Harvesting honey was a pleasure.

For a hive the size of a small room, the honey yield was actually modest — finding flowering plants had apparently been difficult enough that only around three hundred of the comb cells contained honey. But each cell was large by any comparison to pre-apocalypse bee standards, and three hundred oversized cells added up to a significant quantity.

He’d intended to take everything. Then he reconsidered.

Leave half. Keep the colony alive. Return when the opportunity arose.

Killing the goose was something Shen Cong made a habit of not doing. The Activity fruit trees — he’d harvested their produce but never damaged the trees themselves, ensuring continued production. The same logic applied here. A sustainable source was worth protecting even at the cost of leaving resources on the table. That was simply correct resource management.

He packed the larger portion into a carry bag, left the remainder in the hive, and took a moment to locate the queen.

She was at the highest point of the hive structure — not particularly large, perhaps three times a worker bee’s size. Her wings had undergone reduction and she couldn’t fly, moving instead across the comb surface in a slow crawl. If you weren’t specifically looking, she was easy to miss among the workers.

He left her alone and ran.

The swarm pursued him to the edge of the lake island’s territory — roughly where Sun Laiqun’s domain had apparently begun — and then slowed, circling in reluctance before finally turning back.

He stood at the lake’s edge and looked across.

The island’s two-storey stone structure was visible. In front of it, several half-beasts moved in agitated circles, the chains at their necks preventing them from going far.

Ten metres of water between shore and island.

He stopped. Took out the crossbow, loaded a Worker-Ant mandible arrow, and sighted on the chain anchoring the nearest half-beast to a boulder. The arrow sheared through the links — bone-gold sharpening against plain iron wasn’t a contest. Enough remained connected that a few minutes of effort from the half-beast would finish the job.

He repeated the process for each of the remaining chains. Every one cut to the point of failure, not all the way through. Then he shouldered the carry bag and disappeared over the ridge without looking back.

They can manage the rest themselves.

He came over the ridge and saw Vajra.

The Dog-Croc Battle Standard extended above the roofline, the skeleton hanging in its posed lunge against the sky. Everything about the sight was immediately and completely reassuring in a way he had no particular interest in examining too closely.

The anxiety that had been building through two and a half kilometres of separation — the constant low-level wrongness of operating outside Vajra’s range — evaporated the moment the truck came into view. It was instantaneous. Like a switch.

With Vajra at his back, he felt capable of running through anything — any scheme, any ambush, any evolved predator that decided he looked like a target. That was the reality of the bond. He’d stopped pretending otherwise.

He dropped the carry bag in the storage compartment, sealed the armour plating, and cut a section of honeycomb immediately for Blackhead.

Blackhead had accepted its role as primary taste-tester without apparent objection. If Shen Cong brought something new back, Blackhead ate it first. No poisoning reaction, no obvious ill effect — green light.

Blackhead ate the honeycomb and immediately communicated a very clear desire for more. And Shen Cong’s Activity perception registered something definite: Blackhead’s Activity Value had ticked upward from the single serving.

“Good stuff.”

He broke open a comb section for himself.

The honey was orange-red, dense, and slow-moving. The scent was what hit him first — nothing in his experience quite matched it. Sweeter than any Activity fruit but not cloying. He pressed a piece of comb to his lips and the honey came through thick and smooth, coating the palate, leaving a floral warmth that persisted well after swallowing.

He sat with it for a moment.

“Better than anything I’ve eaten. Sweet but not heavy. Soft going in. The scent stays.” He was aware his vocabulary wasn’t rising to the occasion — he’d never been a particularly expressive person and he hadn’t finished high school. The description he was producing was accurate and entirely insufficient.

The warmth spread from his stomach outward in the familiar pattern of Activity enhancement, but the character of it was different. The Activity peaches had been explosive — a surge that overwhelmed the system and forced recovery sleep. The pears had been gentle, steady diffusion. This was something else: a deep, even heat that moved through the entire body simultaneously, reaching places the fruit hadn’t quite gotten to.

Each Activity source had its own frequency, he’d theorised. Bodies built resistance to any given frequency over time. The honey’s frequency was apparently one his system hadn’t encountered before — and it fit well. The enhancement per unit was perhaps lower than the peaches at their best, but the quality of effect was comparable.

No more killer bees. These are Treasure Bees. And this— he looked at the orange-red honeycomb in his hand — this is Bee Treasure.

He was pleased with the names. Vivid. Descriptive. Accurate.

Honey secured, no remaining reason to stay. He finished levelling the last bombed road section with the dozer blade, sent the drone up for a forward sweep, confirmed clean conditions ahead, and got moving.

Three minutes of open highway.

Then a cloud appeared on the horizon.

It was moving toward him. Too fast and too purposeful to be weather. He checked the cameras.

Sparrows.

Enormous numbers of them — a flock that blotted out a section of sky, moving as a coordinated mass directly at Vajra. Each bird was somewhat larger than a pre-apocalypse sparrow, grey-feathered, familiar in form but wrong in scale and behaviour. The sound of them was audible through the armour plating: a dense, layered chittering.

Mutated. Obviously.

He registered their Activity as they hit the hull: slightly above Bee Treasure Bee level, which was already low. Not a significant threat individually.

But when the leading edge of the flock began impacting Vajra’s exterior armour, something registered differently. His Activity perception caught it — a slight, persistent drain. These beaks had some kind of Sharpening quality, something that could actually work against Activity-infused metal over time.

“First bees, now sparrows. What is today.”

He tried to accelerate out of it. The flock matched speed easily. He was hauling the fire truck; top road speed wasn’t going to lose a bird.

The drain was slow but continuous. Not dangerous in the short term. Deeply inconvenient over a longer engagement.

He also identified the source of the attraction: when he’d loaded the honeycomb sections, some honey had smeared onto the exterior armour plating. The flock was concentrating its attack on those specific areas.

The honey’s scent was contained inside the hive. The moment I broke it open and moved it, the smell spread. Attracted the sparrows.

He worked through the implications. The flock wouldn’t disengage — the honey scent on the hull was too strong. He couldn’t outrun them. Carrying them along for the rest of the journey to Hefei meant continuous Activity drain, inability to safely open windows, doors, or the cab roof, and an unpredictable complication in every scenario that required him to operate outside the vehicle.

Eliminate them. Then move.

He braked hard.

“Can’t swat several hundred sparrows by hand. Fire attack. I set up the water cannon for flamethrower conversion before I left camp — now’s the time.”

He opened the roof hatch. A net went up immediately before he came through — the birds were fast and the opening was small, but they’d try. He pulled himself out and secured the hatch behind him, the net stretched tight across the gap.

Hundreds of sparrows descended on him simultaneously, beaks working at every exposed surface.

One hand found the Dog-Croc Battle Standard’s pole frame — grip, stability, no falling. The other grabbed a steel plate from his belt and started clearing the birds away from his face with short, sharp swings.

He drew a breath and shouted at no one in particular:

“Today, Shen Cong eliminates the four pests!”

(End of Chapter 123)