“Rough texture, but excellent with salt.”
Shen Cong gnawed on a boiled Water Tyrant egg and found himself genuinely impressed. An egg was an egg, whether it came from a chicken or a giant water bug. He’d always liked eggs.
Breakfast done.
He stepped outside. The snowpack had dropped by roughly a meter and a half — still two and a half meters remaining. Still impassable.
Twenty meters out, the military jeep had surfaced from the snow level. The area Zhao Zilong’s group had cleared previously was now a wide shallow pool of meltwater. Old Wei had been building a snowman in the upper snowpack and immediately jogged over when he saw Shen Cong emerge.
He stopped before he got close.
His expression shifted — confused, uneasy. He stood at a distance and stared at Shen Cong and the vehicle behind him. “Colonel Chen — something’s different. Being near you and your vehicle feels… wrong. Uncomfortable. Like something is dangerous.”
Shen Cong kept his expression neutral. “What did it feel like before?”
“Just the normal iron person thing. That mutual wanting-to-absorb sensation, you know — I want to eat your vehicle, you want to eat mine.”
Great Vajra’s pressure aura. The solid-state Activity threshold.
Liquid-state Activity produced no pressure aura effect. Solid-state Activity did — and now Great Vajra had crossed into solid-state entirely. The pressure aura had activated. Old Wei wasn’t experiencing the familiar iron person resonance attraction anymore; he was experiencing something fundamentally different. Not the pull of two vehicles generating mutual absorption desire, but the pressure of an Activity Value so far above his own that his instincts were registering it as threat.
Shen Cong didn’t explain this. “We leave tomorrow morning — the snowpack should drop another meter today. Be ready early.”
“Right.” Old Wei nodded, then lingered. “But Colonel Chen — what is this feeling?”
Shen Cong considered not answering. Then reconsidered — these people needed a clear message, enough to discourage any ideas that might otherwise develop. “Because I am much stronger than you. Much, much stronger.”
Old Wei returned to the jeep with questions he couldn’t quite articulate.
“What did he say?” Zhao Zilong asked.
“Leaving tomorrow morning.” Old Wei paused. “But Zilong — I noticed something strange. Something’s changed.”
“What kind of strange?”
“You were at the Radiation Laboratory. You know that iron people have that odd mutual-attraction thing between each other — like the whole zombie-craving-brains situation.”
“Yes. The Laboratory called it the radiation field effect. Iron people’s vehicles generate a specific radiation field, and when another iron person encounters it, they feel drawn toward it — the vehicle wants to absorb the other vehicle’s field to grow its own.”
“Right, I learned about it in training. Before — I had a strong absorption-pull feeling toward Colonel Chen’s vehicle. Today that’s gone completely. When I got close, instead of the pull, I felt…” He searched for the right comparison. “You know how I’m terrified of geese? It was like running into a large goose.”
“Fear? Genuine fear?”
“Yeah.”
Zhao Zilong was quiet for a moment. “That might be a natural biological response. Something analogous to how your skin detects extreme heat or cold — organisms have instinctive responses to danger signals that operate below conscious thought.”
“But I didn’t feel it two days ago.”
“Then there’s only one explanation. Colonel Chen has become significantly stronger since then.” She said it with genuine weight. “Everything is evolving. Super humans use C1. Iron people evolve through their vehicles. All of it advancing. And Colonel Chen — his advancement is apparently moving very fast.”
Old Wei processed this. “That’s why he said he was very strong. Of course — this is a person who took on a hundred-plus super humans by himself. I didn’t see it happen, but just thinking about it gets the blood pumping. When does Old Wei get to have a moment like that?”
Xiao Bei said: “You’ll get there. Jin people and iron people both have the path.”
Dahu added: “I’m just envious of you vehicle people. Before all this happened I was too busy paying off my apartment mortgage to think about buying a car.”
Old Wei slapped both Xiao Bei’s and Dahu’s shoulders. “Don’t lose heart, either of you. When we get to the Command, there will be options.”
While they talked about him, Shen Cong had his own problem.
The tingling sensation had persisted through the entire previous day and showed no sign of stopping now. He managed it the same way he had before — punching the bag until his mind stopped focusing on it. Physical displacement.
But the question of when it would end had no answer.
Evolution is harder than I imagined.
He noticed something new today: he had a mild fever. Since his body had been enhanced beyond baseline human levels, he hadn’t experienced illness once. Now he had a fever. The cause was obvious — the bone metallic transformation process was generating systemic inflammation as a side effect.
He went to bed early, hoping sleep would help.
In the dream, he became a large beetle.
The image came from a story he’d read not long before the apocalypse — Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa wakes to find he has become an enormous insect. He has spent his whole life sustaining his family, but now they look at him with revulsion. His father hurls an apple that lodges in Gregor’s back and rots there alongside him until he dies.
In the dream, Shen Cong was the beetle, and there were apples on his back — not one or two, but many. He tried desperately to shake them off. Impossible. His legs couldn’t reach that far, the same as Gregor’s couldn’t. He could only carry them, helplessly, toward whatever ending came.
The difference was that Gregor was a symbol, without individual character, reduced to pure suffering with human consciousness and nothing else. Shen Cong felt something more complicated — bewildered, carrying a shell he hadn’t chosen, unable to find direction.
The dream shifted. He became a prawn.
The aliens from District 9 — the film where the human protagonist is infected by alien fluid and gradually transforms into one of the creatures, who were called prawns by the humans who despised them. Like that protagonist, Shen Cong felt the transformation happening to him, felt himself becoming something other than human, and began frantically trying to stop it — pulling at his fingernails, trying to hold onto his human form.
Then he noticed his prawn claws felt loose. Like gloves. He could pull them off.
He grabbed hold of one and pulled.
Pulled harder.
Snap.
He ripped the claw free — and jolted upright in bed, fully awake, staring at the ceiling for several seconds before memory returned.
A dream.
He exhaled slowly.
Then he ran his tongue across his teeth.
Something was wrong.
He ran his tongue across the gap where something had been.
His two front teeth were gone.
(End of Chapter 244)