Mechanical Vine — a mutated climbing plant. Bark shows pronounced metallic gradation. Joints are highly flexible and resilient, bending freely in any direction. Filament roots can be extended from the stems and driven into metal surfaces, drawing metal as a nutrient source. Vine tendrils use joint articulation to whip, strike, and bind.

Main root anchored in soil, growing along the metal tower lattice as its support structure. Animal remains found near the root base — consistent with vine-based predation and root-level scavenging. No apparent toxicity. Leaves edible. Flowers and fruit: unknown. Reproduction method: unknown. Lv0.741, Activity Value 0.312H, Talent 0.421H.

Severed vine sections showed no Activity leakage — suggesting possible regenerative capacity.

Click. Click. Click.

Shen Cong finished typing the field notes into his laptop. The data had required a second trip to the site — careful excavation around the root base to confirm what was anchoring the thing. Worth the effort.

He’d tasted a leaf while he was at it. Texture similar to spinach, slightly astringent, with a mineral undertone that probably reflected its metal-heavy diet. Not unpleasant. He’d logged it as edible.

The severed vine sections he’d packed into a plastic basin with soil — a makeshift pot, to see whether they’d take root and grow. If the plant could regenerate from cuttings, it was worth knowing. And a pot of something that moved and captured things on its own was, in its way, a certain kind of style.

It might even have applications. Hard to say yet. Unusual enough to keep.

Notes filed, flight logged, vine potted. Shen Cong tossed a mix of metal scraps and Activity cores to the Antgod — which had burned through significant energy during the aerial excursion — left both the Antgod and Blackhead outside, and climbed into Vajra to finish leveling the damaged road section. One more pass should do it; only a few meters of crater remained, and packing it with fill would make it passable.

An hour later, the work was nearly done.

The last few meters. He was filling the final section when a vibration came through the chassis that had nothing to do with Vajra’s suspension system.

Vajra had good dampers. This wasn’t road noise. This was the ground itself.

Earthquake?

He killed the engine immediately and sat still, feeling for the source. The vibration was brief — a few seconds, then gone. Everything settled.

Then he checked the rear camera feeds.

To the south-southeast, on the horizon —

A cloud. Rising. Shaped like a mushroom.

Shen Cong was out of the cab and into the rear compartment before he’d consciously decided to move. Half-Activated Armor on. Up through the roof hatch.

He stood on top of Vajra and stared.

The mushroom cloud was still growing. Still building upward, the column thickening, the cap spreading — and it was doing this from what had to be hundreds of kilometers away, and he could see it clearly. Not the faint smudge of a distant fire. A defined, developing, unmistakable mushroom cloud, rising from the horizon south of east.

Yesterday’s fire truck explosion had made its own small mushroom. He’d been ten meters from it. That had been nothing. This was —

“Is that a nuclear detonation.”

“Atomic bomb? Hydrogen bomb?”

He stood there with goosebumps running from the back of his neck all the way down his spine, watching the cloud continue to climb.

That scale. That shockwave in the ground. There was nothing in the conventional arsenal that produced this — no fuel-air device, no MOAB, nothing. If this was a chemical explosion he’d eat Vajra’s push blade.

Before he could gather his thoughts, the tree line on Fucha Mountain’s slopes erupted with birds. Dozens of them, large, screaming into the sky and fleeing in all directions. Seconds later a wave of dry, hot air hit his face — the pressure front, attenuated almost to nothing across this distance but still perceptible, still there.

The Antgod and Blackhead came scrambling back to him from wherever they’d wandered, pressing close, trembling.

Even evolved beasts gave way to this.

Shen Cong’s heart was hammering. He’d grown up knowing nuclear weapons were the apex of human destructive capacity. He’d watched the test footage — the archived recordings, the documentary reconstructions. He knew intellectually what a nuclear detonation looked like.

Knowing and seeing were separated by a distance he had no words for.

He made himself breathe. Forced himself to think.

Direction: east-southeast, consistent with the Nanjing corridor. Eastern Theater Command.

They fired a nuclear weapon.

The bureaucratic chain for launching nuclear weapons was among the most complex and redundant systems in any military. The fact that a weapon had been successfully authorized and detonated meant the Eastern Theater Command’s headquarters structure in Nanjing retained significant organizational integrity. Command and control was functional. The nuclear storage and handling systems were intact. The institutional framework had survived.

That was the good news.

The bad news was the question the launch raised: why.

Nuclear release wasn’t a decision made lightly or for manageable threats. The threshold for that authorization was specifically defined as situations where conventional force was no longer sufficient. Which meant the Eastern Theater Command had encountered something it couldn’t handle with everything else it had.

What kind of threat required that?

Internal conflict between factions — possible, but nuclear weapons against Chinese territory made that scenario complicated. More likely: something like what the Anhui Provincial Garrison had encountered at the Oasis. A swarm event. A mutated threat at a scale that conventional firepower couldn’t address. The Eastern Theater Command hitting something in the Nanjing area — or using Nanjing’s assets against something elsewhere — with a nuclear strike.

He couldn’t know. Communications were still down. The one brief radio intercept from Nanjing that he’d caught weeks ago had been followed by nothing — only static, no matter how long he searched the bands. He had no way to follow up.

The cloud was still climbing. Still spreading. From this distance it looked almost beautiful — the geometry was precise, the column steady, the colors shifting as the material dispersed at altitude. He didn’t look away from it.

If there was one detonation, would there be more? Humanity had already lost nine in ten people to the apocalypse itself. Were the survivors now going to inherit a post-nuclear wasteland on top of everything else?

He didn’t want a wasteland. A dead world — static, grey, nothing growing — held nothing for him. This world, as dangerous as it was, had something. The ecology rebuilding itself around the Activity, the evolved species filling every niche, the sense that something new was emerging from the wreckage. He was part of that. He wanted to be part of that.

Please let it be only the one.

He pushed the thought down and went back to work.

The road surface wasn’t going to level itself, and worrying about nuclear weapons from a position of zero information was an exercise in burning focus he needed elsewhere. The practical agenda was clear: reach Feidong County, make camp, observe the garrison’s movements from a distance, and tonight — melt the Hummer’s primary metal chunks using the same liquid-state amalgamation method he’d confirmed on the fire truck. More primary metal meant more Talent. More Talent meant a higher ceiling at Lv1.

It was slow going, staying in Lv0. Four months since the apocalypse and he was still in the sub-threshold range — he could feel his own impatience with that, a low-grade pressure that hadn’t gone away. The junction between what he had and what was possible was close enough to see and far enough to feel the distance.

The Hummer primary metal was the next step. Amalgamating the fire truck’s primary metal had pushed Talent past 2H and given his body the platform for eight-bull strength. The Hummer’s cores were stronger than the fire truck’s — if the pattern held, nine-bull territory was plausible.

Nine-bull strength. He let himself consider what that actually meant. At that level, probably enough raw force to kill the Bull Demon King with a single casual strike.

Beep-beep-beep.

The radar alarm went off.

Forward sector — something had entered the sweep zone and tripped the 15A’s motion alert. Shen Cong reversed Vajra to a wider section of road where he had room to maneuver, then climbed to the roof with binoculars.

He found the contact quickly.

A human. Running. Moving along the highway at speed, coming from the direction of Feidong. Black paramilitary uniform — People’s Armed Police pattern. Female. Injured: half her face was blood-red, the visible portions of her left arm wrapped in white field bandaging.

Evolved person. Provincial garrison?

He tracked her with the binoculars. Her left hand was wrong — the fingers had fused, or grown together, or something had happened to the bone structure that had compressed five fingers into a single enlarged skeletal mass. A bone-palm mutation, pronounced and distinctive.

She was running hard. And she was being chased.

Three of them. Coming behind her at a lope, covering ground efficiently — bipedal, lizard-bodied, moving upright on powerful hind legs in a way that made Shen Cong think immediately of the Deathclaws from the Fallout games. Mutated monitor lizards, maybe. Or something that had started as a lizard and arrived somewhere stranger. Three of them, and they were not losing ground.

The woman and her pursuers saw Vajra at approximately the same moment Shen Cong saw them clearly.

He dropped through the roof hatch and pulled it shut.

Forward cab window open. Crossbow up, bolt nocked — a Canine Tooth Arrow, one of the Wu Wenjun set, Activity Value 0.397H.

Whatever these Deathclaw-variants were, he was about to find out how they responded to a direct hit.

(End of Chapter 133)