With Blackhead's return, the vehicle had gained one good-for-nothing who liked shouting slogans. With no Vajra-Ants to command, Blackhead really was a good-for-nothing.

Fortunately the Vajra Fortress was big enough that keeping one good-for-nothing was no great matter.

Blackhead's evolutionary stage lay roughly between the Lv2 — Pitch-Black Era and the Lv3 — Burning Era. With an animal like an ant, even Shen Cong couldn't say how it would evolve.

Ordinarily an ant's lifespan doesn't exceed ten weeks, while a queen can live thirty-nine weeks. But some worker ants can live as long as seven years, and a queen as long as fifteen. Shen Cong had no idea how long Blackhead's lifespan was, and it was hard to judge whether evolution would change an evolved individual's lifespan at all.

He hoped it could. Otherwise it would be laughable—an apex predator at the top of Earth's food chain, and still no match for old age.

But at the present level of technology, deducing anything about lifespan was very difficult.

After all, nobody had yet worked out how genes operate at the microscopic level, or even how cells operate; speculating about lifespan was unrealistic.

"It's very late. Find somewhere to make camp and rest. Over the next few days I need to prepare properly for anything that could go wrong in the brain-cloud stage."

By a little past three in the morning, Shen Cong finally found a reasonably suitable place: a stretch of dense forest near Tianjin's Ninghe District. The Activity concentration here was very rich, and to Shen Cong's particle-grade Activity waves this ought to be a small oasis lying inside the range of a large one.

Whether some large evolved beast had held it before, he didn't know—probably one had, and perhaps it was among those the Firestarter Spirit had slaughtered that night.

Now the place belonged to Shen Cong.

Time to rest.

Having evolved to the late Lv3 Burning Era spine-fire stage, Shen Cong no longer needed much time asleep; two or three hours were enough to restore a full day's good spirits.

So in the morning he still…