When Shen Cong had originally modified his Volvo FH, he'd referenced the Armadillo — a professional overlanding vehicle. Before the apocalypse, he hadn't been the only person fixated on end-of-world scenarios. Doomsday prepping was a genuine cultural phenomenon, and the products that grew up around it were numerous.

Plenty of major companies had taken a swing at designing "apocalypse vehicles." Most of it was marketing.

Shen Cong had worked through dozens of models and concepts before concluding that the most genuinely capable option for post-collapse conditions was the Armadillo series, produced by Germany's MAN Group. It got hyped as a doomsday war machine, but at its core it was simply a top-tier expedition overlander — with off-road performance rivaling a standard jeep.

His affinity for trucks probably had something to do with his upbringing. His parents had built their livelihood hauling freight. Trucks were in his blood from childhood.

So when he built his war machine, he built it around a truck chassis.

The Armadillo Expeditionary was the reference point.

But at the time, his assessment of it was that it was too short. The design prioritized comfort and off-road performance at the expense of cargo capacity — and cargo capacity was everything to him then. So Vajra had gone in its own direction instead.

Time changes things. That enormous cargo hold — the reason for Vajra's excessive length — had become a liability. Looking back now, the Armadillo's proportions were actually better suited to the world as it currently existed than Vajra's were.

Still, even the Armadillo was too small. Given Vajra's Talent ceiling, it would take at least five Armadillo Expeditionaries combined to provide enough material mass to fully amalgamate to Lv1 Activity.

Stockpile materials. Accumulate points. Finalize blueprints.

Two more days passed.

To boost camp morale and reinforce the sense of security, the Anhui Provincial Garrison organized an open tournament. Two divisions: evolved people, and ordinary survivors.

The ordinary division tested vocational skills. The evolved division was a combat bracket.

Twenty-eight iron people and four hundred and twelve mutants competed in open qualifying rounds to determine a…