Mix Jin Ke La in your fertilizer, one bag does the work of two.
Mix Jin Ke La in your fertilizer, wheat yields eighteen hundred jin per mu!
America · San Diego.
American · SHENGDIYAGE.
Standing at the edge of the sweet potato field, watching the soil bulging and splitting open under the pressure of tubers that had already grown large enough to push through the surface, Shen Cong found the old fertilizer commercial running through his head unbidden.
One week. That was all it had taken. The Activity sweet potatoes had erupted from the ground like something had been poured in to accelerate them — enormous root masses crowding each other, visible without any digging at all. As if Jin Ke La had been involved.
The dense Activity radiating from the field was drawing attention. Several of the camp’s pet evolved beasts spent their idle hours circling the perimeter, unable to help themselves.
Not far from the sweet potato field, a new plot had been cleared — the peach orchard, planted with the Activity Peach pits Shen Cong had provided. The pits had germinated and broken soil. Growth rate was slower than the sweet potatoes, but the sight of green shoots had produced a disproportionate reaction in the camp. Germination meant future harvest. Future harvest meant another food source. The emotional math was simple.
Meanwhile, the Nanfei Moat had officially been completed. Only the Sili Moat remained under construction. A separate engineering crew, led by evolved people, was excavating the tunnel that would eventually connect the camp to Shushan Forest Park.
Everything was moving forward with coordinated urgency.
The leadership was meeting constantly — major sessions every two days, minor ones daily — organizing the formal establishment of the new city. Shen Cong attended almost none of it. His self-definition as an outsider remained unchanged.
“Everything is trending in the right direction.” Yu Fucheng monitored the sweet potato field and the budding peach orchard daily, keeping meticulous growth records.
The surrounding evolved beast population had been substantially depleted by sustained hunting — finding Activity meat was becoming genuinely difficult, and the camp couldn’t maintain the feeding schedules required for large evolved beasts in captivity. The sweet potato fields had become the foundation of the new city’s food security. Once the harvest scale was proven, cultivation would expand.
Food security unlocked everything else.
Shen Cong had mostly stopped taking assigned missions during this period. He was going out — just not for the camp’s task list. His destinations were the red and orange threat zones on the distribution map, areas the camp had never sent people into.
A week of steady Activity sweet potato consumption had pushed his Activity Value to 1.743H. The bull-strength benchmark had jumped from fourteen to fifteen. He now assessed himself as able to survive an encounter with a Heavyweight evolved beast even if he couldn’t win — fast enough to disengage safely.
Which made the unexplored zones accessible in a way they hadn’t been before.
He was building a map.
The DJI Generation 8 had barely touched the ground since the Dragon Hornet incident, swapping batteries and going back up. Today it was hovering over Zifeng Mountain, filming a dense woodland below.
In the trees, moving unhurried through the green shade, was a massive black feline. The Swiftclaw Leopard — one of the seven confirmed Heavyweight evolved beasts, and the closest to the Mingfa Camp of any Heavyweight-tier threat.
The Swiftclaw Leopard being out there was a permanent constraint on the camp’s safety. Non-denning predators ranged widely. The watchtowers had already documented it running from Zifeng Mountain to the base of Shushan in a single pursuit — and a survey team preparing the Shushan tunnel project had been on that slope at the time. The Swiftclaw Leopard had killed its prey and returned without noticing them. The leadership had discussed methods of eliminating it multiple times since then. Without functional heavy weapons, no viable approach had emerged.
Shen Cong was interested.
At fifteen-bull strength, he was starting to sense a ceiling.
Not in his Activity Value — that was still climbing. In his physical substrate. The enhancement was continuing but the gains were compressing. The sensation was like pressing against something that gave slightly and then pushed back.
Running speed was the clearest example. At five-bull strength, Shen Cong had already broken four seconds for fifty meters. At fifteen-bull, he still couldn’t reliably get under two seconds. He was hovering around 2.1 to 2.2 seconds — just under one second per fifty meters but not quite there.
Neural reaction time: from roughly 0.05 seconds at five-bull to roughly 0.01 seconds now. Further reduction was becoming increasingly difficult.
Strike force: five-bull strength had produced roughly 400 kilograms per punch. Fifteen-bull produced around 1,400 kilograms — approaching one and a half tons on a standard strike. Maximum charged burst output was at least ten tons. “Human-form tyrannosaurus” was the appropriate descriptor. But the rate of increase was flattening.
Vision: light sensitivity had improved from approximately 50 times baseline human to roughly 90 times — slightly below an owl’s 100 times. Acuity had reached approximately 1/8000 resolution. At that level, from cruising altitude in a commercial aircraft, he could resolve a one-meter-wide irrigation channel below. Roughly half the visual acuity of an eagle.
In the world before, this would have made him a superhero in any conventional sense of the word.
In this world, against the evolved beasts he was encountering, it still wasn’t enough.
The Swiftclaw Leopard’s measured speed during pursuit: 120 meters per second. More than double Shen Cong’s current sprint velocity. The wind it generated at speed was enough to snap tree branches. At that velocity combined with an elephant’s body mass, a direct impact with Shen Cong would be catastrophic — half-crippled at best, then finished.
Even if I keep pushing physical enhancement, matching the Swiftclaw Leopard’s speed may not be achievable. My body hasn’t grown larger — the leverage and structural limits of a human frame put a hard ceiling on certain types of output. Speed is one of them.
He could feel that ceiling. It had a texture.
Hopefully the Lv1 breakthrough shatters it. Twenty-bull strength, thirty-bull strength — those cannot remain impossible.
His attention returned to the drone feed.
The Swiftclaw Leopard moved through the woodland below at what, for it, was a leisurely pace.
Shen Cong watched it and felt the killing intent rise naturally.
Reason one: its territory overlapped with the camp’s operational range, which made it a direct threat to both camp safety and his own.
Reason two: he wanted its Activity core. That tail — whip-like, already shed of fur, carrying a dark silver sheen that was unmistakably an Activity core. He’d captured footage of it using its tail to split a metal transmission tower that was in its path. Activity weaponization, developed independently — not unique to humans, not even unusual among the more advanced evolved beasts. The sparrow colony he’d encountered in his early days had each been individually capable of using Activity for cutting, and they’d done enough damage to the original Vajra that he’d needed an exploding fire truck to eliminate them.
An evolved beast that had learned to wield Activity was categorically more dangerous than one that hadn’t.
Direct confrontation: not viable. Ambush: extremely difficult given its speed. The approach has to be trap-based — something that removes its speed advantage immediately and leaves it unable to fight back. Then I finish it at my leisure. But this requires careful planning. My safety has no margin for error.
He ended the observation and left Zifeng Mountain’s range.
On the drive back, the sunlight that had been clear all morning simply disappeared. Cloud cover moved in from nowhere — grey-black and total. The temperature dropped from around 30 degrees Celsius to 10 degrees in what felt like minutes, and was still falling.
Rain. The real kind.
He said it quietly to himself. Nearly two months without precipitation. By any measure, a serious storm was overdue.
(End of Chapter 174)