Eight days. Gone in an instant.

At the base of Zifeng Mountain, on Tangyuan Road, Great Vajra sat at the roadside. In the nearby woodland, Shen Cong was making a final check of the trap's concealment.

Half an hour later, everything was in order.

He walked to a section of ground nearby, lifted a cover panel, and dropped inside — into a second Great Vajra, buried beneath the earth.

He'd prepared two positions. He settled into the buried vehicle, drank a vial of Bee Treasure, and let himself center. He could feel the power present in his body, consolidated and ready.

He was satisfied with where he was physically.

The sustained effort of these past weeks had produced results. Continuous Activity fruit consumption, constant drainage of Great Vajra's Activity through combat and Exchange, steady absorption of ambient Activity in return — his personal Activity Value had broken through 2H, reaching 2.097H.

Crossing 2H had no particular mechanical significance. H units were calibrated against Great Vajra's original Talent ceiling, which had been an approximation from the beginning.

What did have significance was 1.946H. When he'd crossed that threshold two days into the trap construction, something had changed — the kind of change you felt before you could name it. His strength had settled into a new register: sixteen-bull. Speed, agility, endurance, explosive output, all five senses, all upgraded.

And something else.

Small Wolf Spiders — a Grassweight evolved insect that had been interrupting the excavation work daily, requiring him to clear them off by the handful — had simply stopped approaching. Not reduced in frequency. Stopped completely. When he walked toward them, they fled.

He'd thought immediately of the Golden Jiao's horn cores after its death — Blackhead retreating in fear, the Treasure Bees fleeing from the processed snakeskin. Was he generating the same kind of pressure aura? Or was crossing 1.946H in solid-state Activity a qualitative threshold, not just a quantitative one?

He couldn't find a concrete answer in his own Activity signature — nothing felt different from the inside. But the behavioral evidence was clear. And the comparison with…