The aerial observation concept had been in his planning documents since 2018.

He’d written it into the nine-thousand-word apocalypse preparation document during that first focused week after reading the forum post — a line item under reconnaissance capability, noting that a drone with good camera hardware would provide tactical awareness that no ground-level sensor could match. Then he’d bought the DJI Phantom 8 and watched it become useless within a month of the apocalypse as the radiation environment ate its communication range down to fifteen meters.

The router represented a path back to that capability. Maybe not 200 meters on the first attempt. But a path.

He guided Vajra’s Activity toward the router through the Amalgamation connection — the integration process taking half an hour given the device’s complexity, the corrosion-induced contact failures resolving as the Active material flowed through the circuit paths and established better conductivity than the corroded metal had been providing.

Then he connected everything with a wireless interface to the local network — radar control, camera feeds, vehicle systems — and tested the management access from his phone.

“Adjust radar rotation angle.”

The roof antenna tilted.

Good. Signal quality at 100% from inside the vehicle. Vajra’s Active envelope appears to suppress local interference.

The external range test required a second person. Zhang Youhai had been hovering near the vehicle since Shen Cong’s arrival, having apparently relocated his sleeping spot from a building across the complex to the nearest available position.

“Walk away from the vehicle, as far as you can, and come back when the phone loses connection.”

Zhang Youhai looked at the phone for a moment. “Can this reach outside? Contact anyone?”

“Local network only. Walk.”

He walked.

The first test ended at twenty meters.

Shen Cong opened the router’s configuration interface and started working through the frequency band parameters. The Activity-enhanced Extension property let him adjust the hardware at a level of precision that normal electronics modification couldn’t approach — not redesigning the circuit architecture, but adjusting the physical state of existing components to optimize their frequency response. Each adjustment required him to understand what he was changing and why, which was why the communications reference library he’d been studying since Chapter 2 was relevant.

Extension as a capability was only as useful as the knowledge guiding it.

He ran the test again. Twenty meters.

Modified again. Twenty meters.

Modified again. Twenty-two meters.

Movement.

He kept working through the band parameters, the radar running in the background to keep track of the surrounding situation, the camera feeds cycling on the secondary display. The process was methodical and slow — each modification required waiting for Zhang Youhai to walk out and confirm the new distance before the next attempt.

After fifteen cycles: a specific band combination that produced 30-meter stable transmission, 40-meter degraded transmission, 50-meter disconnection.

Better than the starting point. Not good enough.

Zhang Youhai, walking back from the latest test, asked how it was going.

Shen Cong found himself asking about the man’s understanding of the radiation environment, and then of evolution, and discovered that Zhang Youhai had approximately no working framework for either topic. Not because he lacked intelligence but because survival had consumed the cognitive bandwidth that thinking about the bigger picture required.

Someone has to do the thinking. Not everyone can.

He sent Zhang Youhai back to the complex and returned to the problem.

The 30-meter ground distance was the floor. Not the ceiling.

The path to 200 meters required equipment he didn’t currently have. A mobile base station constructed from commercial telecommunications hardware — the kind that the major carriers had installed in every residential building, in the elevator machine rooms and stairwell walls — would have sufficient transmission power to overcome the radiation interference at longer ranges.

He knew how to build a basic mobile base station. The knowledge was in the reference library under telecommunications infrastructure. The equipment was in the ruins of every residential tower he could see from the complex.

The practical obstacle: the main hardware was typically installed at the top of buildings, in spaces that were now mostly rubble. The antenna components, however, were distributed throughout the stairwell walls — smaller, more numerous, more likely to have survived in partial form.

He flagged the task for Zhang Youhai as a search objective and returned to thinking about what the current 30-meter range could accomplish.

Vertically, the atmospheric transmission characteristics were different from horizontal ground transmission. The radiation interference was primarily at ground level, concentrated in the layer where Activity-dense air and surface materials interacted. Higher altitude generally meant lower interference density.

If the 30-meter ground range translated to even 60 meters vertically — conservative assumption — and the drone could reach 60 meters of altitude with functional communication, the camera system would see approximately 12 kilometers of surface area.

Not the 10-kilometer reliable observation he’d wanted. But not nothing.

He looked at the camera feed showing the complex’s open area, then at the position of Zhang Tianshen’s departure route on the radar map, then at the bridge locations Zhang Youhai had marked on the city south overlay.

I need to test the vertical transmission before I can calculate anything useful.

He needed the crowd to thin out first. Too many people visible from the complex’s open area to run a drone without making it an event.

Evening, maybe. Or after Wang Gen’s meeting.

The notification from Zhang Youhai’s knock: Li Laotou was back.

The intelligence was clean. Wang Gen had fuel — had systematically collected most of the city south fuel reserves since establishing control over the district — and was willing to sell. He’d heard through Li Laotou’s message that the buyer was evolved, which was the detail that had moved him from willing to consider to requesting a meeting.

“He wants to talk about evolved person development,” Li Laotou said. “I mentioned you were an iron person, like he is. He seemed interested.”

Shen Cong absorbed this.

Wang Gen: iron person. Hummer vehicle. City south leadership for two months. He’d been at the job since the immediate aftermath of the storm, longer than anyone else Shen Cong had information on. If his vehicle had been developing Activity saturation during that time — even at the slow passive absorption rates without a resonance field — Wang Gen’s development level was an empirical data point about what iron people in the area had achieved.

And Wang Gen wanted to compare notes.

Shen Cong thought about what that conversation would cost, what it might yield, and whether the meeting itself created risks he needed to account for.

He has fuel. I need fuel. He wants information about evolution. I have information about evolution that I’d trade very carefully.

The meeting was worth having. The terms needed to be right.

“Tell him I’ll meet,” Shen Cong said. “On neutral ground. He comes with no more than three people, I come with Vajra.”

Li Laotou nodded once.

(End of Chapter 63)