The Tail Cannon had punched a cavity through the Swiftclaw Leopard’s body. Blood turned the pit water red.

Shen Cong didn’t pause. He worked the remote, retracting the drill assembly from the wound, charging hydraulic pressure for a second shot. But the Swiftclaw Leopard had sunk below the water’s surface — blood spreading across the water, the creature itself invisible.

It won’t die from that immediately.

A Heavyweight beast doesn’t go down this easily. It’s playing dead.

And you think I’m going to fall for that?

He pressed another control on the remote. The water surface in the pit began to tremble. A low mechanical roar came up from underground — getting louder.

The pit wall where the Tail Cannon had fired collapsed inward, and Great Vajra’s rear section burst up through the earth and into the pit space from below. He was using the vehicle to block the pit’s opening. Seal it. Trap the leopard inside.

The Swiftclaw Leopard, exactly as predicted, found it could no longer play dead. It erupted from the water — no visible sign of distress despite the hole still bleeding freely in its side — and launched itself upward.

This is the moment.

Shen Cong was already airborne, moving to intercept. The Ape King War Hammer came down on the Swiftclaw Leopard’s head.

His strength was less than the leopard’s. The rebound force knocked him clear — but it had also stopped the leopard’s upward momentum. The creature’s four limbs churned for purchase and found nothing. It dropped again.

Shen Cong was still in the air when he hit the remote.

BOOM.

The Tail Cannon fired again. The high-speed rotating drill drove into the Swiftclaw Leopard’s shoulder blade at full hydraulic force. The sound of bone shattering was audible. The drill buried itself deep.

“RAAUGH… ugh…”

The Swiftclaw Leopard hung from the drill assembly, pinned. It tried to bring its tail — the Activity core, still unused in the fight — around to strike the mechanism. The position made it impossible. The roars grew less frequent. The struggling reduced.

Went still.

Shen Cong got up off the ground, loaded the hand crossbow, and drove several bone-gold arrows through the Swiftclaw Leopard’s eyes and into the brain.

This time it wasn’t playing dead.

Lv0.807. Activity Value 2.227H. Talent 2.758H.

Talent slightly below the Golden Jiao’s 2.874H, but Activity Value higher than the Golden Jiao’s 1.987H — over 2H. At the Swiftclaw Leopard’s speed, its actual combat output had been comparable to the Golden Jiao’s. But it had encountered a trap, an opponent at sixteen-bull strength, and a body proportionally smaller than some other Heavyweight threats.

It had died without showing what it could do.

Which was consistent with how Shen Cong operated. He never allowed evolved beasts to fight at their potential. Ambush, range, or trap — and if none of those, wait for a critical wound on something else and move then. Direct force-on-force against a Heavyweight in optimal condition wasn’t something he was willing to attempt.

That wasn’t fear. It was accurate self-assessment.

He moved to harvest the body.

The tail was the Activity core — two and a half meters long, only about five centimeters at its thickest. What made it unusual was its composition. Not just the tail bones, but the surrounding muscle and skin, all of them showing the metallic gradation characteristic of Activity-saturated tissue. Semi-metallic, highly flexible, structurally unlike anything he’d worked with before.

He thought of the Golden Jiao’s horn protrusions — the same kind of composite structure, bone and muscle both undergoing metallic transition simultaneously.

Not just skeletal tissue anymore. The muscles themselves are starting the metallic shift.

He did a quick test — light polish, Activity infused, single lash against the ground. The tail left a clean, deep groove in the stone.

Extremely strong.

It also carried a significant pressure aura. The moment he brought it aboard, Blackhead retreated into the ant burrow and stayed there. The Antgod didn’t retreat, but transmitted a sustained restless threat-response signal — the emotional equivalent of bristling.

He wound the tail around his torso, dug a ramp to let Great Vajra drive out of the buried position, and towed the carcass home.

The Mingfa Camp had transformed over the past several weeks.

The three moat systems — Dadon, Sili, and Nanfei — had been widened to nearly a hundred meters. On the camp-facing side of each, stone walls now stood ten meters thick at the base and fifteen meters tall, enclosing the entire settlement. Learning from ancient construction principles because the threat demanded it.

Population had grown substantially, and a consistent supply of Activity meat and Activity fruit had done something to ordinary survivor physiology — not evolved person levels, but enough that individuals who’d arrived unable to shift heavy materials were now doing it with ease. Women were matching what would previously have been average male physical capability.

With that labor force, construction had accelerated dramatically.

The Shushan shelter excavation was nearly complete, connected to the camp by a dedicated tunnel.

That last project had been dramatically accelerated by the Tentacle Monster — specifically, by one researcher’s unconventional idea about how to use it. A device was developed that interfaced directly with the creature’s primary motor nerve bundles through electrical stimulation. Conditioned reflex training through directional current application. The approach was exactly what it sounded like: the same principle as training an ox to plow, applied to an evolved near-Heavyweight beast.

Work hard: food reward. Work reluctantly: electrical stimulus. The Tentacle Monster was now the camp’s most productive tunnel excavator, and it answered to the camp’s designated handler with apparent compliance.

The case study launched a dedicated Research Institute project — a taming lab, now actively capturing Featherweight evolved beasts for similar conditioning. Using evolved beast labor to replace human labor was a genuine productivity threshold if it could be made to work.

Shen Cong had reservations about this program.

Evolved beast intelligence was increasing. Blackhead was an ant capable of meaningful exchange. Higher-tier evolved beasts were certainly no less capable. Simple reflex conditioning applied to creatures whose cognitive capacity was actively growing was a risk assessment problem that seemed to be getting insufficient attention.

He compiled his observations into a document — two known practical applications of Activity radiation frequency: first, synchronizing radiation frequencies with a developing evolved organism to establish perceptual links in the early growth stages; second, accelerating core radiation frequency to generate resonance and produce field-force storms that concentrated ambient Activity.

He labeled the file “X-Files” and copied it to a flash drive.

The Swiftclaw Leopard carcass produced the largest reaction the camp had seen since the Golden Jiao.

A Heavyweight — killed solo.

The Edge of Evolution title had been ceremonial for some people and literal for others. After this, it stopped being a matter of debate.

“Strongest human alive.” It was becoming a reflex phrase among survivors who’d never spoken to him directly.

Shen Cong had no response to any of it. The crowd’s attention might as well have been focused on a different person. Beyond threat-assessment, the external social environment wasn’t something he needed input from.

He claimed enough Swiftclaw Leopard meat to fill his cold storage, and commissioned the camp’s leatherworkers to treat the hide.

Winter was coming. Warm clothing was a practical necessity.

Leopard-skin coat. Leopard-skin bedding. Leopard-skin seat covers.

All quite reasonable.

(End of Chapter 192)