The Golden Python — thirty to forty meters of it — had briefly convinced Shen Cong that he was looking at the upper limit of individual evolved beast scale.
Li Aiping’s account corrected that impression comprehensively. The Golden Python was heavyweight tier. Above that was super-heavyweight. The ceiling was considerably higher than he’d thought.
The Anhui Provincial Garrison had classified all mutated animals under the single category of evolved beasts — avian, terrestrial, insect, aquatic — as the primary threat to human survival. Evolved trees and non-biological evolved entities existed as separate categories, but these were generally assessed as low-threat mutations. The dangerous category was animals.
To give survivors a working framework for assessing threat levels, the Research Institute had adapted boxing’s weight class system. The terminology had been slightly adjusted to avoid confusion between similar-sounding Chinese weight class names, producing a clean seven-tier hierarchy:
Super-Heavyweight / Heavyweight / Lightweight / Featherweight / Bantamweight / Flyweight / Grassweight
Classification criteria: individual combat capability, colony/swarm scale, toxicity, and aggression — assessed in combination.
The Research Institute updated the Evolved Beast Classification Chart continuously as new data came in. Every survivor in the garrison was required to read the current edition daily.
“Where’s your copy?”
“Not individual issue — our squad only gets one, distributed to the squad leader. We read it together before each deployment.” She paused. “He’s dead. It was on him.”
“Where did your squad leader die?”
“Feidong County proper.”
“Feidong is completely abandoned?”
“Yes.”
“What tier are the Deathclaws?”
“Bantamweight.”
Shen Cong shifted to the next line of inquiry. “The garrison’s main installation is around the Mingfa Commercial Plaza area in Dayang Town, Hefei urban district. What’s their detection coverage — radar sweep range, drone surveillance radius?”
“Radar doesn’t extend much past a kilometer from what I know. But there are sentry towers at three hundred meters height — those give visual coverage across most of the urban district. Feidong County is just outside that range, which is why when our squad got ambushed by the Deathclaws, no rescue came. If we’d been any closer to the city, command would have seen it.”
Shen Cong had what he needed for now. He retied Li Aiping’s restraints, turned to the door, and paused.
“Stay quiet. We’re going to Feidong County.”
He kicked Blackhead lightly on his way past — more communication than discipline — and said clearly: “Blackhead. Watch her. She breaks the chain, sting her.”
He looked back at Li Aiping as he said it.
“Blackhead’s acid,” he added. “One sting. That’s all it would take.”
“Wait — is that giant ant actually under your control? You’re sure it won’t just — what if it decides to eat me? Can you please take the chain off, I won’t do anything, I’m injured, I’m not a threat to you—”
He locked the partition door and walked to the cab.
Engine on. Back to work — finish leveling the damaged road section first.
Ten minutes later, Vajra was through the worst of it and moving toward Feidong County at speed.
Deathclaws were common in this area. They appeared several times on the approach — the dominant local threat species, it seemed. Primary attack method was the tongue; Activity cores were concentrated in the claws and dorsal spines. The overall profile matched the Fallout creature he’d named them after, with differences: no head horns, and their default locomotion was quadrupedal rather than fully bipedal, going upright only when attacking.
Intelligence: low. Aggression: high, with no apparent threat assessment or retreat instinct. Individually manageable; persistently annoying in groups.
None of that mattered against Vajra. Shen Cong drove through them, the push blade doing the main work, and directed the Antgod — riding on the roof — to retrieve the Activity cores from the kills. The meat wasn’t worth processing; Deathclaw tier was too low to bother.
Ten minutes at highway pace brought him into Feidong County proper.
Li Aiping had given him a rough location for her squad leader’s last stand. He found it. What remained of the squad leader was a skeleton in shredded uniform fabric, the bones already picked partially clean. The Evolved Beast Classification Chart booklet had been torn in half and scattered nearby.
Vajra’s arrival drew the lingering Deathclaws in from the surrounding ruins. Shen Cong stepped out with the Dog-Croc Warhammer, cleared them systematically — anything that came close died quickly — retrieved both halves of the booklet from the ground, and returned to the cab.
He drove clear of the site immediately, used drone footage to identify a suitable concealment position in the ruins, and spent the next hour using the push blade to excavate a rough garage space in the rubble.
This was going to be his base of operations for the foreseeable future.
The plan: cache Vajra here. Observe the garrison from a distance, gather additional intelligence, wait for the right conditions before making contact. He’d been impatient to reach the garrison for months — but impatience and premature contact were different things. He didn’t know what was waiting for him inside that organization, what interests might want to acquire or control what he represented. The garrison’s militarized management structure was itself a significant concern. He was not interested in becoming property of the provincial military command. He needed a cooperation model that preserved his autonomy, and finding that required understanding the garrison’s actual capability and internal dynamics first.
Strength. That was the foundation of any negotiating position.
Once the concealment work was done, he went back to the cargo compartment and removed the chain from Li Aiping’s wrists.
“You can move freely. Including outside the vehicle. But don’t go far — there are Deathclaws throughout this area — and stay where I can see you. You’re still here until I’ve had time to verify what you’ve told me. When I’m satisfied, I’ll let you go back.”
Li Aiping rubbed her wrists. “You’ve been watching too many thrillers. The garrison values evolved people — especially iron people. You’d walk in there and get the best treatment available. Is all this really necessary? Fighting the evolved beasts is all anyone cares about right now. Nobody has time to scheme against you—”
He’d already stopped listening. His assessment of the situation came from his own analysis, not from reassurances delivered by someone with an obvious interest in getting him to lower his guard.
He sat down with the torn Classification Chart and spread both halves on a flat surface.
Colour illustrations, annotated data tables, organized by tier from the contents page. Seven levels: Super-heavyweight through Grassweight.
Super-Heavyweight: three entries.
The first was the Disaster Locust swarm. Individual locusts were smaller than a fist, physically fragile, but colony counts were staggering. Evolved mouthparts could tear through hardened materials. They consumed everything in their path completely.
The second was the Dragon Hornet. Individual body size comparable to a large dog. Extraordinary speed. Exceptional visual acuity. The tail stinger delivered a toxin that was immediately lethal to ordinary humans; in evolved people, it caused progressive deterioration of evolutionary factors, resulting in death through gradual systemic collapse. Individual Dragon Hornets were beyond standard evolved person capability — and they operated in colonies of several hundred.
The third was the only individual-type beast classified at Super-heavyweight: the Iron-Eater. Physical profile resembling a pangolin, scaled up to thirty meters tall and forty-one meters long — comparable to Seismosaurus, the largest dinosaur in Earth’s geological record. The critical characteristic: it ate metal. On record for swallowing an iron person’s tank vehicle in a single bite.
Military assessment: apex predator and effective ruler of the Huoshan Oasis food chain. Missile strikes had produced no measurable damage. Operational note: the Iron-Eater did not leave the Oasis. It showed no interest in the abundant zone.
Below Super-heavyweight: Heavyweight. Six entries — three colony-type, three individual-type. Each one in the Golden Python’s general threat category.
Shen Cong found the Dog-Croc entry. Notably, the Classification Chart used the same name he’d coined independently — Dog-Croc — noting in the description that the creature’s running gait closely resembled a dog’s. Apparently the resemblance had struck whoever wrote the entry the same way it had struck him.
Dog-Croc: classified Lightweight.
(End of Chapter 136)