He logged the final results of the fly experiment, stretched, and put the relaxed expression away.
The Activity overflow problem needed addressing before he left.
His calculation: Vajra would accumulate sufficient excess to trigger another siphon event in approximately three to four days from the overload. He’d already spent three of those days recovering. The window was closing.
The solution he’d worked out during recovery: if Vajra’s definition of self could be extended through Amalgamation, the excess Activity would distribute into the newly incorporated material rather than building toward overflow. He had a substantial inventory of equipment — the newly-made weapons, the armor, various stored components — that could be Amalgamated into Vajra’s Active body, increasing the denominator and absorbing the excess.
He started with a single worker-mandible arrow. Steel shaft, bone-gold tip, the simplest test case.
The Active integration took less than a second. The arrow joined Vajra’s system completely, and he felt exactly what he’d hoped to feel: the pooling excess Activity dispersed outward into the new material, distributing evenly, the overflow pressure dropping.
He exhaled properly for the first time in three days.
It works. The definition can expand.
He spent the next several hours methodically Amalgamating equipment into Vajra — weapons, additional armor components, stored materials. Each new addition absorbed a portion of the excess, the accumulated overflow from the Level 1 transition spreading into an ever-larger integrated body rather than building toward another catastrophic siphon event.
The clock had bought him time. He’d use it to reach the military and find answers.
August 17th. His injuries had progressed to the point where he could move normally, think clearly, and push reasonably hard without triggering setbacks. Five bulls of capability — he tested the estimate carefully, aware that post-overload self-assessment was unreliable, and found it held up.
Early morning, before the heat became oppressive, he started the engine.
The approach to Juchao District’s city south required decisions about which faction to encounter first. His original plan — using Zhang Youhai’s group as intermediaries to establish a presence before meeting any of the evolved people — had collapsed when the scavenging teams stopped coming to Yinping. The indirect approach had run out of road.
Direct approach it was.
The map, annotated based on Zhang Youhai’s briefing: Wang Gen’s people controlled the Yuxi River bank and both bridges connecting city south to the main district. The Dragon Slayer faction under Zhang Tianshen had positioned at Sanhe Village, controlling access to both Provincial Road 208 and 316, the main exit routes. The Shadows operated in the Wangcheng to Li Da Village corridor, adjacent to the Dragon Slayers’ position and apparently dedicated to making their lives difficult.
The camp at the lake between Zhoujia Village and Sansheng Village — the scavenger staging area Zhang Youhai had described with over a hundred people — had dried up along with the lake. The drought had moved everyone.
He drove to Gongjia Village to find out where they’d gone.
The Liushui Bay residential complex had been twenty-plus floors before the apocalypse. Most of it was rubble. What remained was two or three relatively intact floor levels on several structures — frameless windows, cracked walls, structurally questionable but sheltering people regardless, because people required shelter whether it was structurally sound or not.
He saw the collection detail from the road before he reached them.
A group of ten or twelve, armed with a mixture of improvised weapons and what looked like actual firearms, moving through the complex systematically. At each ruined stairwell, one or two hollow-faced survivors would emerge and hand over whatever they’d accumulated. A tax collection run.
The leader was visible as a mutant from fifty meters — two large bone spines extending from his shoulder blades, rotating with his arm movements, clearly Activity cores. He carried himself with the relaxed authority of someone who had not been seriously challenged recently.
Shen Cong watched him reach toward a woman’s face as she backed away with her child, then apparently think better of it and move on. Not restraint exactly — more like a man who had other things to do and would get back to the entertainment later. The toothpick he was working with his molars suggested a man who liked the image of unhurried confidence.
Dragon Slayers. This is Zhang Tianshen’s man.
Not Zhang Tianshen himself — Zhang Youhai had described the faction leader as substantially more capable, and this person’s behavior suggested middle-management confidence rather than top-tier capability. A lieutenant, probably, running the routine tax collections while the leadership handled more important matters.
The lieutenant — a badge on his jacket that said Wang Laoda, Wang the Senior — reached a familiar face in the collection queue.
One of Zhang Youhai’s group members. Ma Laosan, receiving a slap across the face for bringing an empty lighter cylinder as tribute payment, then being talked down by Old Li arriving at a run with supplemental payment scraped together from the group’s communal reserves.
Shen Cong watched Old Li’s performance — the practiced apology, the preemptive deescalation, the strategic smile — and felt something adjacent to respect. The old man was managing a genuinely dangerous situation with exactly the right tools and no good options. That was a specific kind of competence.
Wang Laoda collected the supplemental payment, apparently satisfied, and turned toward the motorcycles his group had parked at the edge of the complex. Three of them, painted in colors that had been chosen for maximum visual noise.
The sound arrived before Vajra did.
Thirty tons of moving vehicle at even moderate speed had a particular acoustic signature, especially when a dozer blade was clearing rock debris from the road surface. The blade work was partly functional and partly deliberate — Shen Cong wanted to be heard before he was seen, and the clearing operation provided a natural explanation for the noise that wasn’t here comes something you should be afraid of.
The effect he got anyway.
Wang Laoda’s toothpick nearly fell.
The entire collection detail turned toward the roundabout.
Vajra rolled through the intersection, silver-white armor catching the morning light, spikes intact, dozer blade up, the engine note settling from clearing-operation to cruise. Moving at a speed that communicated purpose without urgency. Nothing about the vehicle suggested it was in a hurry. Nothing about it suggested it needed to be.
Wang Laoda stared.
His mouth was open. The toothpick was definitely going to fall.
Good start.
Shen Cong kept driving.
(End of Chapter 58)