"I don't carry passengers."

It sounded like a bad joke, but Shen Cong meant it completely. Great Vajra's volume could carry hundreds of tons of cargo. There was space inside for gardens, ant colonies, beehives. Just not people.

The cab door had been sprayed in red paint, deliberately: MAXIMUM OCCUPANCY: 1.

He didn't feel like explaining why. His vehicle, his rules, no negotiation.

Zhao Zilong asked anyway. "Why?"

He answered something entirely different. "The jin-crystals on the bodies are yours. Consider it part of the transaction."

Jin-crystals were a strange product of the post-apocalyptic landscape — glass-like crystalline formations harvested from nuclear detonation sites, brought out by death-eaters who had risked radiation exposure at ground zero. The precise mechanism was unclear, but the result was a subtle one: worn on the body, jin-crystals mildly suppressed Activity dissipation. For individuals dependent on C1 Mutagen, whose Activity was in constant danger of draining away, this was enormously valuable.

So they functioned as currency.

He'd collected roughly thirty from the rat-catching unit he'd killed earlier. Useless to him.

Before the death-eaters had closed in and forced his hand, he'd actually been considering trading the crystals. Death-eaters were morally indefensible, but they hadn't been his direct problem, and he wasn't in the business of playing hero. He'd even started to think killing the rat-catching unit had been an error.

Then the whistle had blown. And here they were.

Since the death-eaters had chosen to make themselves his problem, trading was off the table. Direct action was the appropriate response.

The death-eater stronghold in Yizheng was still a different matter. The Beech weapons, the thousand-plus ordinary people, several hundred death-eaters — he couldn't take that on yet. He needed to be stronger first. With his Talent ceiling, each evolutionary stage produced gains that dwarfed what ordinary jin people or iron people could achieve. The time would come.

Until then: accumulate. Prepare. Return.

He intended to recover everything lost from the death-eaters personally — and eliminate the Black Blood Group, Lost Paradise, and New Hope Laboratory, all three organizations that had participated in the ambush. The…