He’d tested it properly that morning: one hand, granite stone, steady compression until the rock gave way.
Brick was easier. Granite was the meaningful benchmark.
Speed, agility, jump height, endurance — all of it elevated proportionally along with the raw strength. Six years of martial forms and conditioning drills before the apocalypse, now running on a body that had no business being as capable as it was. The term small superhero was hyperbolic and also not entirely inaccurate.
The limitation he kept coming back to was firearms.
Against unarmed evolved people, against bone-gold weapons, against anything that required physical contact to matter, three bulls was enough to work with. But a bullet from a gap in the Baogai Armor’s coverage was a bullet regardless of how strong he was. The armor was excellent. It wasn’t sealed. In China’s gun-controlled environment, the evolved people had established dominance over ordinary survivors precisely because the gap between enhanced and unenhanced bodies wasn’t bridgeable by civilian means.
In America, he thought, a sufficiently motivated group of normal people with legally accessible firearms could create problems for anyone without ballistic protection. Here, the evolved people were essentially unchecked by anything below military hardware.
But we’re all still developing. At some point, if the Activity keeps accumulating, maybe even firearms stop being the deciding factor.
He wrote a row of terms on the blank paper and looked at them.
Bone-gold. Evolved people. Mutants. Half-beasts. Iron people. Evolved beasts. Evolved fish.
The survivor community had developed its own vocabulary while he’d been working alone in the ruins. Most of it he found awkward. Evolved people and evolved beasts were reasonable — they described the relevant distinction clearly. Mutants was vivid enough, the X-Men connection giving it a recognizable frame. Half-beasts communicated the cognitive failure mode effectively. Iron people was functional if slightly reductive.
He’d use their terms for now. Shared vocabulary was a prerequisite for communication, and communication was eventually going to be necessary.
He pinned the paper to the cargo wall and looked at it for a while.
After Vajra hits full saturation — Juchao as a waypoint, then Hefei. The provincial military district. People who’ve had months to study the Activity systematically, with resources he doesn’t have.
That was the destination that mattered. Not the city south factions with their territorial disputes and tribute economies. The military, wherever they were operating out of, would have information he needed. Zhang Youhai had confirmed they’d been to Juchao before the flood, collected most of the evolved people, and brought them back to Hefei. A military organization actively gathering evolved people was a military organization that understood the Activity was significant. They’d have done research.
He wanted that research.
In the afternoon, he fished.
Five rebar rods from the Yinping ruins bent and worked into appropriate lengths, sharpened wire bent into hooks, Dyneema cord as line, second-generation maggots on the hooks, rods wedged into the lakeside rocks.
He sat at a comfortable distance and watched them.
Zhang Youhai had mentioned evolved fish in Lake Chao specifically — significant enough to mention as a hunting problem, dangerous enough that Wang Gen had apparently sent people out to catch them and lost some. This small lake was a side channel, probably connected to the broader watershed. If the flood had moved fish up through the system and deposited some here, they’d have had months to establish themselves.
By evening, all five lines had come back empty. The maggots had survived the entire session, which was either a testament to their constitution or an indication that nothing in the lake considered them food.
He reeled in the lines and looked at the map.
The Yuxi River channel should be about a kilometer north. Better odds of finding something there.
Tomorrow. Tonight there were other things.
He threw the last cut of Tumour-Pig — the section that was moving past the edge of edible — to the Spine-cat, which was growing its removed spines back steadily and would probably be at full regrowth within another week.
“Eat well. You’re my Activity source until I find evolved beasts in the area.”
The cat ate and then growled at him anyway, apparently not interpreting the relationship the same way he did.
He climbed to the roof in the dark and let himself sit with the stars for a few minutes before the evening’s work.
Twenty-four hours ago, this sky had meant solitude. Now it meant something different — not because the stars had changed, but because he knew there were two thousand people a few kilometers north who were also under them, doing their own version of trying to survive.
The factional structure Zhang Youhai had described wasn’t a disaster. Multiple power centers with competing interests but no single dominant force meant no one entity could move against him with the full weight of city south behind them. The tribute economy meant everyone was focused on resource acquisition and security maintenance rather than expansion or territorial aggression. The fire brigade’s presence in the main district meant there was something at least nominally organized holding the most defensible ground.
This is manageable. The city isn’t the main threat — it’s a resource environment with complications.
What the city needed was evolved-beast meat and useful materials. What Shen Cong had was an armored vehicle capable of systematic hunting and enough preparation to do it safely. That was a transaction waiting to happen, when the timing was right.
For now: twenty-three peaches. Eleven nights. Saturation from 30% to somewhere around 80% or better.
He descended.
The evening research check came with unexpected bad news.
The six second-generation maggots were still eating, still growing, no sign of pupation approaching yet. Variant 1 was stable at fist-size, the Activity increment from the ant-core test apparently not having translated into further growth. These were expected.
The ant eggs were not.
He’d been checking them daily since setting up the incubation box. Three eggs from the queen’s gaster, removed intact, placed in appropriate conditions, monitored for the fourteen-day development cycle the reference files specified. They’d been showing faint but consistent Activity radiation since he’d collected them — a sign that whatever biological processes drove development were at least partially active.
Now the radiation from all three was diminishing.
Steadily, measurably, the signature he associated with living Activity presence fading toward the baseline he got from inert material.
They’re dying.
He held the incubation box and tried to work out why.
The queen had been dead when he extracted them. The queen’s Activity had been substantially depleted before her death by the Vajra absorptions. The eggs themselves might have required ongoing contact with the queen’s biological systems — hormonal, chemical, thermal — that the incubation box couldn’t replicate.
Or the Activity itself might have been the sustaining factor, and with the source gone, the eggs were failing the same way the motorcycle frame had failed without the Plastic Rabbit to maintain it.
Or the crushing from the dozer blade had damaged them in ways that weren’t visible externally.
He didn’t know. He wouldn’t know without equipment he didn’t have. What he could observe was the trajectory: all three eggs, Activity fading in parallel, the rate suggesting they’d be fully inert within a day or two.
He noted the failure in the log without editorializing.
Ant queen eggs: incubation attempt unsuccessful. Activity signature declining in all three specimens. Probable cause: separation from queen’s biological support systems post-mortem, or Activity depletion prior to extraction. No second-generation ant queen data will be available from this attempt.
He closed the log and moved to the evening’s main task.
Two peaches. Repair work on the remaining offline display systems. Radio scan.
The ant eggs were a loss. The peaches were not.
(End of Chapter 41)