At least two tons. Dragging it was real work even at three bulls.
He didn’t mind. The timing was almost comedic in how well it solved his immediate problems — fresh Activity-rich meat running low, hunting trip needed, fuel situation making a hunting trip complicated. Then a two-ton evolved water buffalo walked up and ate his Spine-cat.
One week of meat, minimum. Maybe more if the Activity in the tissue lasted. That was a week of not hunting, a week of focusing on Vajra’s repairs, and by the end of it, enough Activity accumulation to approach the city south factions from a position of genuine strength rather than operational need.
Good luck had a way of arriving in clusters when it finally decided to arrive. He’d noticed that pattern before.
He collected what remained of the Spine-cat while he was in the area, then walked to the river tributary to check the lines.
Five rods. Five hooks. Five results.
Three evolved fish still alive on the hooks, thrashing. Two more reduced to skeletons — whatever had taken the bait had been thorough.
So there are evolved fish in this channel.
Zhang Youhai had mentioned this — the scavengers had relied on river fishing before the three factions claimed the accessible waterways. This tributary arm was far enough from city south that it apparently hadn’t been incorporated into anyone’s territory yet. He’d file that for later.
He photographed the three living fish, measured them, and wrote up the entry.
Ugly Lump Fish: malformed mutant, aquatic type. Body size roughly basin-diameter. Head covered in bony protrusions, no Activity core identified. Scales show faint metallic transformation — similar pattern to the Spine-cat’s bone spines. Probable failed mutation.
No Activity core, but Activity present in the tissue. Edible. Worth catching.
He hadn’t eaten fish in months.
He could make sashimi. Properly stored raw fish retained Activity longer than cooked meat — he’d observed the inverse relationship between heat and Activity preservation in the Fangwolf meat experiments back in Chapter 4. The evolved water buffalo was the priority protein source right now, but the fish were a useful secondary option.
He photographed the water buffalo next, then started butchering.
Bull Demon King: mutated water buffalo, evolved beast category. Body mass approaching elephant scale. Physically powerful, fast runner, highly durable. Diet has shifted from herbivore to carnivore. One-meter horn pair identified as Activity core — strongest radiation intensity observed in any evolved beast to date, possibly exceeded only by the Dog-Croc’s tail spine.
The horns were extraordinary. Each one a meter long, heavy enough that handling them required real effort even at his current strength level, radiating Activity at an intensity that made holding them feel like holding something warm rather than cold. The best Activity cores he’d previously collected were the queen ant’s chest plate and the Tumour-Pig’s crescent tusks. These were in a different category.
He picked one up and turned it slowly, feeling the radiation move across his palm.
I’ve been meaning to develop a classification system for evolved beasts. Activity core radiation intensity is the most objective metric I have.
The problem was calibration — he had no standard unit, no instrument, only his own perception. But his perception had been getting more precise as his Activity development advanced. He could distinguish the faint signature of a Burrower mandible from the stronger signature of a Fangwolf fang, and both from the queen’s chest plate, and all of those from what he was holding now.
Ordinal ranking first. Absolute measurement later, if I find a way to quantify it.
He filed the thought and kept cutting.
The display system repair occupied the entire afternoon.
Vajra’s automatic driving capability — infrared obstacle detection, sector-by-sector environmental monitoring fed to the display array — was the combat system that made the vehicle genuinely safer to operate in a world where opening a window to look outside meant exposing himself to whatever was outside. Getting it back online was a higher priority than most of the other repairs still pending.
The work was detailed and frequently frustrating.
He laid out the circuit schematics on the cargo floor, cross-referenced component specifications from the electronics reference files on his drives, and worked through each element methodically. The flood damage was more extensive than he’d initially assessed — not just surface corrosion but genuine functional failures in the control board components. The CMOS battery had dissolved. A BIOS chip was shorted internally, which was a loss he couldn’t recover through Activity repair because the damage was to the integrated architecture rather than to the physical substrate.
He swapped the CMOS for a compatible unit pulled from the salvaged motherboard he’d found in the Yinping internet café. He guided Vajra’s Activity through the Extension property to slowly reconstitute the physical connections where corrosion had broken circuit paths. He replaced two small capacitors after a short circuit he caused by not discharging a component properly before working on it.
Five and a half hours.
Beep.
The display came up three seconds after he connected power. Color initialized. Interface loaded.
He sat back and looked at it for a moment.
The relief was disproportionate to the practical improvement — he’d been managing with manual observation through viewports, which worked, just slowly and incompletely. But having a functioning display meant information about his environment without exposure, which was the core safety principle the whole vehicle had been designed around. Getting it back felt like recovering something important rather than simply repairing something broken.
He noted the specific fault patterns for the remaining seven displays and closed the work log. Tomorrow would be faster now that he understood the failure mode.
Dinner: medium-rare bull steak.
The Maillard reaction at medium-rare preserved enough of the tissue structure to carry the full Activity benefit while producing the fat-rendering and surface crust that made the eating experience significantly better than the technically-superior-but-drier rare option. He’d worked this out empirically over the past several months and had no plans to revisit the conclusion.
He also cooked a small portion of Spine-cat. Tasted it. Made a face. Fed it to the research insects.
The Activity content in the Spine-cat meat was measurably lower than the Bull Demon King, and the flavor profile was in a category he didn’t have a polite word for. He’d eaten worse things, but not recently.
Evening Activity injection for the ant eggs.
The familiar sensation of proximity as the frequency-synchronized eggs absorbed what he offered. That feeling of kinship — familiarity wasn’t a strong enough word, there was something almost parental about it, which was a thought he found profoundly uncomfortable and immediately suppressed — was stronger than it had been the previous session.
He sat with the eggs and tried to understand what was happening.
The frequency synchronization was the mechanistic explanation. He’d synchronized Vajra’s frequency with the ant swarm’s to achieve camouflage, and he hadn’t felt any particular bond with the ants. The difference was directionality: with the ants, the frequency shift had been temporary and one-way. With the eggs, he’d established an ongoing mutual alignment, with the eggs actively seeking his frequency rather than him imposing his on them.
What else has this property?
Vajra did — the core of the whole bond was a frequency alignment between his Activity and Vajra’s. The Plastic Rabbit had had it with the motorcycle. The eggs had it with him now.
It’s not just frequency matching. It’s something about mutual seeking. The system needs both sides to actively orient toward each other.
He turned this over for a while, getting nowhere specific but feeling the shape of something he couldn’t quite see.
Then, working backward from the frustration:
Activity radiates as a field. Fields propagate. The propagation of electromagnetic fields follows known physics. Activity is Activity-like-radiation, which means it probably behaves like radiation. Radiation propagates as waves.
He sat up.
v = fλ.
Wave velocity equals frequency times wavelength. Basic wave physics, the formula he’d memorized in high school. If Activity propagated as a wave — and everything he’d observed was consistent with wave-like propagation — then frequency wasn’t the only relevant variable. Wavelength was also a property. And wave velocity was also a property.
He’d been thinking about Activity entirely in terms of frequency. But a complete description of a wave required all three parameters.
What if the bond isn’t about frequency matching alone? What if it’s about velocity or wavelength? What if the familiar feeling comes from a resonance condition that requires a specific combination of all three?
He didn’t have the instruments to measure any of this properly. But the framework had just expanded in a way that felt significant.
He opened the laptop and started writing.
(End of Chapter 44)