“After the world fell,”

“everyone was broken in some way.”

“It’s hard to tell anymore who’s the one who’s lost it—”

Shen Cong stood in the moonlight on the Nanjing Ring Expressway, head bowed, reciting to himself in a low voice. The roadway ahead had been excavated into something that could barely be called a road at all.

“—me, or everyone else.”

A light wind. The temperature had dropped to a few degrees above zero. With the Half-Activated Armor over the Swiftclaw Leopard and Golden Jiao hide underlayers, he wasn’t cold.

“I keep running from pursuit — the living and the dead both chasing me.”

“Hunted by the scavengers still breathing.”

“Haunted by the ones who died because I wasn’t enough.”

“So I live on the wasteland.”

“Only one instinct left.”

“Survive.”

He finished the monologue, turned sharply, got back in the vehicle, and drove toward Heliuqu — there was another northern road, the Shansheng Line, worth trying.

Half an hour later, the Shansheng Line showed the same thing: the road had been cut.

The yellow sand that had blanketed everything after the apocalyptic storm had washed away considerably since then. What remained underneath was broken rock and rubble — nearly undrivable even for Great Vajra. Not impossible, but slow. He’d have to doze a path meter by meter, the same way he’d carved his way from Wuwei to Juchao District at the very beginning. Days of travel time spent mostly on road-clearing.

“Set up camp in Heliuqu tonight. Figure out the path forward tomorrow. And hopefully the death-eaters decide I’m not worth the trouble.” He paused. “I’m in a bad mood.”

He found a reasonably open area in Heliuqu and stopped.

The night’s work began.

He wanted to examine the captured sharkskin and core weapons from the rat-catchers, think through some new equipment ideas, and work through a question that had been sitting at the back of his mind: how exactly did death-eater evolution work?

It seemed to fall somewhere between jin people and iron people.

Jin people evolved through forming and developing a jin core. Iron people evolved through their bond with a vehicle. Death-eaters had neither — no jin core, no vehicle — only injected C1 Mutagen. Externally they looked similar to ordinary people or iron people, with minor differences: fingernails and teeth showed subtle metallic transformation, but without a core to regulate the process.

Artificially induced metallic transformation.

When C1 injections stopped, the whole system reversed rapidly. Tissue began failing across the board. The metallic transformation in bone structure dissolved, Activity drained away in days. A severe dependency that offered no exit.

The drug could not be stopped.

“Not enough data to properly assess the death-eaters’ situation. But — if a stable C1 could be developed that didn’t require extracting materials from living people, it might genuinely change the picture. Let the people of the old era find a path into new-era evolution alongside everyone else.”

He set that thought aside. Not enough information.

Then he picked up the stilts.

He took them outside and tried walking on them. Awkward — they weren’t his legs. But once he got the balance, the stride opened up considerably. The increased sightlines alone made them worthwhile.

“Practice these seriously. Start at one meter, move to two, aim for three eventually. But — actually, stilts aren’t the only direction. What about springs?”

The stilts had triggered something.

Human bodies were fundamentally mediocre compared to specialized animals. Slower than reverse-jointed runners. Less armored than shellfish. No wings, no gills, weaker bite than crocodiles, slower reproduction than cockroaches. Inferior nose to dogs, inferior hearing to bats, inferior vision to eagles, inferior color perception to pigeons.

But the brain was unmatched. Intelligence compensated for everything, through tools.

Stilts gave you a giraffe’s sightline. Wingsuits gave you flight. Vaulting poles gave you leaps. Roller skates gave you speed. Bamboo rafts gave you rivers.

And springs — springs could give him something else entirely.

He thought through the mechanics. Two basic types relevant here: coil springs, compressing and releasing vertically, used in performance shoe soles to add bounce. These had to be small and distributed evenly — limited total force as a result.

The other type: leaf springs. A curved plate that bent and rebounded. Similar in principle to blade prosthetics — the carbon fiber running blades that amputee sprinters used, which stored kinetic energy in the bend and released it in the push-off.

Extending something like that from the Half-Activated Armor’s feet was straightforward. No complex engineering required.

Ten minutes. The extensions were done.

Overall shape: curved, sickle-like arcs, similar to blade prosthetics but wider and thicker. Had to be — his leg force was far beyond any ordinary person’s, and thinner metal, even Activity-reinforced alloy, wouldn’t survive the impact loading.

He walked on them. Stable.

He jumped. No particular increase — the metal was too thick to deform meaningfully from a standing position. But when he started running, the full force of his stride drove the blades into compression, and they rebounded.

CRACK.

CRACK.

CRACK.

He accelerated. Faster. The ruins blurred past him and the wind hit like breaking waves. He’d been doing fifty meters per second before — one stride covering twenty meters. Now the same stride, with the blades adding their stored energy back, covered forty.

He couldn’t calculate precisely, but the subjective sensation was clear.

The Swiftclaw Leopard had done a hundred and twenty meters per second. He felt like he was approaching a hundred.

A hundred meters a second.

A speed no human being in the history of running had ever imagined reaching.

THUD.

He reversed direction and came back. His chest was heaving. The cold moonlight fell across silver armor and made it shine.

“Under heaven, no force is unbreakable — only speed cannot be overcome.”

The silver moon hung high.

Roughly six kilometers away, on the Yangtze channel near Baguazhou, something moved beneath the still surface.

An ugly creature — shaped like a giant salamander — broke the water, hauled itself onto the bank, shook off the river, and vanished into the darkness, its tail sweeping like a shadow.

Then the surface seemed to boil.

One. Two. More. Steadily more. Ugly salamander-shaped creatures climbing out of the Yangtze and disappearing into the night.

(End of Chapter 227)