While the Antgod struggled to work its way out of the cocoon, Shen Cong pulled out one of the persimmons, bit through the skin, and sucked the juice clean out of it. The drained husk he dropped to Blackhead, who was poking at his trouser leg with dry antennae and not getting anywhere.
He’d named the persimmons Traffic Lights.
The reasoning was simple: the fruit came in red, yellow, and green, which matched a traffic signal exactly, and Shen Cong had always had a talent for naming things. The Traffic Light tree sat at Lv0.78, Activity Value 0.333H, Talent 0.427H — higher level and Activity Value than any fruit source he’d consumed before, with a correspondingly stronger enhancement effect on the body.
After finishing the red one he reached for a leaf of Veggie Mulberry and chewed it slowly. The paper mulberry he’d harvested from Miaogang Township had earned the name during the walk back — the leaves had a light, pleasant freshness to them, clean on the palate, filling the same niche as the Veggie Willow he’d found months ago. Different plant, same role. Lv0.691, Activity Value 0.219H, Talent 0.317H — a step below the persimmon, but that wasn’t the point. Meat provided almost no vitamins, and his body needed them. Veggie Mulberry filled that gap.
The Antgod was taking its time.
Where Blackhead had simply forced its way out — shell cracking outward as it pushed — the Antgod was working through the cocoon wall with considerably more care, struggling at a seam that wouldn’t cooperate. Shen Cong was still deciding whether to help when Blackhead charged in and tried to bite the cocoon open with both mandibles.
The cocoon didn’t move. Blackhead strained. Still nothing. The shell was harder than steel — after a solid minute of effort, Blackhead had accomplished exactly zero.
Shen Cong nudged Blackhead out of the way with his foot and tried himself. Both hands, full grip, maximum leverage.
The cocoon didn’t move.
This was embarrassing.
He ended up using the fang knife with Activity driven through the blade, cutting a clean slit along one end. The Antgod squeezed out through the opening, slowly, and stood blinking in the compartment light.
The cocoon shell itself was worth examining — not an Activity core, but saturated with Activity nonetheless. The hardness was comparable to a core, same class of metallic gradation product. No combat application — it couldn’t take an Activity charge for Sharpening — but as raw material it was exceptional. He filed it away and turned his attention to what had just emerged.
The Antgod had wings.
Two pairs of them — actual wings, semi-transparent, extending from the sides of the prothorax and mesothorax, folding over the body in a layered canopy. They were still crumpled from the cocoon, creased with weeks of compression, trembling slightly as the Antgod began working them open.
Thwap. Thwap.
The compartment was immediately too small. Every attempt to spread a wing found a wall or ceiling. The Antgod sent a wave of frustrated eagerness through the bond. Shen Cong opened the rear cargo doors and stepped back.
The Antgod climbed out onto the road surface.
It was immediately clear how much it had grown. The cocoon had been notably larger than Blackhead to begin with — now, fully extended, the Antgod was more than twice Blackhead’s size. Six long, powerful legs braced against the asphalt, body held up off the ground with the easy stability of something that had been built for exactly this. The black exoskeleton carried brown-yellow patterning across the abdomen and thorax, intricate and genuinely striking.
Standing on the road surface, it looked like a small calf had decided to become an insect.
The wings came out slowly as it worked. Four of them, arranged in two pairs — the forward pair slightly larger, the rear pair slightly smaller. Creased and folded, then gradually flattening, membrane pulling taut as the Antgod shook them in patient cycles.
A few minutes of this and the wings were fully spread.
The effect was something like a helicopter sitting on the tarmac.
Trembling. Fanning. Building speed.
The Antgod was trying to fly.
First attempt: airborne for less than a meter, then a complete loss of control and a face-first crash into the asphalt.
It got up. Shook its head. Tried again.
Second attempt: wobbling, tilting, deeply questionable — but airborne. It climbed, circled Vajra in an unsteady spiral, and then, gradually, the circles grew wider and the altitude grew higher and the wobble came out of the flight path. Within minutes it was moving with confidence, gaining speed, pulling up toward the sky.
Flying.
That one word came through the bond — not a word exactly, but a feeling so clear it translated as one. Joy, velocity, altitude, freedom, all compressed into a single transmission. It hit Shen Cong squarely in the chest before he’d even registered it coming.
Blackhead’s antennae were swinging back and forth in their happiness pattern.
Shen Cong climbed to Vajra’s roof and did a security sweep with the binoculars. Clear in all directions. He lowered the binoculars and watched the Antgod bank and spiral overhead.
Fine. Let it fly.
It was approaching noon. He set up camp, cooked, ate, then got back to work leveling the damaged road surface.
Lunch: Veggie Mulberry leaves dressed cold, the unidentified bird eggs lightly fried, Bull Demon King steak at medium-rare. Two Traffic Light persimmons for dessert, finished with a small measure of Bee Treasure. In the apocalypse, assembling a meal like that qualified as genuine quality of life. If the evening allowed, he’d add a small cup of Venom Duke bile wine before sleep — good for circulation, good for vision, good for clearing the accumulated fatigue of a day’s work.
His appetite had been enormous since the upgrades began and showed no sign of settling. Activity enhancement didn’t manufacture capability from nothing — it unlocked physical potential and then let the body fill that potential through nutrition. Every level up opened new room; eating was how you converted room into reality. He ate accordingly.
A song from the speakers. A few minutes to let the food settle.
Then he climbed back to the roof and found the Antgod perched in the crown of a large tree nearby.
“Come back.”
The Antgod spread its wings, lifted off, circled once, and landed on Vajra’s roof. It moved toward him immediately — antennae touching his leg armor, the same greeting posture Blackhead used — and sent through the bond a cluster of feelings: gentle, obedient, devoted. The emotional signal was stronger and more articulate than Blackhead’s, a clarity that spoke to something developing in its intelligence.
“Good.” Shen Cong got out the measuring tape.
Antgod — Full Measurements (Post-Emergence)
Activity core: prothoracic dorsal plate — large, significantly exceeding the Short-sting Ant Queen’s chest armor.
Stats: Lv0.251, Activity Value 0.157H, Talent 0.625H. Talent unchanged from pre-pupation — but 0.625H was still the highest Talent he’d recorded in any mutated insect.
Body dimensions (wings folded): 128cm total length — mandibles 23cm, head 21cm, thorax 26cm, petiole node 11cm, abdomen 47cm. Wing length: 94cm. Total length with wings extended: 134cm. No stinger. Antennae: 28cm. Leg length: 53cm. Body weight: 50kg.
Twice Blackhead’s length, three to four times the mass.
Unlike Blackhead’s uniform black, the Antgod’s abdomen and thorax carried the brown-yellow patterning. Combined with the wings, this told Shen Cong something about its caste: winged ants were exclusively reproductives — queens and males. Worker and soldier ants were developmentally arrested females, never producing wings. Whatever the Antgod was, it was not a worker.
Distinguishing queen from male was harder. In normal ant species the difference was clear — queens were larger, and after the mating flight queens shed their wings while males died. With a mutated specimen and no comparison individual, he had no reliable method.
He didn’t dwell on it. It was a mutated ant. Even if it was a queen, without a suitable male for a mating flight, reproduction was academic. What mattered was what it could do.
He finished the measurements, looked at the Antgod sitting on Vajra’s roof with its wings half-spread, and felt an idea arrive.
He patted the Antgod’s large head.
“Alright. Grab my shoulders. Let’s find out if you can carry me.”
(End of Chapter 131)