ice, perfectly still, perfectly static.
And in that stillness, Li Wei pushed.
The ice cracked.
Not much...just a hairline fracture...but it was enough. He poured his remaining strength into the door, and with a groan of ancient wood, it swung inward.
Beyond was darkness. And stairs. Leading down.
[New Area Discovered: Ancient Frost Reliquary]
Li Wei stared into the darkness. Somewhere below, something waited. Something old. Something powerful.
He should turn back. Find another way. Be smart.
But Li Wei had never been smart. He had been an office drone who spent his free time reading webnovels about idiots who walked into dangerous places and got rewarded for it.
"Caution..." he said as he stepped through the door. "I can do caution."
The door slammed shut behind him.
"Or not."