Vajra rolled through the yellow sand, and Shen Cong started feeling it about five minutes into the drive — a heat building from somewhere in his gut, spreading outward. Not the temperature. The cab thermometer read a steady 26°C. This was something internal, something reacting with the Activity Vajra was feeding back into him, amplifying it, pushing through his body like a slow burn.
It came fast and faded just as fast. Five minutes, maybe less.
When it cleared, he felt stronger. Noticeably.
The Burrower meat.
Obviously. What else could it be.
This was a significant discovery. Burrower meat didn’t just fill his stomach — it actively fed the Activity, strengthened the bond, made him physically more capable. That made it genuinely valuable. For the rest of the drive, Shen Cong found himself half-hoping another Burrower would come looking for trouble.
None did. The road to Wuwei’s ruins was quiet.
He knew he’d arrived because of the tower — or what was left of it. The county government had put it up a couple of years back, billed as the tallest structure in Anhui Province. The so-called Anhui First Tower was now lying on its side in the sand, its fractured frame sticking out at odd angles, quietly testifying to what had happened here.
Not far from it, the broken shells of a few multi-story buildings marked the edges of what had once been a reasonably busy county town.
Vajra slowed to a crawl through the rubble. The battlefield radar kept sweeping. And then — blips on the display. A few of them, moving fast. Closing in.
Whatever they were, they were quicker than Vajra. Running wasn’t an option.
Fine. Don’t run.
Shen Cong had Vajra. He wasn’t particularly worried. If anything, he was hoping for more Burrowers. He hit a sequence of controls, and eight retractable support legs extended from the sides of the chassis and drove themselves into the sand and gravel, locking the vehicle in place. Anything trying to rock the hull from underneath was going to have a much harder time now.
About fifteen seconds later, the things arrived.
Not Burrowers.
Wolves.
Or something that used to be dogs — built larger than a Tibetan Mastiff, snarling and prowling around the hull. Whatever had happened to them had stripped away anything domesticated and left something rawer underneath. And the teeth — enormous, curving fangs that would’ve looked excessive on a saber-toothed cat, carrying the same dull silver sheen as the Burrower’s mandibles.
With teeth like that, I’ll call you Fangwolves.
He watched them circle through the camera feeds and filed the name away.
The meteor shower had apparently been generous. Not just him — these animals had gotten something out of it too.
Not that it mattered much. However dangerous they looked, Shen Cong was already thinking about what they tasted like.
The hunt was simple.
He cracked open the rear viewport on the cargo container. When the first Fangwolf charged the opening and lunged for it, Shen Cong had the hand crossbow up and aimed at its open mouth.
Thwack.
Point-blank range. The bolt went straight through the skull. The wolf dropped without a twitch.
The others didn’t even react. Whatever the meteor had given them in size and aggression, it hadn’t done much for their threat assessment.
Thwack.
Second one down. Clean headshot.
Thwack.
Third bolt went wide — caught the throat instead of the head. That one took a while to stop moving.
After the fourth dropped, the remaining three finally registered that something was wrong and pulled back from the opening. What they didn’t understand was the concept of range.
Thwack.
The bolt caught the nearest one through the eye. It was dead before it finished falling.
Thwack.
Same result on the next. Eye socket, straight through.
The last one had enough instinct left to start backing away. But it hesitated — turned back toward the truck and snarled, like it couldn’t quite commit to retreating.
Thwack.
Left eye. Into the brain.
Seven Fangwolves. Zero injuries on his end. He hadn’t broken a sweat.
He wasn’t about to stroll around on open sand to collect the bodies — not after the Burrower incident. Instead he lowered the dozer blade and used it to scoop up all seven carcasses, then kept moving through the ruins.
Deeper into town, the rubble got denser. The thick layer of sand and gravel thinned out in places, replaced by actual concrete road surface. One building had half-collapsed but still had half standing — the kind of structure that might hold. Crucially, the hard ground meant Burrowers probably couldn’t operate here.
Shen Cong sat in place for a while, radar running, watching the screens. Nothing. He climbed out carefully — he’d never fully trusted open ground again after that first Burrower — hauled one of the Fangwolf carcasses onto his shoulder, and got back inside quickly.
Same process as with the Burrower. Photos. Measurements. Dissection. Notes.
Fangwolf: mutated canid. Low intelligence. Fast movement. Moderate threat level. Aggressive.
He cut a piece of the meat, added more oil this time, and fried it properly.
One bite in, and the heat came again — rolling up from his stomach, the Activity stirring and growing. Stronger than the Burrower had produced. A more noticeable bump.
He added a line to the log: Meat edible. Contains trace Activity. Nutritional value higher than Burrower.
Then, after a moment’s consideration, one more line: Taste: worse than dog meat. Better than Burrower. Marginally.
After the meal, he spent some time guiding Vajra through Activity exercises — the equivalent of a training session for the truck’s developing capabilities.
By the time he looked up, the sky had shifted. The sun was going down. The horizon was lit up in orange and red, the first real color he’d seen in weeks after all that gray.
He climbed to the roof and sat with the wind for a while.
When the sun dropped below the horizon, it hit him fully for the first time.
This was real. Not a drill, not a preparation, not a fantasy to get through another empty day. The apocalypse had come. He was living in it. Ruined buildings all around him. Mutated predators in the sand. No signals on any frequency, no voices on the radio, no sign that anyone else was still out there.
Maybe there were other survivors. Probably, somewhere. People who’d been in shelters, in mountains, in whatever accidents of geography had kept them alive. People who didn’t have Vajra, didn’t have six years of preparation, were making do with whatever they’d had on hand when the meteors hit.
He wanted to find them. The idea of not being the last person alive was worth something — proof that humanity hadn’t been completely wiped out.
He also wasn’t sure he wanted to. Maybe wandering through the ruins of the world alone was exactly the life he’d been building toward without realizing it. Six years of isolation had been preparation. But it had also been practice.
He didn’t resolve the question. The last light faded, and he climbed back inside.
Shen Cong sat cross-legged on the floor, file in hand, working on a Fangwolf fang.
The things were absurdly large — from wrist to elbow, one on each side of the jaw. The same dull silver, the same metallic quality to the bone. Harder than the Burrower’s mandibles. He’d tested it with his alloy knife and only managed to scratch the surface.
Whatever Activity was doing to these creatures, it was concentrating in the hardest parts. The densest structures. Metal-adjacent tissue.
Metal. Activity. Vajra is metal. Is that the connection?
He turned it over and got nowhere. Shelved it.
The fang was coming along nicely. He filed around the root, wrapped the broken end in a band of iron sheeting to reinforce it, and held up the finished product.
A fang-knife.
Ancient tribal chiefs had done exactly this — worn the teeth and bones of their kills as trophies, as declarations of power. Shen Cong found he understood the impulse completely.
He tucked it away and picked up the second fang, but decided to save it as a spare. He still had six more wolves outside, twelve more fangs to work with.
It wasn’t late, but it wasn’t early either. He stretched out on the narrow bunk, pulled the laptop onto his chest, and decided to get a few minutes of gaming in before sleep.
Surviving was one thing. Living was another. He wasn’t going to become a caveman just because civilization had ended. He’d packed multiple phones and laptops specifically to avoid that fate.
No internet, of course.
He’d tried everything — radio frequencies, satellite bands, anything that might carry a signal. Nothing. Just static on every channel, in every direction.
He was starting to think it wasn’t just Wuwei. Not just Anhui. Not just China.
If anyone, anywhere on Earth still had functioning infrastructure, something would have come through on the radio by now. A military broadcast, an emergency signal, a lone operator trying to reach someone. Anything with meaning in it.
There was nothing.
The whole planet had gone quiet.
As quiet as the space between stars.
(End of Chapter 5)