Blueprints in hand. Workshop built.

Shen Cong moved without pause — he went back to Huai'an City and recruited a team of vehicle modification specialists with greenbacks, brought them into the Big Pagoda Mountain base, and set them to work converting and tuning Great Vajra. All ordinary people, every one of them. For greenbacks, they were willing to skip New Year's Eve entirely — not that they had family to spend it with. The Command still skewed heavily male, and ordinary men without evolutionary development had found themselves largely overlooked as the evolved population grew. A lot of them were alone.

Inside the fog zone, they were effectively blind. They posed no threat to Shen Cong. And the Vajra Ant squad was watching anyway.

He could let them work.

Inside the modification workshop, a small totem generator hummed and turned, powering the electric lights that filled the space. Great Vajra lay across the floor with its undercarriage exposed and the connection point between cab and cabin cut open.

Fabrication equipment. Installation equipment. Shaping equipment.

Under the specialists' direction, Shen Cong worked through the chassis restructuring. Adding the gear assemblies needed to switch between the three-core totem engine's power delivery modes was the straightforward part — half a day of installation and calibration, done.

The difficult work was integrating the three-core assembly with Great Vajra's existing drive systems.

The three-core totem engine was positioned at the top of the cab-to-cabin junction, occupying a section of the cabin's interior to accommodate the unit's size. Once installed, Shen Cong removed the diesel engines entirely. Great Vajra was done with combustion fuel. Keeping it supplied had always been a logistical headache, and there was no reason to carry that burden forward.

The diesel engines out meant the fuel delivery systems out. The fuel tanks out. The recovered space was substantial.

The generators, however, stayed. Under the specialists' guidance, Shen Cong expanded both electric motors — larger housings, greater output. In the pre-Apocalypse world, meaningfully upgrading an electric motor's power rating was a serious engineering undertaking. After the Apocalypse, with Activity-reinforced materials and fabrication techniques…