The surviving Furious Sparrows circled the smoke column, produced several more broken-sounding calls, and departed.

Shen Cong stepped out of the cab and stood on the road, waiting for the fire to reduce.

He wasn’t leaving without checking for the primary activation metal.

In all of Juchao district, counting Plastic Rabbit, there had been exactly four iron people and iron beasts. Vehicles capable of bonding were extraordinarily rare. The primary activation metal extracted from dead vehicles hadn’t yielded a consumption method yet, but the evidence suggested it was the only pathway to increasing Talent — the evolutionary ceiling he’d been unable to raise through any other means. Losing the fire truck’s primary metal to an explosion and a sparrow swarm would be a significant setback.

At his feet, Blackhead was picking through the Furious Sparrow carcasses scattered across the road surface.

The ant had become selective since completing its metamorphosis. It ate when something genuinely interesting was on offer — Activity fruit, Activity cores, Bee Treasure, Giant Stag eggs — and largely ignored the baseline evolved meat and scrap metal that had been its diet before. The sparrow carcasses apparently fell into a middle category: Blackhead was sampling rather than gorging, testing each one before deciding whether to continue.

The fire continued. Metal popped and split in the heat.

Shen Cong looked west — the direction he needed to go. The sky ahead was unchanged, still clear. Behind him, black smoke had swallowed half the horizon.

“Clean the bird carcasses off the exterior armour,” he said, and kicked Blackhead lightly in the direction of Vajra.

He took out his phone and opened the music player.

Random selection.

In the crowd, there’s you and me. We meet, we know each other, we figure each other out. In the crowd, it’s you, it’s me. Putting on a proper face, wearing a smile…

Not particularly appropriate to the moment. The melody was decent. He tapped his foot twice, turned slightly, and extended one hand in a loose, aimless wave at nothing in particular.

A few seconds of stillness after that, head tilted, thinking about something that he kept to himself.

Then he moved — jumped up onto Vajra, swept the surroundings with his binoculars, confirmed nothing coming, and jogged to the road beside the burning wreck. The materials he’d thrown clear before the detonation were still there. He collected everything recoverable and carried it back to Vajra in multiple trips, packing the compartments until several of them were nearly full. Even then he’d gotten less than half of what had been in the fire truck — the rest had to stay.

The Bee Treasure went into triple-sealed containers. He wasn’t attracting another swarm.

The Furious Sparrow Activity cores were worth a systematic pass. He collected the intact ones — mostly beak and talon mutations, which were the most common Activity core locations in birds. Too small for arrowheads, but usable as slingshot pellets. He already had unprocessed Giant Stag and Thieving Crow cores in storage; the sparrow cores joined the queue.

All low-tier material. His high-tier bone-gold reserves were down to the two Dog-Croc triangular drumstick heads.

The limitation of Activity cores as a weapons material was becoming clearer with experience. Once amalgamated into Vajra’s structure they became fixed in whatever shape they’d been harvested in — Vajra couldn’t reshape them, only integrate them. Processing them into usable forms required Shen Cong’s own hands and grinding tools. That was a significant bottleneck.

And the cores degraded with use. The fang arrows, recycled through multiple engagements, had shattered completely in this last fight. The bone-gold material — bone that had been progressively replaced or chemically altered to form something resembling a metal alloy — wasn’t particularly abrasion-resistant. It held up well under impact but couldn’t sustain indefinite mechanical stress.

He filed the observations and waited for the fire to die down.

The fire truck had burned to residue by the time he approached. Low flames still worked at the edges. The radiated heat through the Half-Activated Armor was uncomfortable — the suit was efficiently conducting warmth inward and he felt like a piece of meat in a slow oven.

The consumption urge intensified as he got closer.

The primary metal is still there.

He hadn’t been certain, but the feeling confirmed it. Primary activation metal had a specific signature to his Activity perception, and that signature was still present somewhere in the smoking wreck. He exhaled slowly — if the explosion had destroyed it, the loss would have been significant. The primary metal was the fire truck’s most valuable component, the reason he’d been hauling the vehicle at all.

He used an iron rod to move debris aside carefully.

There.

Where the engine block had been, a pool of molten metal had collected — orange-red, self-contained, formed into an irregular mass like a large water droplet that hadn’t spread. It sat in its own space without flowing into the surrounding material, as if held together by surface tension at a scale that didn’t make physical sense.

Consume. Consume. Consume.

The urge hit him so hard he had to stop and breathe through it. The desire to simply pick the molten mass up and drink it was immediate and visceral and completely impossible — iron melts at 1,535 degrees, and primary activation metal presumably adhered to that, which meant the liquid in front of him was at minimum hot enough to ignite flesh at ten metres.

“Hot.” The armour was cooking him. Being this close was a mistake by any rational standard.

Get water. Cool it down.

The thought arrived, and then something else arrived alongside it — a connection his mind made before he’d consciously reached for it.

Solid primary activation metal: Vajra couldn’t amalgamate it. The resistance was inherent, some fundamental incompatibility between two activated metal systems.

But physical alloys didn’t work that way. Two pieces of solid metal of different types couldn’t be fused — the interatomic repulsion was too strong. But two liquid metals could be mixed freely. The liquid state eliminated the structural barriers that prevented fusion in solid form.

If primary activation metal can be melted — if it’s in liquid form — does the same resistance apply to Vajra’s amalgamation?

The parallel was obvious once he saw it. Vajra’s amalgamation process was fundamentally a form of physical fusion, Activity-mediated but physically real. The solid-state resistance might be a structural phenomenon rather than a fundamental incompatibility. Remove the structure, and the resistance might go with it.

Try it. Zero downside risk to Vajra.

He had the decision before the analysis was finished. He worked the iron rod under the liquid mass — it moved like very heavy dough, surface tension holding it together as it began to deform and droop from the rod. He was moving fast, carrying the molten primary metal balanced on the rod’s end, running back toward Vajra before the mass could cool.

He reached the truck, swung the rod, and flung the liquid metal onto Vajra’s roof.

Then he was inside, in the driver’s seat, projecting his will into Vajra’s Activity system and directing everything toward the roof surface.

One second.

The resistance wasn’t there.

He almost laughed. His mouth curved upward sharply instead.

This is it. This is the method.

Not consumption through will. Physical amalgamation — melt the primary metal first, then let Vajra’s Activity system merge with it at the structural level, the way liquid metals merged. The solid-state incompatibility had been structural all along.

He felt the cooling happening in real time. As the liquid mass dropped in temperature, it began resolidifying, and the resistance crept back with each degree of cooling. He pushed everything he had — all of Vajra’s Activity mobilised and directed at the single integration point, working against the clock.

“Absorb. Amalgamate. Push through. Come on.”

Three minutes.

The entire primary metal mass, fully integrated. Nothing left outside Vajra’s structure.

He sat back and let the long breath out.

Directing that integration had cost him more focused effort than almost anything he’d done. The sustained concentration, holding Vajra’s Activity mobilised at full output and pushing against progressively increasing resistance as the metal cooled — his hands were shaking slightly from the output.

But it was done.

On Vajra’s roof, where the liquid metal had landed, the cooled and integrated primary metal sat like a node in the armour structure — irregular, slightly raised, not yet shaped into anything useful.

But it was part of Vajra now.

(End of Chapter 125)