The overnight footage answered the cohabitation question clearly.

Variant 1 had survived. Variant 2 had not. The process, reconstructed from the video: initially both flies had fed on the meat fragment together without conflict. When the meat ran out, the truce ended immediately. They’d gone for each other with the same focused efficiency they’d shown toward food. Variant 2’s needle-proboscis had found Variant 1’s wing. Variant 1’s needle-proboscis had found Variant 2’s head. The outcome had taken about forty seconds.

Mutated creatures don’t share. File that under confirmed.

He thought about the exceptions — the Fangwolves that had been running as a pack, the ant colony operating as a cooperative unit. The Fangwolves had almost certainly been a pre-apocalypse litter, the mutation happening to an established social group rather than to individuals afterward. The ants had queen-mediated cohesion through pheromone networks. Both were special cases, not counterexamples.

He moved on.

The larva enclosure showed activity.

The blowfly eggs he’d been monitoring had hatched. Several pale maggots, considerably larger than they should have been, working through the meat. Second-generation offspring of an unmodified fly, raised from hatching on Activity-rich substrate.

They’d mutated anyway.

The Activity works across generations. The environment itself is enough — sustained exposure from birth, without requiring the acute transformation event the parent underwent.

He noted it and closed the enclosure door, putting a physical barrier between himself and the smell.

The morning was overcast again. Dense haze, high ambient Activity, the Geiger counter running at several times baseline.

The Spine-cat was awake when he came out, pulling at its chain with the particular combination of anger and futile optimism he’d come to find mildly endearing in a purely clinical sense.

He led it to the base of the peach tree.

Final verification.

He tossed half a peach in front of it. The cat ate and went down on schedule. He started his clock.

Ten minutes: he lifted the cat slightly and checked the ground beneath it. Clean.

Twenty minutes: same.

Thirty, forty: nothing.

At fifty minutes, he lifted the cat again.

White filaments, fine as thread, emerging from the rock-dust soil. Several had already made contact with the cat’s fur, working toward skin.

He moved the cat aside and excavated the filament network with the entrenching tool. The threads ran continuously back to the main root system, every strand oriented toward the sleeping body’s Activity signature. Fifty minutes from initial contact to active penetration attempt.

That’s the mechanism.

He’d reconstructed it in the half-dream thinking of the previous night, and now he had the experimental confirmation.

The peaches weren’t toxic. They were attractants — extraordinarily dense in Activity, irresistible to any creature capable of sensing that density. An animal eating one would absorb a surge of Activity so concentrated it would trigger the mutation-sleep response: hours of unconsciousness while the body processed the input. And while it slept, the tree sent roots.

The animals under the tree hadn’t been poisoned. They’d been harvested — the root network penetrating the incapacitated bodies and extracting Activity and nutrients while the animals were unable to resist. Some had probably survived the process and walked away. Others, perhaps already weakened from the journey to the tree, or taken by something else while unconscious, had died on the spot and become permanent fixtures of the tree’s feeding apparatus.

Not a poison tree. A trap tree.

He updated the field guide entries.

Peach renamed: Activity Honey Peach — not toxic, induces mutation-sleep through Activity overload. Safe for consumption by sufficiently developed Activity users.

Tree renamed: Man-eater Peach Tree — not through its fruit, but through root penetration of sleeping subjects.

He moved the cat back to a safe distance and let it continue sleeping.

After lunch, he harvested the tree.

Twenty-seven Activity Honey Peaches, collected carefully into a sealed container. He also gathered a substantial bundle of leaves — the metallic bark quality extended to the leaf structure, and he was curious whether something with that level of Activity saturation in the tissue was edible as a vegetable. Months without green food. His enhanced digestive capacity should be able to handle it if anything could.

He stood at the base of the tree for a moment after collecting.

The research value of the tree itself had been largely extracted. There were almost certainly more secrets in it — the root intelligence, the mechanics of how it sensed sleeping prey at range, the full scope of what the metallic transformation of its structure meant for Activity circulation in plants. He wasn’t equipped to investigate those questions properly, and he had a route to keep moving along.

I’ll come back.

He made a mental note of the location against his radar map and walked back to Vajra.

The Spine-cat — still alive, still growing its harvested spines back at the measured pace he’d observed the previous night — was chained to the rear of the cargo section. Meat supply on four legs. He’d keep it until the protein ran out.

He drove north on the village road through the afternoon, Xu Wei playing through the laptop speakers, singing along when the mood took him. The road was rough. The singing didn’t require the road to be smooth.

“The sunset once again lights up my face. Once again it shines on my restless heart. What place is this, still so desolate. That endless journey, how very long.”

By nightfall, according to the combined radar and map calculation, he’d reached the approximate position of Daguo Village — the northernmost settlement in Wuwei County. Seven or eight kilometers covered. Less than twenty to Chaohu city boundary.

He ran his evening routines: feed the Spine-cat, add Activity meat to the second-generation maggot enclosure, check Variant 1’s body mass against yesterday’s measurement. Then the sustained work of guiding Vajra’s Activity absorption and continuing the equipment repairs.

The radio produced nothing useful.

At 1 AM on July 30th, with the Activity saturation sitting at 25.3% and trending upward, he decided the time had come.

He picked up one of the Honey Peaches.

The cat survived. The transformation-sleep in a creature his size and with his Activity development should be manageable. The benefit should significantly outweigh the disruption.

He ate it in three bites, lay down on the bunk, and had about ten seconds of lucidity before something like a very fast sunrise happened inside his chest and he lost consciousness entirely.

He woke to full sun coming through the viewport cracks.

The first thing he did was flex his hands. Different. The feedback from his own musculature was different in a way that was hard to articulate — not stronger exactly, more present, more available, as if the gap between intent and physical output had narrowed.

Two and a half bulls, at minimum. Up from two.

He reached out to Vajra.

25.3% saturation last night. 27.1% this morning. 1.8 percentage points gained during the transformation-sleep, without any active guidance from him.

Under normal ambient conditions, that accumulation would take two and a half days. On a good overcast day with elevated Activity density, two days. A single sleeping night: less than eight hours.

The Exchange goes both directions. I absorbed the peach’s Activity during the transformation. The overflow went to Vajra.

He lay on the bunk for another minute, feeling the difference.

Then he sat up, genuinely smiling for what felt like the first time in weeks, and started the day.

(End of Chapter 33)