No hesitation. Six Dragon Hornets dead — Shen Cong loaded the carcasses onto Great Vajra immediately and drove.
Partway along the route, he stopped to coat both the Dragon Hornet bodies and Great Vajra’s exterior armor with gasoline, masking the scent trail. Dragon Hornets tracked by smell. He wasn’t going to lead them anywhere that mattered.
He took the ring road east and stopped only when he reached Dianbu River in Feidong County.
He didn’t return to the Mingfa Camp. If Dragon Hornets followed the scent and found him there, the camp would be destroyed in the resulting swarm retaliation, regardless of whether he personally survived. Better to wait here.
Great Vajra sat at the river’s edge. If a Dragon Hornet colony came tracking, he’d drive straight in. The Dianbu River — Hefei’s mother river — ran a hundred meters wide, deep enough at its center to submerge Great Vajra completely. The vehicle had been built fully sealed against flooding; a retractable ventilation port in the roof could supply air for an extended period underwater. Getting back out was the awkward part, but the winch would handle it.
He checked the Antgod’s condition. Wounds across its body, numerous but not critical. Rest would handle it. Blackhead’s carapace had been bitten through — same prescription.
Then he noticed something about the Antgod that hadn’t been there before.
Its abdomen was significantly larger.
“Are you a queen now? Carrying eggs?”
The Antgod’s response came back through the link, simple and certain: Mother. Eggs. Find place. Build colony.
“The ant burrow is yours.” He’d built the room for both of them. The Antgod was back, and back as a queen. He gave her the space without hesitation.
Rescuing the Antgod had been a calculated risk that had just paid unexpectedly well. A colony of giant ants, eventually — that was worth thinking about. Directing a colony in combat someday, experiencing the chaos of swarm tactics from the commanding side.
The Antgod settled into the ant burrow to recover. Blackhead installed herself at the door as an entirely self-appointed guard, ferrying food and water with evident satisfaction.
Shen Cong turned to the Dragon Hornet carcasses.
The data resolved quickly.
Dragon Hornet (Colony Type).
Individual combat tier: Lightweight.
Colony combat tier: Super-Heavyweight.
Individual evolutionary stage: Developmental Stage (Lv0.463, Activity Value 0.311H)
Individual Talent: Half-Star (0.672H)
Description…
“0.672H Talent on a standard individual. Higher than the Antgod’s 0.625H ceiling.” He turned this over. “And that’s just an ordinary worker. What does the drone or the queen look like?”
The Antgod had held the record for highest Talent among insects in his collection. No longer.
It wasn’t entirely surprising — Dragon Hornets were classified Super-Heavyweight at the colony level, and exceptional individual performance was expected from a species at that tier. He’d felt it during the fight: the Super-2 Ant Acid had taken him considerable time and effort to hold something at his own level, yet a Dragon Hornet doused in the same acid had recovered in barely ten seconds. That resilience, multiplied across hundreds of individuals, was what made them genuinely unkillable by ordinary means.
The Dragon Hornet’s body was long and lean, similar in profile to a common wasp, black-and-yellow banding, mandibles visibly sharp even in death. Looking at one, he thought of Sun Laiqun — the unhinged man from early on who’d called the Treasure Bees “killer bees.” If Sun Laiqun ever saw a Dragon Hornet, he’d probably revise his opinion of Treasure Bees entirely.
“Activity core is the tail stinger.”
He used tweezers and his dagger to extract a stinger from one of the carcasses.
Twenty-five centimeters long. The tip was needle-sharp; the base end was as thick as a bottle cap, tapering to a perfect cone. Hollow throughout — an internal channel connected to the venom gland in the abdomen.
His Super-2 Ant Acid was fully expended. The Dragon Hornet venom was a partial replacement.
Six carcasses’ worth of venom glands, carefully extracted — two small vials total.
Activity-suppressing toxin. He considered naming conventions. Activity-Killer. That works. Can be loaded directly into the stinger — fashion the stinger itself into a javelin. Dragon Hornet Javelin. Fill the tip with Activity-Killer venom. Dragon Hornet Arrows — same concept, smaller scale. One hit on an evolved person and it’s essentially fatal.
The limitation was quantity. Two vials wasn’t much. But Dragon Hornets in numbers — hundreds deploying their stingers simultaneously — that was the kind of force that might stress even the Iron-Eater.
Something to consider for later.
Shen Cong spent a day and a night at the Dianbu River.
Alongside the Dragon Hornet research, he finished the bathroom installation in Great Vajra’s interior: shower, radiant heat lamp, water heater, bath, sink and vanity, squat toilet — and a closed-circuit monitor, because being in the bathroom was no reason to stop watching the vehicle’s surroundings. Music or film available on request.
Current completion status: forward cabin — game room and study, bedroom, greenhouse, all finished. Aft cabin — kitchen and dining area, bathroom, ant burrow, butchery area, all finished. Remaining: the main supply room, the laboratory, and various detail work.
The Golden Jiao Totem was running at full output.
The field-force storm it generated was producing dense ambient Activity, and Great Vajra was absorbing it continuously. Over just a few days, the vehicle had climbed to Lv0.606, Activity Value 1.525H, Talent 2.518H. The Exchange process was feeding Shen Cong proportionally — he’d reached Lv0.608, Activity Value 1.531H, Talent 2.518H.
Yesterday: ten-bull strength.
This morning, after a full night of sleep and a proper meal: eleven-bull.
The sensation of ongoing evolution had become something he could feel as a continuous background presence, running through the nights.
If both Great Vajra and I reach 2H Activity Value, will that be twenty-bull strength? At Lv1, could it be thirty?
The plan going forward: use combat to drain Great Vajra’s Activity in controlled amounts, preventing it from pulling too far ahead of his own physical development. Keep them synchronized. The Siphon risk was the constraint that mattered.
The next morning.
No Dragon Hornet colony had appeared. The danger seemed to have passed.
He drove to Binhu Wetland Forest Park and resumed yesterday’s interrupted work — Giant Salamander Monitors to hunt, Money-String Mulberry fruit to gather.
Giant Salamander Monitors were deeply ugly creatures. Fast, though — their Activity core was the skull, effectively a built-in helmet. At nine meters in length, they were in the same size range as the Dog-Croc within the Lightweight tier.
At eleven-bull strength, Shen Cong was not the same person who had once benchmarked himself against Dog-Crocs.
The Ape King War Hammer dispatched each Giant Salamander Monitor in a few strikes. Carcasses into the cargo hold — Blackhead and the Antgod dragged them to the butchery area, which could accommodate seven or eight. Only five Giant Salamander Monitors came to investigate during the fruit harvest, so five were killed.
Thirty points per Giant Salamander Monitor. Five kills: 150 points.
Money-String Mulberry fruit had modest Activity enhancement effects on evolved people, but provided meaningful physical strengthening to ordinary survivors — increased strength, improved constitution — which pushed its point value higher. Forty points per standard unit. The grove yielded approximately seven standard units: 280 points.
The Dragon Hornet carcasses plus the intelligence report of Dragon Hornets appearing in Hefei urban territory: at least another 100 points.
Total for the outing: at minimum 530 points.
He drove back to the Mingfa Camp at noon.
(End of Chapter 169)