Bad Day at Turtle Rock

An Impromptu Test

Rather than wait until sunrise, Master Roshi decides to kick off his real martial arts training that very evening. He scribbles a kanji onto an ordinary rock and flings it deep into the jungle below Kame House, daring Goku and Krillin to hunt it down inside thirty minutes. Dinner hangs on the result, and whoever fails to deliver the actual stone goes to bed on an empty stomach. If neither returns in time, both lose the meal entirely. Without flinching, Goku leaps off the cliff, snags a passing tree branch to break his fall, and plunges into the undergrowth to begin the hunt while Krillin scrambles behind him.

Scheming and Scrambling

Krillin immediately tries a shortcut. He marks an identical character onto a random stone and presents it to Roshi, only to catch the fake right on his skull a second later. The hermit dismisses the deception and sends him back into the wilderness. While scouring the jungle, Krillin has to fend off a lunging sabertooth tiger and barely sidesteps the stampede of a charging triceratops. When he overhears Goku celebrating a find, he smooth talks the trusting boy into handing over the prize. A brief scuffle breaks out and Goku comes out on top, but Krillin hurls a decoy stone in the opposite direction, tricks Goku into chasing it, and bolts back toward Kame House with the real rock clutched in his hand.

An Empty Victory

At dinner Goku is forced to sit and watch the others dig into a hot meal while his own belly rumbles and complains. The satisfaction does not last long for the winners. Roshi, Launch, and Krillin all come down with vicious food poisoning soon after their last bites, leaving the darkly comic final panels to the only trainee who went to bed hungry. The message lands hard on Krillin: cheating may win a meal, but it rarely earns the last laugh.