Heat. Dryness. Pain. Numbness. Itch. A spreading tingle. A deep, bone-level softness.
Seven sensations, cycling through him simultaneously as Vajra pulled the Hummer’s primary metal in, drop by drop.
They converged into a single phrase in his mind: shedding the old body, being reborn.
What Vajra was passing to him was a qualitative change from the inside out — not something he could observe clearly or trace with precision, but something he could feel in the way you felt structural things, the way you felt a bone knitting rather than a cut healing. The result was legible even if the mechanism wasn’t. His Talent and Vajra’s were climbing together, synchronized, increment by increment.
Starting value: 2.083H.
Ten minutes in: 2.096H.
Twenty minutes in: 2.125H.
The Hummer’s primary metal had been cut into sections, which made the process manageable but not fast. At this rate, complete amalgamation would take roughly five hours.
He stopped after thirty minutes.
His body was sending signals he’d learned not to ignore — a specific quality of strain that meant he was approaching the boundary of what he could sustain. His stomach was also making its position known on the subject.
He ate. A full bottle of Bee Treasure, swallowed in long pulls. Several of the green Traffic Light persimmons, unripe but edible, chewed through without ceremony. The energy and Activity flooded in, and his body — cells in active transformation — absorbed it with a hunger that went beyond normal appetite. The nutrition was being used as fast as it arrived.
His eyes pulsed with warmth. The night around him brightened by a perceptible fraction — night vision improving again. His ears ached briefly, then the ache resolved into new clarity: more detail in the ambient sound, more separation between signals, the world arriving in better resolution. He closed his fist and felt the tendons and bones settle into a grip that could, without exaggerating, tear rebar apart bare-handed.
Ten minutes of rest. Then the welding torch again.
Amalgamate. Rest. Eat. Amalgamate.
The cycle continued into the deep hours of the night.
The garrison didn’t move against him. No sudden interest from the perimeter, no activity in the direction of his position, nothing that triggered the radar or the cameras. They appeared to have genuinely accepted his status as a cooperative independent unit, at least for tonight.
He didn’t relax his guard. Thirty-thousand-plus people in the Mingfa Camp constituted a small town’s worth of competing interests — factions, agendas, schemes running at every level. Twenty-seven iron people in the Motor Battalion, each of them potentially aware of what Vajra represented. Any of them could have decided that Shen Cong’s resources were more valuable redistributed.
Assume nothing. Watch everything.
He sweated through his underlayer and pushed through the discomfort and kept going.
At 1:30 in the morning, it was done.
The last of the Hummer’s primary metal folded into Vajra’s structure. The level numbers recalculated themselves in his perception — the familiar drop that came with every Talent expansion, the bottle getting larger while the water level stayed the same.
Vajra: Lv0.524, Activity Value 1.315H, Talent 2.511H. Shen Cong: Lv0.51, Activity Value 1.281H, Talent 2.511H.
Past 2.5H. Both of them.
His body felt different. Not just stronger — different, in the way that eight-bull had felt different from seven-bull, but more so. He ran an internal assessment and arrived at a number.
Nine-bull strength.
“By the evolved beast classification system, I’m probably in the near-Heavyweight bracket now.”
He tested the assessment against what he knew. The Violent Ape King’s four tusks were in storage — he’d measured them when he harvested them. The Ape King’s stats: Lv0.77, Activity Value 1.567H, Talent 2.034H. His own Talent was now half a point above that. Against a fresh Ape King, he wasn’t confident of winning cleanly. Against the burned, one-armed, javelin-riddled Ape King he’d actually fought — that had already been demonstrated.
The Golden Python was still the reference point that humbled him. Heavyweight tier, Talent likely above 2.5H, and it had been growing since the last time he’d seen it. Not yet.
But the gap was narrowing.
A thought surfaced and didn’t leave.
Something feels like a ceiling.
Not a sense of capability running out — more like pressure against a boundary that hadn’t been there before. As though the flesh-and-blood framework had been pushed to the edge of what flesh and blood could structurally accommodate. He probed at it and couldn’t find a way through.
Is this it? Is 2.511H the wall?
He didn’t know. He filed it for the Research Institute conversation in the morning.
The garrison had sent a delivery in the evening — Silver tier benefits, including cooked Violent Ape King meat. He’d handed it directly to Blackhead and the Antgod without sampling any of it. His food was his food. Other people’s food was a variable he declined to introduce.
He slept poorly and was up before dawn.
Morning exercises. Footwork and striking drills, run through at the deliberate pace of someone who was maintaining form rather than pushing output. The sun hadn’t fully cleared the horizon when Li Aiping arrived.
“Updated Evolved Beast Classification Chart from the People’s Defense Department.” She handed it over along with a wrapped parcel. “And your Silver tier daily allocation — I had the cooked meat changed to raw per your request.”
Silver tier: ten Activity fruit, twenty jin of evolved beast meat, two jin of evolved plant material per day. That was the full-supply standard; when logistics ran short, allocations were cut proportionally across thirty thousand people. He wasn’t counting on receiving the full amount consistently.
He took the raw meat and opened the new Chart.
Super-heavyweight remained three entries: Disaster Locust swarm, Dragon Hornet, Iron-Eater. The Heavyweight section had gained a seventh entry — a new listing for Golden Jiao, which the notation confirmed was the evolved python he’d submitted footage of. The garrison’s Research Institute had reviewed his material, classified the creature as a jiao — a category of Chinese mythological serpent associated with transformation toward dragonhood — and entered it accordingly.
His name for it had been Golden Python. The garrison’s name was Golden Jiao. He found he didn’t particularly object.
“Any tasks from the People’s Defense Department today?”
Li Aiping was sitting on a nearby stone with the expression of someone who had not yet decided whether this assignment was interesting or tedious. “Same as always — civilian teams on reconstruction, evolved person teams on resource collection.”
At eight in the morning, a reconstruction team arrived to begin building the platform around his position. Simultaneously, several researchers from the Research Institute appeared, led by their director, Zhang Kan.
They wanted to assess Shen Cong and Vajra. Shen Cong wanted to know what the garrison’s research had actually produced. The two objectives were compatible, which made this a workable meeting.
“My education level is low,” Shen Cong said once the introductions were done. “I have a middle school certificate. I dropped out before finishing high school.” This was accurate — not a deflection, just a fact. “So I may not be able to articulate my own condition precisely using technical language. Give me your research framework first — the terminology, the concepts, how you’ve organized your understanding. Once I know how you’re thinking about it, I can describe what I’ve observed in terms that will actually be useful to you.”
Zhang Kan was not an evolved person. He was an ordinary survivor, a former professor at Hefei University of Technology, rescued by the garrison in the early weeks and immediately set to work on the mutation research program. He had the unaffected directness of someone who had spent his career communicating complex ideas to students and had no particular reason to be coy.
In the current environment — where the existential pressure from the Oasis was severe enough that unite every available force was effectively official policy — there wasn’t much worth hiding anyway.
He began.
(End of Chapter 145)