The alarm woke Shen Cong the next morning. The sun was actually out.

He checked the battery bank — 52% remaining. He hauled the solar panels up to the roof to charge, then came back down and got the frying pan going. Fangwolf meat for the foreseeable future. Seven kills, more than he could eat before it turned — no sense letting it go to waste.

His favorite cut, he’d decided, was the belly fat. Rendered down, it made cooking oil. Fry the meat in its own fat and it came out considerably better than the dry, stringy first attempt.

Fed and fueled, he started Vajra up and began a slow circuit of the ruins.

He planned to stay in Wuwei for a few days. Before the apocalypse, he’d put together a detailed map of the surrounding area — every county town and the provincial capital, marked up with supply caches, weapon sources, repair points, fuel depots. Now he needed to cross-reference all of it against what was actually still standing.

One of the marked locations was a water treatment plant right here in Wuwei — the kind that supplied the whole county and ran a bottled water operation on the side, with an underground storage room full of sealed drums.

He’d been out here for over a month and a half and hadn’t found a single lake or river. His water supply had maybe another month in it. He’d genuinely never planned for a scenario where finding fresh water would be this hard.

Still — the Fangwolves were alive. Something was keeping them hydrated. Wuwei had water somewhere.

Vajra prowled through the rubble in silence, broken only by the wind pushing sand across broken concrete. The battlefield radar swept steadily, mapping the ruins, building up a picture of the terrain.

The radar had a surveying function Shen Cong had been making use of — he’d loaded his pre-existing maps and overlaid the radar’s scans, which let him roughly identify what each ruin used to be.

According to the map, this should be the China Unicom building. There was a Carrefour in the basement.

He lowered the dozer blade and spent twenty minutes clearing sand and rubble from the area, working out the actual footprint of the building. When he finally found what remained of the basement entrance, he frowned. The top of the staircase was just visible, but it was buried under several feet of packed debris. The entrance had been a large one — he wasn’t sure how much of the basement had been filled in.

He went back to Vajra and pulled out a seismic locator — a device that used surface vibration to map underground voids. It wasn’t precise enough for detailed work, but he didn’t need precise. He just needed to know whether the basement was intact or completely buried.

The reading came back good. Large empty space below. The supermarket was still there.

He set the radar to push an alert to his phone the moment it detected any movement — phone signal was gone, obviously, but infrared and Bluetooth still worked fine within a few meters. Then he suited up: anti-stab vest, cut-resistant gloves, combat boots. Grabbed the entrenching tool.

With his current strength, clearing an access hole took about half an hour. A normal person would’ve been at it half the day.

The basement was dark. Every shelf had toppled. Products everywhere across the floor.

Shen Cong clicked on his headlamp, slung his pack, and picked his way through the wreckage. Clothing aisles, food sections — he walked straight past all of it. Not what he was here for.

He was looking for drinks and bottled water. And, secondarily, cigarettes and liquor.

The water was obvious — he was almost out. The smokes and alcohol were for trade. Hard to say he was the only person left alive, and if there were other survivors, luxury vices would be worth considerably more than basic food and water. He’d learned that from years of post-apocalypse fiction and figured it was probably right.

He found the drinks section — shelves down, bottles scattered across the floor. Pulpy orange juice, Nanguo milk drinks, Coca-Cola, green tea. The full spread. He picked up a bottle of Nanguo milk drink, checked the date — still within shelf life — and drank the entire thing in about five seconds.

He let out a long, satisfied belch.

For the past month and a half, he’d been rationing water so carefully he’d barely let himself drink properly. It felt genuinely good to just drink something without calculating it first.

When he filled his pack, though, it was mostly mineral water. No expiry date. He only took a few of the flavored drinks as a treat.

He found the tobacco and alcohol aisle next. A dozen cartons of the premium stuff, a few bottles of decent liquor. On the way back, he passed a snack display that had somehow stayed upright — roasted seeds, walnuts, peanuts. He grabbed a bag of each.

That was when he heard it.

A soft, rustling movement behind him.

He spun around.

A mutated rat, roughly the size of a small pig, was nosing its way toward him across the floor.

The headlamp beam hit it. The rat’s fur instantly bristled. It made a sound like a snake’s hiss — a flat, dry, wrongness of a noise — and without any further warning, launched itself at him.

It was faster than a Fangwolf. Shen Cong had no time to step aside, only just managed to get his arm up —

Crunch.

The rat’s teeth went through his anti-stab vest like it wasn’t there and sank deep into his forearm. The pain was immediate and total, radiating up through his shoulder and across his chest. He tried to shake it off. It didn’t let go.

“Get — off —”

He jammed his free hand to his hip and drew the military spike he kept there, and drove it into the rat’s back. Solid hit. The spike went in clean.

The rat released his arm — and took the spike with it as it dropped to the floor, writhing and hissing. Then it gathered itself and lunged again.

His hands were wrong. The crossbow was on his back. The pistol was in his jacket, safety still on. He was out of time.

And then he remembered.

Last night. The fang-knife. Right there on his belt.

He grabbed it and brought it up, arm shaking, intending only to block —

Shhhk.

The sound of fabric tearing, but wet. The fang-knife passed through the rat’s skull. Not a stab — a slash. Half the head came away. Blood hit the floor.

Shen Cong stood there breathing hard for a moment before his brain caught up with what had just happened.

He grabbed the carcass and moved fast, back up through the access hole and into Vajra. He’d deal with what he was holding once he was somewhere safe.

Back inside, with the armor sealed and all systems green, he reached around and felt the cold sweat soaking through his shirt. His hand was shaking.

He’d assumed the sealed basement would be safe. No exits, no light, nothing for anything to live on. The rat had apparently not gotten that memo. Those incisors — cleaver-wide, straight-edged — had punched clean through his forearm. The blood wasn’t slowing down on its own.

“AAAGH—”

The disinfectant hit the wound and he swore through clenched teeth, eyes watering. He’d treated injuries before, mostly on stray dogs. First time working on himself. Movie heroes who gritted their teeth and had a bandage on in thirty seconds were, he now understood, completely full of it.

He was crying a little. He wasn’t ashamed about it. And the thought of getting the needle and thread out next made him feel worse than the wound itself.

He kicked the dead rat. It helped slightly.

Then, through the pain, a thought surfaced.

How did that happen.

The fang-knife: he knew how hard it was. He’d tested it with his alloy blade and barely left a mark. But hard and sharp weren’t the same thing — and what he’d done to that rat wasn’t a stab, it was a glancing slash. A slash that had taken off half a skull.

He went back through the moment carefully.

He’d been panicking. Every bit of energy he had had gone into that hand, into that grip —

Including the Activity.

He’d pushed the Activity into the knife without thinking about it. The same way he’d guided it into Vajra’s frame when doing repairs. The same way it flowed into his body through the feedback loop.

Activity can reinforce Vajra. Activity reinforces my body. So Activity can reinforce the knife too.

And then the obvious follow-up: can it heal the wound?

He focused. The Activity distributed throughout his body — the accumulated feedback from weeks of the Vajra link — he drew it deliberately toward the injury, concentrated it there.

A coolness spread across the wound. The burning edge of the pain softened, went fuzzy. Underneath it, he could feel something happening — not imagined, actually physical — the tissue beginning to close.

Extension. Same principle as Vajra’s self-repair. Just applied to me.

At this rate, he estimated a week before the arm was fully functional again.

He sat back, breathing slowly, and looked at the rat’s body on the floor.

“The disaster broke everything. But not everything it changed is bad.”

When the pain had dropped to a manageable level, he got the laptop out.

The incisors went straight into his collection — same material as the Burrower mandibles, the Fangwolf fangs. He was building a pattern.

Log entry:

Gnawrat: mutated rodent. Low intelligence. Fast movement. Low-to-moderate threat. Aggressive.

He’d briefly considered rating it moderate-to-high. It had, after all, put a hole through his arm and nearly ended his run in a dark supermarket basement. But stacked against Burrowers and Fangwolves, the Gnawrat’s raw combat capability was genuinely on the lower end. The difference was context — no Vajra, tight space, no warning.

He kept the rating where it was.

Low-to-moderate.

And added a note: Do not enter enclosed spaces without clearing them first.

(End of Chapter 6)