Shen Cong declined the Research Institute’s invitation.

He wasn’t genuinely interested in scientific research. He was interested in becoming stronger. With a clear picture now of where the Institute actually stood, the disappointment was real but manageable — he adjusted his expectations, accepted that the Activity mystery wasn’t going to be solved here anytime soon, and refocused on what he’d come to Hefei for in the first place.

Vajra’s overhaul. Reaching Lv1. Everything else was secondary.

He did agree to collaborate on one specific task: helping the Institute assign accurate ratings to every evolved organism in their sample set and updating the Evolved Beast Classification Chart. That work earned points. He had uses for points.

Working collectively, the team produced a notably more precise data format. The Violent Ape King entry served as the template:

Violent Ape King Combat tier: Near-Heavyweight. Projected to enter Heavyweight at peak breakthrough. Current evolutionary stage: Metamorphosis Stage (Lv0–0.25: Juvenile; Lv0.25–0.5: Developmental; Lv0.5–0.75: Mature; Lv0.75–0.99: Metamorphosis; Lv1.0: Peak Breakthrough) Individual Talent: Two-Star (1H Activity Value = One Star; 1.5H = One-and-a-Half Star; 2H = Two Star; increments continue) Appendix — Precise values: Lv0.77, Activity Value 1.567H, Talent 2.034H.

The framework was built on Shen Cong’s quantitative system but simplified for camp-wide use. Decimal strings gave most people headaches; the star rating and stage nomenclature translated the same information into something a soldier or a civilian could apply quickly in the field.

The four-stage developmental model made the current condition of any individual immediately legible. The Talent star rating gave a clear projection of their ceiling at Peak Breakthrough. The Violent Ape King, as an example: Metamorphosis Stage at Near-Heavyweight now, Heavyweight projected at Lv1. Straightforward.

Applied to the Mingfa Camp’s own evolved people, the same framework showed a population spread across Developmental and Mature stages, with Talents ranging from Half-Star to One-and-a-Half Star. The ceiling projections were visible and, for most of them, modest.

Shen Cong’s own entry: Developmental Stage, Two-and-a-Half Star Talent.

Two-and-a-Half Star was territory that, in the wild, only individual-class Heavyweight evolved beasts occupied. Against the full camp’s evolved population, the gap was categorical. At Peak Breakthrough — if he reached Lv1 — Two-and-a-Half Star Talent put him at the threshold of Super-heavyweight.

He noted this and moved on. Thresholds were for crossing, not for contemplating.

The updated Chart incorporated everything: all evolved beast entries refined with the new data format, evolved plant entries added for the first time, the complete current picture of human knowledge about Activity assembled into one reference. Zhang Kan and his team had adopted “Activity” as their standard terminology almost immediately — it was more precise than “evolutionary factor” and Shen Cong had explained it coherently. The Chart now used it throughout.

Activity Value. Activity Source ceiling. Radiation frequency. Radiation continuity.

The terminology was better. The underlying research capacity hadn’t changed overnight. Meaningful scientific results from the Institute would take time — possibly a long time.

Doesn’t matter, he told himself. The goal is Vajra’s overhaul. Evolution will take care of itself. Whatever’s ahead, walking forward is how you find out what it is. Reach Lv1 first. Then push further. Maybe someday the ceiling disappears entirely.

The image surfaced, half-serious: flying under his own power. Not on the Antgod’s back — actually flying. That would be something close to what the old stories called transcendence.

Will that day come?

He didn’t know. He wanted it to, with a clarity that surprised him when he examined it directly.

By nightfall the day’s contributions — the data organization work, the framework development, the sample assessments — had translated into 120 additional points. Running total: 620. He was now the highest-scoring evolved person in the Mingfa Camp by a margin.

Li Aiping offered congratulations.

He didn’t respond. Rankings were noise. The only value the score had was indirect — a highly useful evolved person was a person the garrison leadership had reasons to protect rather than scheme against. His value to the camp reduced the probability of certain kinds of hostility. That was the relevant calculation.

It also introduced the opposite risk: other evolved people noticing the gap and resenting it. Envy was a reliable source of problems in any sufficiently large group.

More people means more schemes. Stay alert.

He climbed to Vajra’s roof as the camp settled into its evening rhythms, taking the sports seat salvaged from the old Hummer. Stars overhead. The night air had the particular clarity of post-apocalyptic skies, empty of industrial light pollution, the Milky Way visible as an actual band rather than a theoretical concept.

At nearly sixty times baseline human light sensitivity, the sky he was looking at was blue-white rather than black — the photons that would be invisible to a normal human eye arrived in sufficient quantity to register. It was different from the night sky he’d grown up with. It was also beautiful in its own way.

He let the Antgod out while the darkness gave cover. The creature settled onto the roof beside him and breathed the open air.

Identifying individual stars within constellations was something he’d been doing on clear nights for months — a practice that required nothing from him except attention and patience, which made it useful for decompression. The daily tension of watching for threats and managing variables and never fully relaxing had to go somewhere. This was where it went: eyes on the sky, mind temporarily empty of threat assessment, the pressure releasing in increments.

He looked at the stars for a while.

“If there’s one thing evolutionary history teaches us,” he said to no one in particular, “it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands into new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, even dangerously.”

Jurassic Park. He’d always liked that line. It had a shape that felt true when you said it out loud, especially now — especially in a world that had been demonstrating the principle continuously for four months.

He didn’t know if Activity was ultimately beneficial or catastrophic. He suspected the answer was both, depending on where you stood in the food chain and what choices you made. What he knew was that he wanted his own life to be the kind that broke through barriers rather than the kind that was broken by them.

That felt like enough of a creed to operate on.

Then the Antgod interrupted him.

A transmission came through the bond — not words exactly, but something that assembled into meaning the way emotions sometimes did:

Fly. Distance. Drawn. Mate.

Shen Cong came out of his reverie. “What?”

The transmission repeated, with more urgency this time.

Fly. Distance. Drawn. Mate.

He worked through it. “You’re saying you want to fly somewhere. There’s something far away drawing you. You want to go mate with it?”

The Antgod’s response was immediate and unambiguous: Mate.

“There’s another of your kind out there? It’s far? You’re not worried about the danger?”

A single feeling came back: certainty.

He sat with it for a moment. The nuptial flight — the mating flight of reproductive ants, the biological event that winged ants existed for. Queens and males, drawn together by pheromone signals across distance, the annual dispersal that seeded new colonies. He’d known this day would come eventually. Winged ants didn’t keep their wings forever; the instinct to fly and mate was fundamental, encoded at whatever level evolutionary biology went all the way down to.

He could feel it in the bond — not controllable, not negotiable. This was a pull the Antgod couldn’t argue with even if it wanted to.

He raised his hand.

The Antgod touched it with both antennae, a gesture that carried something like farewell.

Then it spread its wings, lifted off the roof, and headed south — toward Chaohu Lake — and was gone into the dark.

Blackhead climbed to the roof. It sat facing the direction the Antgod had flown and didn’t move for a long time.

Worried. For a sibling, or whatever category the bond between them had created.

“This is the nuptial flight,” Shen Cong said, sending a calm feeling through the bond to Blackhead. “It’s what winged ants are made to do.”

He hoped the Antgod completed the flight and came back. He hoped it kept its wings — queens shed them after mating, but the Antgod’s biology had departed from standard ant biology in enough ways that the outcome wasn’t certain. The wings were his air superiority. If they came back, good. If they didn’t, he’d operate without them.

For now: without them.

More careful from here. No extraction option if things go wrong.

He went back inside and started working on bone-gold weapon refinements. Between grinding sessions, he pulled out a notebook and began sketching.

Vajra 2.0. What it should look like when the overhaul was done.

He’d need the Research Institute’s help to execute it. He’d need to understand the camp’s resources and workflows well enough to make the request at the right moment in the right way. He was learning both. When the time was right, he’d ask.

Until then: accumulate points, build relationships, sharpen weapons, draw plans, and wait.

(End of Chapter 147)