He’d read a news story once, years before the apocalypse.
Australia had originally had no cattle or sheep — those came with the convicts and colonists, who brought livestock and let them multiply across the grasslands. As cattle and sheep populations grew, so did their dung. The problem was that Australia’s native dung beetles had evolved alongside marsupials and had no interest in imported bovine waste — they were specialists for kangaroo dung. The result was enormous quantities of cattle manure accumulating and destroying vast stretches of pasture.
The Australian government’s solution: import dung beetles from around the world. It worked.
But then the pastures were sprayed with pesticides. The cattle ate the treated grass, produced pesticide-contaminated dung, the dung beetles ate the contaminated dung, and began experiencing paralysis, reproductive failure, and population collapse. Facing extinction.
A genuine illustration of a genuine principle: there was poison in the excrement.
Unable to eat dung safely, facing extinction — and then the meteor shower came.
The dung beetles in front of him were not that story anymore. They were enormous, they had switched from dung to carcasses, and whatever metallic material they packed into their balls was corrosive enough to drive off a Heavyweight lizard.
Shen Cong was reasonably certain his Half-Activated Armor couldn’t survive a sustained barrage of those metallic fragments either.
“But the four-legged snake has been persistent enough to recruit help using food as a trade offer. There must be something worth having in that banyan grove.”
He thought it through.
Should I help?
If I don’t — how does the four-legged snake respond? Attacks me? Tries to take the food back?
If I do — what’s the actual danger level? How do we split whatever’s in there after the beetles are gone?
And what method do I even use?
He worked through the questions and found himself leaning toward helping. Not for any strategic reason particularly — because this was the first cross-species trade negotiation he’d ever witnessed, possibly the first one in the post-apocalyptic world. A Heavyweight evolved beast with enough intelligence to seek help from a human through a food offering was worth something. He didn’t enjoy dealing with people; people were full of schemes and calculations. But the possibility of a working relationship with a Heavyweight evolved beast — that was a genuinely interesting idea.
“I’ll try.”
The four-legged snake obviously couldn’t parse the words, so he pointed at himself and then at the beetles in the distance.
The snake understood that. It made several low gurgling sounds in response.
Shen Cong reached to the back of his Half-Activated Armor and pulled out a rolled bundle of rubber sheeting. He shook it out and pulled it on over the armor — a shapeless, crinkled garment, functional rather than elegant. He’d stitched it specifically as a corrosion-resistant outer layer.
The design principle came from his Pepper Water experiments. Pepper Water was devastating against Activity-bearing materials — and completely inert against wood, plants, and non-Activity objects. The same pattern should apply to the beetles’ metallic fragments: corrosion that targeted Activity-bearing surfaces shouldn’t affect rubber, which had no Activity to react with.
This outer layer had already survived exposure to Pepper Water, boiling-radiation gun fluid, centipede bombs, Super-2 Ant Acid, and Activity-Killer Venom. He was reasonably confident it would hold against the beetles’ spray as well.
“First pass to confirm. Adjust the plan if that’s wrong.”
He began running. A full circuit of the lake’s edge, building speed gradually. The four-legged snake’s head tracked him with its eyes, clearly puzzled — this creature it had brought here to help was running laps instead of fighting.
The puzzlement didn’t last long.
Shen Cong had his speed. He turned and drove straight into the beetle formation.
The beetles responded without hesitation — legs flew, carcass-ball material erupted outward, metallic fragments filling the air.
Crack. Crack.
They hit the rubber outer layer. He was already pulling back, putting distance between himself and the spray.
And the rubber held. No corrosive reaction. No penetration.
The outer layer worked.
The rest of the problem was now simple.
“Four-legged snake — you owe me a drink,” Shen Cong called, and drove back into the beetle mass.
With the rubber layer absorbing the fragment spray, the beetles’ primary defense was neutralized. The Tyrant Broadsword found the first target — one beetle the size of a large water barrel, head separated from body cleanly, dead on impact.
Roughly two hundred beetles in the banyan grove.
Shen Cong worked through them steadily, moving into contact range, cutting, pulling back, cutting again. If the beetles had stayed as ecological cleaners eating dung, he genuinely wouldn’t have cared about them. Switched to meat — eating carcasses, colonizing territory, disrupting the local ecosystem’s scavenger function — the calculus was different.
Watching from a safe distance, the four-legged snake became increasingly excited as the body count rose. It bounced in place, clearly wanting to participate, clearly still afraid of the fragment spray.
Two beetles per minute.
After thirty minutes, sixty-plus beetles were down. The remaining hundred-odd seemed to collectively assess that the engagement had turned against them. Together, they began rolling their carcass-balls out of the banyan grove.
He let them go.
Thirty minutes of sustained combat was a real expenditure of energy and reserves. And he kept a portion of his focus on the four-legged snake. It was a powerful animal. Once the problem it had enlisted help for was resolved, the most natural animal response was to treat the helper as simply another creature in its territory — and act accordingly.
Animals didn’t scheme the way people did. But they also didn’t maintain social obligations out of a sense of honor. For a carnivore, the relevant question after a danger passed was whether the creature that had helped was now a threat or food.
The four-legged snake came toward him after the last beetles retreated.
And didn’t attack. Made low, rolling sounds from its throat — the same quality as before, when it had been happy. Possibly gratitude. Possibly just appetite for what was about to come next.
It used its tail to sweep the remaining carcass-balls clear of the grove entrance, then twisted its body and pushed into the banyan root network. At the entrance, it stopped and looked back — another clear indication that Shen Cong should follow.
He pried a small amount of the metallic fragment material from one of the carcass-balls first. Then he went in.
Inside, the four-legged snake was digging. It moved fast, claws cutting into the earth, and within moments had unearthed a large sphere. Pure black, completely distinct from the black-and-yellow carcass-balls the beetles had been rolling outside.
The black sphere’s surface material was something he couldn’t immediately identify. The snake split it open efficiently with one claw — two halves revealing a smaller, inner sphere.
This inner sphere was milky white. Slightly translucent.
The snake split that open too. Inside: a hollow approximately the size of a large soup bowl, filled with thick white liquid. The consistency was something between cream and gel. The scent that reached Shen Cong was light and unexpectedly pleasant — osmanthus flowers.
He looked at it carefully. Based on dung beetle biology, objects buried underground in their dung-balls were typically their eggs — the larvae would hatch inside, feed on the surrounding material, and pupate within it. But this milky-white sphere didn’t read like a beetle egg to him.
He’d eaten enough evolved creature eggs at this point to have developed some sense for them.
The four-legged snake extended its tongue, touched the thick white liquid, and made a sound of enthusiastic satisfaction.
Then it pushed half of the sphere toward Shen Cong — a clear indication — and began lapping at the liquid in its own half with evident pleasure.
(End of Chapter 249)