Blackhead had learned to apply Activity.

Shen Cong had assumed she was watching the patterns on the skylight. She'd actually been tracking the movement of ambient Activity through the glass — sensing its flow, mapping it — until the understanding clicked into place.

With Activity application unlocked, her mandibles could now achieve a sharpening response. Cutting metal was no longer a matter of sustained pressure and grinding effort. One light stroke was enough.

He was genuinely pleased. He was also thinking ahead.

Blackhead was an insect with limited intelligence, not even close to the top of the evolved hierarchy. If she could figure this out independently, watching hail hit glass in the dark — then more and more evolved beasts would inevitably follow. The Furious Sparrows had already been doing it when he first encountered them. The Swiftclaw Leopard was doing it with its tail. The timeline on "evolved beasts that can actively wield Activity" was compressing.

The hail didn't last long. About half an hour, then it stopped.

What replaced it was snow. Heavy, thick-flaked snow — the kind that returned a little light to a sky that had been completely black, painting the world in grey-white. The time was 4:30 in the afternoon. Still light, barely.

Shen Cong pushed open the roof hatch and climbed up to look.

The world had been buried. White where surfaces rose above the water line, grey-dark where the low-lying areas held ice and water mixed. The camp's elevated platforms were ringed with that grey slurry; the structures on top were wrapped in white. Small groups of figures moved between platforms, doing rescue work. Someone had climbed the 300-meter watchtower again and was scanning outward.

"Minus 9 degrees, coming up slightly." He watched the snow fall for a moment. First snow since the apocalypse began. The ruined world looked more desolate for it.

By evening the temperature had recovered to zero. The snow had lightened. The ice-water mixture was retreating — water depth down to roughly half a meter.

The damage report came in: a dozen ordinary survivors dead, a dozen militia squads…