Shen Cong’s full-force strike came down — and the Bull Demon King’s instincts answered it. Those horns, each well over a meter and a half long, swept up like a pair of great blades. No martial technique behind the movement, just raw predator reflexes honed to a fine edge. It was enough. The arc of the Dog-Croc Warhammer was intercepted before it could land.

Route blocked.

In the same instant, Shen Cong torqued his waist and redirected — a small adjustment, but decisive. The Warhammer’s head shifted off its original line, slipped past the horn, and connected with the side of the buffalo’s neck.

“MOO—!”

The Bull Demon King screamed. The neck split open on impact, flesh torn wide.

Shen Cong didn’t pause. The Warhammer came back up immediately and swung again, targeting the head. The buffalo bellowed and managed to protect its skull once more — but its shoulder took the follow-through, and the crack of bone was unmistakable.

Fighting for its life now, the massive body twisted and the horns whipped around in a wide arc. Shen Cong read it cleanly, jumped back, let them pass, then stepped right back in. The Warhammer kept moving — blow after blow landing across the buffalo’s body, each one deliberate, each one finding a gap in the frantic defense.

Finally, the Bull Demon King made a sound unlike any before it. A long, broken bellow.

The injured foreleg buckled. Six or seven tons of animal went down hard, and that was the verdict — it was finished. Shen Cong didn’t hesitate. Two more strikes to the skull. The bone gave. The Bull Demon King stopped moving.

He stood over it breathing hard.

Those last few swings had cost him — the Activity he’d driven into the Warhammer for each strike added up quickly, and he could feel the drain. Still. The hunt had gone cleanly, and the target was dead.

He grabbed the carcass and began hauling it back toward Vajra.

Back at the truck, he got to work: draining, skinning, butchering.

A creature this size took time. While he worked, he ran the numbers.

The new Bull Demon King: Lv0.588, Activity Value 0.449H, Talent 0.764H.

Against the first Bull Demon King — the one still mounted as a totem on Vajra’s cab: Lv0.327, Activity Value 0.215H, Talent 0.658H.

Across every metric, the new one was dramatically stronger. Abundant zone living had been good to it.

The horns were Activity cores. Shen Cong cut them free with care — these would become his new Bull Demon King Totem set. The existing cores had been running continuously for months and were significantly degraded; the 0.449H replacements would generate a noticeably stronger field-force storm.

The prime cuts of meat he set aside for food. The bones were worth boiling for stock — good for a meal, good for the marrow. And this time, instead of discarding the hide and tendons, he kept them.

He wanted to build a bow.

The hunt had left him thinking.

Firearms were losing their edge against high-tier evolved beasts. Machine gun rounds had treated the Bull Demon King like an inconvenience. The Rhino Horn Javelin had accuracy problems at range. The crossbow was reliable but short-range and relatively low-powered.

He’d never liked close combat. Close combat meant possible injury. His doctrine had always been overwhelming ranged firepower — but outside of military-grade heavy weapons, the only ranged option that still scaled with his strength was a bow.

A proper bow, drawn by someone with eight-bull strength, shooting quality arrows on a high arc — effective range could hit a kilometer. He’d done the research. Some of the extreme competition recurve setups he’d read about before the apocalypse could reach 1,200 meters maximum range. Effective combat range would be shorter, but with his current physical capability it was worth the calculation.

In Song Dynasty terms, one shi was roughly 60kg of draw weight. Ten shi was 600kg — just over half a ton. Yue Fei, by historical record, could draw two and a half shi. At ten shi, Shen Cong would be operating in an entirely different register. A ten-shi war bow with the right arrows might actually approach mortar-round terminal performance.

That was the theory. The practice was harder.

He only knew how to make basic horn bows — the classical composite construction. Producing a true ten-shi draw-weight bow was a serious craft challenge, even for someone who’d built a heavily modified long-haul truck from scratch in an abandoned warehouse. And archery at that level required years of dedicated practice to develop proper technique. His current physical coordination and stability would accelerate that learning curve — but how much, he couldn’t say.

Still. The materials were right in front of him.

A horn bow required horn and tendon for the limbs, hide for the string. The Bull Demon King’s enhanced horn, hide, and tendon were better raw materials than he was likely to find anywhere else. He set to work separating them carefully — the tendons especially, which required patient, precise work to extract cleanly.

Fortunately, his hands were steady. It didn’t take as long as it might have.

With the new horns installed in the Totem mount, the difference was immediate.

The resonance field strengthened visibly — the field-force storm running noticeably more intense than before. Part of that was the higher Activity Value in the new cores: 0.499H against the old 0.215H. Part of it was almost certainly the abundant zone’s ambient Activity density, which had been climbing steadily since Tuogao Town.

Either way, Vajra — currently running low after everything the past two days had cost — began pulling in free Activity at a significantly higher rate. The recovery had started.

Shen Cong cleaned up the site without lingering and drove on.

Past Tuogao Town, the next settlement was Miaogang Township — the northwestern edge of Juchao District, separated from Feidong County by Jian Mountain and Fucha Mountain. Hefei proper was close now.

The abundant zone made itself felt more with every kilometer.

Miaogang wasn’t barren wasteland. The township itself was rubble and broken walls like everywhere else — but the rubble sat inside a living frame. Trees clustered around the ruins, old growth and young growth both, and along the roadside and between the collapsed structures there was actual grass. Green, low, patchy grass. If the collapsed buildings hadn’t been there to remind him, Shen Cong might have thought he’d wandered into an ordinary rural landscape on an ordinary afternoon.

He pulled over and walked the ruins on foot.

“Mostly standard tree species — bark showing metallic gradation, so evolved trees, but no evolved fruit trees visible… These low ones look like paper mulberry. Paper mulberry fruit is edible. Tender leaves are pig feed back in the villages. I wonder if…”

He examined the shorter trees more closely. Paper mulberry — known in rural areas as skin tree or valley-skin tree. Extraordinarily fast-growing: where most trees took decades to mature, paper mulberry was usable timber inside two years, its roots constantly throwing up new shoots, practically invasive. The fruit — small fuzzy balls called zhushi — were tart-sweet and edible. The young leaves were standard animal fodder.

If pigs could eat it, humans could eat it. With no vegetables to be found anywhere, Shen Cong picked a generous bag of tender leaves to take back. A pity the trees hadn’t fruited yet — fresh Activity fruit would have been better, but leaves were something.

He was gathering the last of them, bag in hand and ready to head back, when the edge of his vision caught something.

In the crown of a large poplar tree, not far off.

A nest.

Shen Cong raised his binoculars.

It was unquestionably a bird’s nest. Large — satellite-dish large, wedged between three branches high in the canopy, built up with layers of packed material.

He lowered the binoculars.

Swallowed.

Four months into the apocalypse, and he had never once eaten a real bird’s egg. Giant Stag Beetle eggs absolutely did not count.

“Please have eggs in it.”

(End of Chapter 128)