The Old Pearl Mussel had provided Shen Cong with his first real data on the Lv1 era: Activity core metallic transformation completing, then propagating into surrounding body tissue.

That said, it was ultimately the evolutionary pathway of evolved beasts and mutants. Its relevance to iron people was limited. No great loss in killing it — and he couldn’t keep it alive aboard the vehicle regardless. It wasn’t a pet. The only way it was getting on Great Vajra was as a carcass.

Two hours later, the Old Pearl Mussel had become a cargo rack hanging off the rear of the vehicle, packed full of the lower-grade Activity cores Shen Cong had accumulated during the excavation.

As for the flesh-gold — the portions with lighter metallic invasion, which were still slowly leaking Activity — those went to the Antgod as food. The portions with deeper metallic transformation went to a different purpose: shielding the meteorite fragment.

The fragment’s Activity radiation was far too penetrating. Left unshielded, it would alter the local environment and advertise his position. Bone-gold and flesh-gold, he’d confirmed, could actually block Activity radiation — unlike lead, which handled conventional radiation but let Activity radiation through.

So he wrapped the fragment in flesh-gold, sealed it inside a basketball-sized pearl mussel shell, and placed it in the lead bucket. The lead bucket went inside a fish-tank-sized mussel shell. That shell went inside a bathtub-sized mussel shell. The whole assembly was wedged into the corner of the laboratory.

No radiation leaking out. Not a trace.

For now, he had no idea how to use the fragment beyond keeping it safe. Keeping it safe was enough.

He spread the paper map across the table and studied his options.

He’d already retraced his route back to the Shanghai-Chengdu Expressway from Fuxing Township. Quanjiao County was still a dozen or so kilometers ahead. From there, the question was direction: south toward Nanjing’s Pukou District, or north toward Chuzhou’s Langya District.

It didn’t take long to decide. He’d check Langya first, then head to Nanjing.

Chuzhou was shaped something like an egg — Langya District the yolk, Nanqiao District the white. The city government sat in Nanqiao; the developed heart of the city was Langya. Not that any of that mattered much now. Both were rubble with faint crater scars.

Quanjiao County showed no signs of human presence. He drove straight through to Langya District. The DJI drone went up, and what it showed was a city blanketed in blast craters — large and small, dense and overlapping. Whatever had happened here, it had been sustained and intense. Standing on the ground, you could feel the scale of the violence just by looking at the landscape.

Beyond the craters, everything had been swallowed by ruins. Hard to tell whether the fighting had been humans against each other or humans against evolved beasts.

He leaned toward evolved beasts. But he didn’t rule out the alternative. Human beings had a talent for scheming against one another that operated everywhere and always — he had personal experience with that — and schemes directed at others were as universal as schemes directed at him.

“Nothing here. Eleven-thirty. Head south and check Nanjing’s Pukou District.”

He’d barely finished turning the vehicle around when the radar alarm sounded.

The display showed a cluster of signals appearing behind Great Vajra. He switched to the rear camera and zoomed in.

From the rubble, they were emerging one by one — creatures that looked like rats, or looked like people, or looked uncomfortably like both. Each one was carrying something: a bone club, improvised from evolved beast remains.

“What are these? Evolved beasts? Something else?”

He accelerated toward the expressway — open ground, room to maneuver in any direction. But even as he drove, more of the rat-like creatures were climbing out from rubble ahead of him.

Close enough now to see them clearly.

They were mutated rats, each standing about a meter tall — but completely unlike the Great-Fang Rats he’d encountered before. These ones had developed disproportionately powerful hind legs, capable of fully bipedal movement. Their massive tails acted as counterweights for balance. Their upper bodies were held upright, necks curved forward, heads parallel to the ground.

From a distance, they looked like hunched-over people.

What startled him most was their forelimbs. They weren’t just capable of gripping — they were actively using the bones as weapons. All manner of evolved beast bone fragments had been gathered, wielded, brandished. The bipedal creatures shrieked at Great Vajra as it approached.

Compared to the Deathclaws, which had achieved a crude two-legged stance, these things were considerably closer to human posture.

More kept coming. The road ahead was filling with them.

“Get out of the way.”

He was startled by their weapon use, but a meter-tall evolved beast wasn’t going to hurt Great Vajra. He pressed the controls — dozer blade down, Flying Wing Knives deployed — and maintained a steady forty kilometers per hour toward the expressway.

The blade and the knives had some deterrent effect. Many of the creatures scattered sideways. But a significant number held their ground, shrieking.

Thud.

The dozer blade, backed by Great Vajra’s full mass, converted several of them into smears without slowing down.

The ones along the vehicle’s flanks were harder to reach — they were only a meter tall, and the first pair of Flying Wing Knives mounted at two meters cleared over their heads entirely, even angled down to one and a half meters’ reach. The outer pairs were more effective: the second pair angled down to about one meter, the third and longest pair reached fifty centimeters off the ground. They swept through the flanking creatures efficiently.

First pass: at least twenty down.

Second wave coming in immediately.

Crunch. Crunch.

Impacts and cuts, the sounds layering together. The creatures’ shrieking running underneath all of it.

Then, from a rubble pile ahead and to the right, a larger one appeared.

Two meters tall. Carrying a massive piece of evolved beast bone shaped roughly like an axe. It shrieked louder than the rest — and every creature in range responded instantly, hurling their bone clubs at Great Vajra in a simultaneous volley.

Bone rained against the hull. Harmless.

“Higher cognitive function than I expected.”

Shen Cong engaged the autopilot, picked up his modified heavy crossbow, and opened the side firing port.

A 0.5H bone-gold bolt went in. The tip extended outside the port.

As Great Vajra passed the rubble pile where the leader stood, he fired.

Snap.

The bolt crossed the distance and hit the two-meter rat squarely in the chest, dropping it.

“Leader dealt with.” He raised an eyebrow.

He didn’t get to appreciate it for long. Ahead, both sides of the road were filling with more of them — bigger specimens among the new arrivals, carrying larger bone weapons, arranged in what was unmistakably an attack formation. Several looked ready to jump for the vehicle.

He swore under his breath.

“What in the world are these things?”

(End of Chapter 216)