Three minutes. That was all it took to swallow and amalgamate the fire truck’s primary metal — and it left Shen Cong drenched in sweat, wrung out, his mind scraped hollow.

Truth was, he hadn’t slept properly since the night before.

“Can’t do it. Half an hour minimum — driving exhausted is how people end up in accidents.” He set the radar alarm parameters, ran one more drone sweep to confirm the area was clear, then retreated to the sleeping compartment and went out cold.

Half an hour later.

The phone alarm he’d set started ringing.

Beep-beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep. Over and over, cycling on its five-minute interval — and Shen Cong didn’t wake up.

He had fallen into something deeper than sleep. His face had gone a hot, blotchy red. Sweat soaked through his collar. His body convulsed every few minutes, limbs jerking against the bunk. And eventually — blood. Seeping slowly from his eyes, ears, mouth, nose.

In the dream, he was inside Taishang Laojun’s alchemy furnace.

The fire didn’t stop. It burned and seared and hammered him from every direction, and at the same time — energy. Vast quantities of it, flooding in, inflating him like a hot-air balloon stretched past every reasonable limit.

He tried to scream. Nothing came out.

He tried to move, to fight his way out. His arms and legs felt like they held infinite strength and yet refused to answer a single command.

At some point — he couldn’t tell how long — the temperature in the furnace began to drop. The flames couldn’t quite reach him anymore. He felt control returning to his limbs. He fought, thrashed, kicked—

His feet hit something solid and he jolted awake.

“Ah—”

Shen Cong lurched upright on the bunk, breathing hard. No alchemy furnace. Just Vajra. His own partition, his own compartment.

The Hummer’s display screen at the head of the bed blinked patiently:

September 16, 2022 — 16:05.

He’d gone under at 10:28. That was five hours and thirty-seven minutes.

Beep-beep-beep. The phone alarm cycled again — God only knew how many times it had gone off already. He silenced it, rubbed his face, and sat there for a long moment getting his bearings.

His hand came away with dried blood on it. Flakes of it, already crusted on his cheeks.

Then his stomach settled any remaining questions about priorities.

Grumble.

“Starving.”

He had the sensation of a hundred bulls stampeding through his body — raw, coiled power — and absolutely zero ability to use any of it, because he was about to pass out from hunger first.

He moved to the kitchen at something approaching a run.

He ate like an animal until the worst of it passed, then slowed down enough to pull up the laptop and check the outside feeds. Nothing hostile. The fire truck — what remained of it — had stopped smoking. All that was left was a warped black chassis frame sitting in the middle of the road, surrounded by the scattered debris of the explosion.

Quiet. Clear.

With food in him and the threat picture settled, Shen Cong finally let himself sit down and examine the situation properly — himself first, then Vajra.

He pulled up the sleeping compartment’s surveillance footage and scrubbed through it at fast-forward.

Thirty minutes in: first convulsions. An hour and a half: blood from all seven orifices. Two and a half hours: full-body muscle cramping, veins standing out like cables. Three and a half hours: gradual calming. Four and a half hours: no more violent movement. Five and a half hours: he woke up.

So my condition — that was Vajra amalgamating the fire truck’s primary metal, wasn’t it.

He already knew the answer. He could feel the change before he even ran the numbers.

He pulled his stats.

His Talent had cleared 2H.

Shen Cong sat with that for a moment.

If he was a bottle before — a bottle sized for 1.584H — he was now a bottle sized for 2.083H. Same water level, larger container. His Activity Source ceiling had expanded. His evolutionary limit had risen. When he eventually crossed Lv1, everything built on top of that foundation would be proportionally greater.

He closed his fist slowly.

Talent. Increased.

Back when he’d watched the Dog-Crocs fighting the Golden Python, he’d wondered whether the Python’s Talent might clear 2H. After reaching six-bull strength, he’d grown confident he could take a Dog-Croc one-on-one. And now — someday, within the ceiling his Talent defined — even the Golden Python might be within reach.

That was what gave him that confidence. This one number, just over 2H, sitting quietly in his stats.

He checked Vajra next.

After the Furious Sparrow assault, cutting loose the fire truck, and the primary metal amalgamation — Vajra’s numbers had taken a serious hit.

Lv0.58. Activity Value 1.208H. Talent 2.083H.

Talent had climbed for Vajra as well. But the Level had cratered — straight from Lv0.838 down to Lv0.58, actually dipping below Shen Cong’s Lv0.583.

The losses were real.

“Still,” Shen Cong thought, “we lost a fire truck and dropped in level — but against gaining the method to amalgamate primary metal? Worth it. Talent is past 2H now. If I can do the same with the Hummer’s primary metal chunks, who knows how far it goes. Maybe past 2.5H?”

Leveling back up wasn’t hard. Talent evolution — breaking through the ceiling — that was the genuinely difficult part.

It was already past four in the afternoon, and the day had been chaotic enough. Shen Cong decided to stay put for the night and push out at dawn.

He cracked open a bottle of Bee Treasure honey, let the warmth spread through him, and spent the rest of the evening in the cab — guiding Vajra to work the newly amalgamated fire truck primary metal through its extension ability, spreading it evenly across the exterior armor plating.

Once amalgamated, the primary metal had lost its distinctive properties. Vajra had apparently stripped those away in the process. Shen Cong could sense it through the bond: portions of Vajra’s core structure now carried the signature of primary metal, a feeling that sat just slightly apart from the rest of the activated metal — not wrong, just different. A subtly distinct resonance.

By midnight, the work was done. The primary metal on the roof had fully fused into the exterior armor. The plating was measurably thicker.

He wasn’t sleepy — he’d already banked five and a half hours during the day — so he spent the rest of the night working through his stockpile of Activity cores, grinding them down into arrowheads and pellets. Ammunition. Insurance against whatever came next on the road.

First the Giant Stag Beetles. Then Sun Laiqun’s half-beast settlement. Then the Treasure Bee hive. Then the Furious Sparrows.

And he hadn’t even left the barren zone’s nesting grounds yet. If the abundant zone ahead was anything like the intelligence suggested, Shen Cong didn’t want to think too hard about what was waiting there.

He could already see the pattern. Survivors in the apocalypse came in three types: the individual apex predators — your Golden Pythons; the colony swarms — your Thieving Crows, Furious Sparrows, Treasure Bees, and the old Short-sting Ant armies; and the ones with intelligence and weapons — humans.

Everything else had already been eaten.

He caught a few hours of sleep in the second half of the night.

At five-thirty in the morning he was up, sharp and on schedule. First order of business:

Take down the Dog-Croc Battle Standard.

“It’s not deterring anything,” he said, looking up at the assembled skeleton swaying on its telescoping poles. “Wasn’t expecting it to scare off the big ones — but at least keeping the small ones at bay would’ve been something. It can’t even manage that. Down it comes.”

(End of Chapter 126)