Shen Cong was born on April 21, 2000, in Wuwei, Anhui Province. His parents had spent half their lives grinding away, eventually buying six big rigs and building a small trucking company. When business started going south, they cashed in on the real estate boom — sold five of the trucks and bought seven apartments.

Spring Festival of 2015 had barely ended when a car accident took both his parents’ lives. Shen Cong witnessed it happen with his own eyes, and something inside him broke that day.

The humor was gone. The optimism was gone. He stopped making friends, stopped going out, stopped going to school. He became paranoid — convinced that people were out to get him.

The kid his teachers had once called “university material,” the kid who could fix a car engine at seven years old, became a textbook case of persecution complex. He scraped by on what his parents had left him: one beat-up freight truck, rental income from the seven apartments, and eight hundred thousand yuan in accident compensation. He became a shut-in.

That lasted until one day in 2016, when a random forum post changed the course of his life.

“Humanity has been strip-mining nature for decades. Doomsday is coming — the wild weather swings of the past two years are proof enough!”

The author was clearly an environmentalist, possibly a self-taught expert of sorts. The post went deep — climate anomalies, magnetic pole shifts, glacial melt, rising earthquake frequency — all laid out with data and dubious logic, building toward one conclusion: stop destroying the environment, or the world ends.

“My prediction: 2022 is the deadline. Humanity, if you don’t stop, you’ll regret it when it’s too late!”

Posts like this might reel in newbies fresh off their first Wi-Fi connection, but any seasoned netizen would laugh it off as nonsense.

And sure enough, the comment section was full of veterans cheerfully planning their apocalypse survival kits — what to bring, where to go, which supplies were most critical. A lively discussion.

But Shen Cong, trapped deep in his own world of “everyone is out to get me,” believed every word — maybe because he needed something to hold on to. He decided then and there to prepare for the end of the world, to be one of the survivors when it came.

He found an outdoor survival forum online and started soaking up everything he could about living off the land, outside the reach of civilization.

A month later, he’d climbed to senior member status and had a full doomsday plan mapped out in his head. He spent a week hammering it all into a ninety-thousand-word document.

Looking at everything he’d put together, Shen Cong felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time — a faint, quiet excitement stirring in his chest. Maybe when his parents died, his life had lost all direction, and he’d replaced it with this unlikely obsession: surviving the apocalypse.

If the end comes —

Then let it come. Let it destroy this gray world. Strip away all the pain. And in whatever comes after, maybe I can find myself again.

And so.

Shen Cong — persecution complex and all, at the peak of his edgy teenage years — made the most on-brand decision of his life: he was going to convert his truck into a doomsday battle rig and drive it through the end of the world.

He dusted off his old talent for mechanics.

From 2016 to 2022 — six years — he built it piece by piece.

The project gave him a reason to get out of bed. Prepping for the apocalypse meant every single day felt urgent, purposeful. Nobody knew what doomsday would actually look like, but getting stronger was the baseline.

Push-ups. Sit-ups. Horse stance. Running. Swimming. Pull-ups and dips. Nunchucks. Kickboxing.

He even tracked down an underground dealer online and, through several layers of middlemen, got his hands on three high-powered air rifles and two Type 64 pistol replicas. On top of that, he personally scouted police stations and armed police posts in the nearby county towns and townships — mapped out the routes, memorized the layouts — ready to raid them for real firearms when the time came.

If he’d ever gotten caught, he’d have gone straight to prison. But Shen Cong wasn’t some dangerous criminal. He bought the guns, stashed them, and never touched them. When he wanted to practice shooting, he drove to a legitimate shooting range in the provincial capital.

Most of his time was spent at an abandoned warehouse his parents had rented back when the trucking company was still running. That was his base — where he worked on the truck, trained his body, and practiced archery, crossbow, and slingshot. His bow and crossbow skills were on par with professionals. His slingshot was in another league: within twenty meters, he could hit whatever he aimed at. A soybean. A coin. Didn’t matter.

In a post-apocalyptic world, bows and slings were premium weapons — ammo you could make anywhere.

The sky was clear.

In 2022, after years of aggressive pollution control, China’s skies had gone blue again. Nothing like the hellscape the forum post had predicted six years ago. Shen Cong’s faith in doomsday had wavered more than once — but he’d come too far to quit now. He kept working on the truck.

Bzzt — bzzt — bzzt.

The welding torch melted steel into steel. Shen Cong stood on top of the truck cab, mounting a compact radar unit onto a retractable platform. The radar was an AN/PPS-15A battlefield surveillance radar — military grade. He’d paid nearly four hundred thousand yuan for it through a contact at a radio enthusiast club in the provincial capital, sourced as a decommissioned unit.

Guys with the right connections could pull obsolete equipment from the military and flip it for a premium.

Getting the radar to actually work had taken serious study. Fortunately, Shen Cong was sharp, and he had years of mechanical experience to lean on. After nearly a year of tinkering, today was the day he finally got it running.

Because the unit was irreplaceable, he’d engineered a custom lift mechanism for it: raise it when in use, lower it into the cargo box when not.

Half an hour later, it was installed.

Shen Cong looked over the 15A with satisfaction, then decided to grab sandpaper and a file to smooth down the weld joints before hitting everything with a coat of camo paint. Then it’d be perfect.

Thud!

He dropped straight off the top of the cab — nearly four meters up — landed clean, and pulled out his remote from his belt. He aimed it at the truck, which was encased head to toe in steel-spiked armor plating.

Clunk. Clunk. The armor panels over the front cab swung open. Shen Cong vaulted up in one motion.

The base vehicle was a Volvo FH heavy-haul truck — 16.1-liter engine, 750 horsepower at stock, twelve forward gears, four reverse, top speed 120 km/h. That was before. After Shen Cong was done with it, none of those original specs meant much anymore. He’d bolted two additional six-cylinder engines onto the rear axle of the cab.

The cargo container behind — nine meters long — had been raised and widened. It now stood 3.9 meters tall and 3.5 meters wide, completely encased in welded steel plate studded with outward-facing spikes. He’d had to compromise on thickness — load limits meant he could only go 16mm — but one full wrap of that plating brought the total weight to thirty tons, just within the range where top speed wasn’t significantly affected.

Up front, he’d bolted a dozer blade salvaged from a bulldozer. Four meters wide. It could sweep almost anything out of the way.

The external armor was honestly the easy part. What had actually eaten six years of his life was the interior.

At this point, aside from the name on the door, virtually every component of that Volvo had been replaced by Shen Cong.

He’d originally considered bulletproof glass for the windshield, but scrapped that idea and went with full steel plate instead. Visibility was handled through cameras and a periscope system. As a result, the cab had been completely rebuilt into something closer to a command center — automated driving capability, eight screens of varying sizes mounted throughout, each tied to a different system on the vehicle.

Shen Cong worked the control panel with practiced ease, tapped a sequence on one screen, entered a string of code. A radar initialization bar appeared, ticked upward. About a minute later, the scan completed. The rooftop radar came online. A sweep display appeared on screen.

Battlefield surveillance radar — capable of tracking moving vehicles and personnel within a one-kilometer radius.

He’d always had the same fantasy for this thing: get into an ambush situation during the apocalypse, spot the enemy early, get out clean. The truck also had infrared thermal imagers front and rear, which worked alongside the radar to give a sharper picture of the surrounding environment.

VROOM. VROOM.

He fired up the ignition. All three engines roared to life at once. Shen Cong drove the rig around the warehouse yard in a wide circle, feeling the raw, almost violent power of the machine rolling through his hands. If the truck weren’t so completely insane-looking, he would’ve taken it out on an actual road. For now, laps around the yard would have to do.

The warehouse compound was massive and sat well out of the way — surrounded by walls four or five meters high that blocked any view from outside. The surrounding land was all farmland, no buildings tall enough to see over. The only people who ever noticed anything were local farmers heading to their fields, who’d sometimes hear the thunder of engines from behind the walls.

Step inside those walls, and you’d find the sprawling abandoned yard lined with heaps of scrap — rusted steel parts, old machinery, a stack of blown-out tires piled high enough to look like a fortress wall in one corner. All junk, but sorted neatly.

A small forklift sat in another corner — used to move it all around.

Past the scrap heap stood the warehouse itself, a corrugated steel structure showing its age, patched over in many places with whatever steel panels had been available. It looked like something that had been wrapped in scrap metal and left to sit.

For six years, Shen Cong had abandoned any comfortable life the city had to offer and lived out here alone.

When he’d had his fill of driving, he parked the rig dead center in the yard and popped open the front cab armor. He dropped to the ground and stood back, taking it in.

In the afternoon sunlight, the machine gleamed — silver-white, bristling with weld seams, brutal and domineering. Looking at it, Shen Cong felt something settle in his chest for the first time in years.

Safety. Actual safety.

He did one last walkthrough of the supplies stored in the cargo box — he kept everything loaded and ready at all times, partly against the unknown timing of doomsday, partly to test how the rig handled under full load. Everything checked out.

“All supplies accounted for.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a can of spray paint.

On the armor plating of the heavy truck, he painted the name he’d chosen for her:

Vajra.

She can’t transform, but she’s just as fierce — tougher than Optimus Prime’s rig ever was.

“Vajra — when doomsday comes, you and I will face it together.”

Right on cue, the sky rumbled.

Shen Cong looked up. The clear blue sky had changed without him noticing. A meteor shower was falling — streak after streak, bright tails blazing even in full daylight. Then one of them tilted, its trail bending — heading straight for the warehouse.