The mutated rat colony was far larger than Shen Cong had initially seen. And as more of the larger two-meter specimens appeared, they stopped hesitating — they started jumping.

Great Vajra’s exterior wasn’t smooth hull plating. The photovoltaic panels were protected by a perimeter bumper system, and those bumpers were exactly the kind of irregular grip surface a climbing creature needed. Within minutes, mutated rats were swarming up the sides. Once aboard, they swung their bone clubs against the hull — hammering and striking at anything they could reach.

In under five minutes, Great Vajra had become a writhing ball of fur. Every exterior surface was covered, except the front, where the dozer blade’s constant motion left no foothold to occupy.

Shen Cong kept his expression neutral and ignored his new passengers entirely. He pressed the accelerator and kept driving.

First priority: distance from the main colony.

These creatures weren’t powerful enough to threaten Great Vajra in any meaningful way. The Activity drain from their attacks was slower than Great Vajra’s ambient absorption rate. He had options once he was clear. No need to waste them here.

The engines roared. Great Vajra thundered down the county road with a hundred uninvited passengers clinging to its exterior.

Past the initial shock, Shen Cong’s mind had already moved to analysis.

“Mutated rats — more transformed than the Great-Fang Rats, and they’re using weapons. Intelligence has clearly developed further. Bipedal posture, tool use, social coordination…” He thought of the games he’d downloaded before the apocalypse — the Warcraft-style RPGs, the ones with rat-men as a playable faction. In those settings, ratmen wore clothing, maintained strict tribal hierarchies, crafted weapons, had their own language.

These creatures were nowhere near that level. But the direction was unmistakable.

“Given time, actual ratmen might genuinely emerge.” He’d already concluded through studying evolved beasts that Activity-driven mutation didn’t only increase physical power — it accelerated neurological development as well. Larger bodies meant larger brain cavities. More brain volume meant more neural capacity. More neural capacity meant more cognition.

Intelligence development wasn’t a joke. It was a trajectory.

Not that this was comfortable to think about. He was human. Humans were the dominant species, the planet’s rulers — or had been. Watching creatures that had been mindless vermin a few months ago begin exhibiting signs of higher cognitive function carried a particular kind of unease that was hard to dismiss.

He thought of Rise of the Planet of the Apes — the film series he’d watched before everything ended. Apes chemically stimulated into sapience, humanity devastated by disease, civilization collapsing, the apes building something new from the ruins.

The parallel wasn’t subtle. In those films, human population had dropped to one in ten. The industrial base had collapsed. The apes had begun developing technology and eventually surpassed humanity entirely.

Here, the apocalyptic storm had done the equivalent. Human population reduced to one in ten. Civilization shattered. And the animals — mutating, month by month, in directions nobody had predicted. The Great-Fang Rats Shen Cong had encountered early on had been aggressive and enlarged but still fundamentally animal. These things were carrying weapons and responding to coordinated signals from a leader.

Ratmen. It might actually happen.

Overthrow human dominance?

The thought flickered through and was gone.

Great Vajra turned off the county road and onto the Chuma Expressway. Speed climbed immediately — seventy kilometers per hour, the dozer blade handling any obstacles in the path.

Ten minutes. He judged the distance from the colony sufficient.

He hit the brakes hard.

Into the vehicle, Half-Activated Armor on, back to the cab. He reached the central console and pressed a touchscreen control.

Immediately, the outer bumper system ignited.

Arcs of electricity leaped across the hull in every direction.

High voltage. One of Great Vajra’s built-in weapons — the High-Voltage Perimeter Grid.

A ten-second discharge consumed one-tenth of the vehicle’s stored charge. Designed specifically for massed small evolved beasts. Forty thousand volts of direct current — ultra-high voltage — with a current of fifty milliamps, slightly on the modest side, but sufficient to kill small-bodied evolved creatures outright, or paralyze those it couldn’t kill.

CRACK.

Current ran through mutated rat after mutated rat. Their fur stood on end. They convulsed. They fell.

One full discharge cycle. Upward of a hundred mutated rats, virtually all of them paralyzed or unconscious, dropping from the hull. Some had fur visibly smoking.

Great Vajra was clear.

Shen Cong threw the door open.

Tyrant Broadsword in hand, he dropped to the ground and started working through them.

“So you want to evolve into ratmen?”

He moved along the rows, taking heads. A handful that hadn’t been fully stunned tried to rush him. They were far too slow. Every one that came forward died where it stood. None escaped.

He finished quickly, harvested the Activity cores, kept one intact carcass for later study, and left the rest.

He wasn’t lingering. A colony that size could send reinforcements, and engaging a mass of low-power creatures wasn’t worth the resources it would cost to repel them. The ratio of gain to expenditure was wrong. No reason to stay.

The Wings of Light extended. Great Vajra soaked up the afternoon sun as it ran south along the expressway, moving through the landscape like a great bird built from steel.

By evening, it had reached the foot of Laoshan Forest Farm in Pukou District. A good campsite for the night, with a clear view for reconnaissance.

The DJI drone went up.

Pukou District appeared in the feed: blast craters, rubble, silence. The same pattern as everywhere else.

“No signs of survivors in Pukou District.” He couldn’t entirely suppress the disappointment.

Something else became apparent as he settled in at Laoshan. The ambient Activity concentration in the area was thin. This was barren zone territory. Chuzhou, further back, had also been barren zone — but its ambient Activity had been slightly denser than here at Laoshan.

“Which means no Oasis near Nanjing. The gradient is pointing north. If the map distances hold, the Oasis is probably around Hongze Lake after all.”

He drew circles on the paper map — one centered on Huoshan Oasis, measuring the distance to Hefei and Chaohu Lake. Then one centered on Hongze Lake, measuring the distance to Chuzhou and Nanjing.

The distances matched. Hongze Lake to Chuzhou was approximately the same as Huoshan to Hefei.

“Either the Hongze Lake Oasis is somewhat smaller than Huoshan, or the Oasis is actually further north — maybe around Suqian. In that case, Chuzhou and Nanjing could both be sitting in the Hongze Oasis’s barren zone, assuming it’s at least comparable in size to Huoshan.” He folded the map. “But then — what was the nuclear detonation in the direction of Nanjing about?”

“Can barren zones produce evolved beasts more dangerous than Oasis-zone creatures? Or was it what the New Hefei Research Institute suggested — powerful evolved beasts traveling inland from the sea via the Yangtze?”

He put the map away.

“Tomorrow: move into Pukou District, survey what happened in Nanjing, try to locate the nuclear detonation site from the air. My body might be able to handle radiation — might not. Blundering into a blast zone would be a problem. Radiation suit on at all times.”

(End of Chapter 217)