Old Li moved Ma Laosan aside with a gentle firmness that suggested he’d done this before — gotten between younger people and trouble that wasn’t theirs to take on.
“Old Three, it’s fine. This young man’s here for me.” He walked to the vehicle. Up close, the disparity between Vajra’s scale and his own was striking. “What can I do for you, friend?”
“Come in through the rear.”
Shen Cong sealed the hatch behind him, then called out to the crowd: “Everyone disperse. Don’t stand around.”
The survivors of Liushui Bay had developed the particular compliance of people who’d learned that attention from armed and armored individuals was rarely beneficial. They drifted back toward their routines. Ma Laosan stayed where he was, at a distance, watching.
Inside the cargo section, Shen Cong sat across from Old Li and let a silence develop. Old Li didn’t fill it with nervous chatter, which was a mark in his favor.
“Your name is Old Li,” Shen Cong said. “I’ve been watching your group for a while.”
Old Li blinked. Then looked at the Baogai Armor, and something clicked. “You’re the evolved person Youhai mentioned?”
Shen Cong didn’t confirm or deny it. “How many survivors in this complex?”
Old Li accepted the non-answer and answered the question. “About fifty at the moment. It’s a stopover point for scavengers — no water here now, so nobody’s staying long.”
“Your scavenging team. Seven people?”
“Yes. Safer to work together out there.”
“Tell me about the current situation in city south.”
The intelligence update was mostly consistent with Zhang Youhai’s original briefing, with recent developments layered on top.
The drought had changed things. Water was now a purchased commodity in city south — Wang Gen controlled the Yuxi River access and charged for it. The heat and dehydration were killing the weakest survivors at a rate that the Dragon Slayer and Shadows conflict hadn’t approached.
Half-beasts were thinning out, apparently moving toward water sources further from the urban center. Evolved beasts and fish were similarly scarce. Scavengers were pushing into previously dangerous territory because the safe zones had been picked clean.
The faction conflict: the Dragon Slayers had attacked Wang Gen again. Both sides had taken losses. Wu Wenjun — Dragon Slayer number two — had been shot and wounded but survived. The Shadows’ Captain had used the opportunity to hit the Dragon Slayers while they were already bloodied. More losses on both sides.
Three-way balance maintained. All three factions still in place, still grinding against each other, none strong enough to eliminate the others outright.
My arrival breaks that equilibrium, Shen Cong thought. A new variable with unknown capability and no established allegiance. All three factions will be trying to assess me simultaneously.
He asked about the severe vehicle corrosion Li had mentioned to Zhang Youhai — all the cars in the underground garages rusted as if they’d been aging for years, not months.
Old Li confirmed it. Even in protected spaces, metal equipment had deteriorated at rates that shouldn’t have been possible in the elapsed time. The Dragon Slayers’ motorcycles had been built from salvaged components specifically because the intact vehicles weren’t operational.
“The military couldn’t take everyone when they came,” Old Li said. “The cars not working was part of why.”
Shen Cong filed that alongside the other unexplained Activity-and-metal anomalies he’d been accumulating since the beginning. Metal was central to the Activity system in ways he still didn’t fully understand.
“Does the Dragon Slayer faction have diesel or gasoline?” he asked.
“Should do. We found fuel in sealed underground garages — engines and tanks had held. We used some of it for fires before it got taxed away.”
The answer he needed. He moved to the proposal.
“I want you to act as my representative. I’m going to negotiate a trade with the Dragon Slayers — cigarettes and liquor for fuel. I need someone to handle the transfer on my side, verify what comes in, and transport it. In exchange: food.”
Old Li agreed immediately.
Shen Cong waited for the catch.
“Youhai told us everything,” Old Li said. “The food, the medicine. You treated us like people. That’s not common with evolved people.” He paused. “And we’ve kept your secret since he came back. Nobody’s said a word.”
“Before you go — call me Huang Xiaoming.”
Old Li’s mouth moved slightly.
“I know,” Shen Cong said.
He watched Old Li descend from the vehicle, then watched Ma Laosan pull him into a quick urgent conversation, then watched both of them look at Vajra with expressions that suggested the conversation was going the way most conversations about unexpected kindness from people with armored vehicles went.
When Old Li asked, just before leaving, if he could stay on with Shen Cong’s operation long-term, Shen Cong declined immediately and explained nothing. The transaction was specific. It would end when it ended.
He didn’t collect people. Every person he trusted was a person who could betray him, inform on him, decide his resources were more useful in someone else’s hands. The persecution complex had never fully distinguished between the paranoid version of this concern and the rational version, and post-apocalypse, the rational version had simply absorbed the paranoid version and made it redundant.
He ate a simple lunch, settled into the driver’s seat, and divided his attention between the radar display, the camera feeds, and the plastic container beside him.
One of the two larvae had grown to roughly the diameter of a large cooking oil drum — the kind you bought in bulk — and was still eating, methodically working through the Activity-core fragments he’d been supplying. Its Level read 0.087, above any Short-sting soldier ant he’d catalogued.
The other was the same size but had stopped eating. It had moved to the corner of the container and curled, and as he watched, its body was losing definition — not decomposing, but transitioning, the surface becoming something between solid and gel, the internal structures beginning to reorganize.
Pupation.
He watched through the container’s transparent wall. The process was deliberate and unhurried — nothing about it suggested urgency or distress. Just biology following its program.
The two larvae had been on identical development schedules until this divergence. One continued feeding and growing; one had apparently decided it had enough stored material and initiated the transformation sequence. The timing difference might reflect different caste destinations — worker ants pupated at different sizes than soldiers — or it might be individual variation.
Level at initiation of pupation: 0.085.
The Active bond with the pupating larva hadn’t disappeared. If anything, it felt more present — a quality of increased focus, as if the organism’s attention had turned inward and was broadcasting that inwardness outward. He couldn’t characterize it more precisely than that.
They’re still there. Whatever’s happening inside that transformation, the bond persists through it.
He watched the gel-like surface stabilize into the characteristic opaque casing of a developing pupa, and thought about what would emerge from it.
Whatever the Activity had made of a Short-sting ant queen’s eggs, raised from birth on metal and Active material, bonded to an iron person through a mutual frequency synchronization — he genuinely didn’t know.
He was looking forward to finding out.
(End of Chapter 60)