Wu Wenjun’s mutation had been in his teeth — four canines extended and hardened into Activity cores. Zhu Haifeng knocked them out personally and handed them to Shen Cong.
He took them.
Activity cores were Activity cores. They had research value, weapons-fabrication value, and apparently nutritional value for the ant larvae. He had no principled reason to refuse.
What he noticed, setting them next to Wang Dong’s shoulder spines and Zhang Tianshen’s finger-claws in the collection pouch, was a specific internal resistance he couldn’t fully suppress. He could make himself act cold. He could make himself harvest what needed to be harvested. He couldn’t make himself feel nothing about doing it.
Feeding mutant Activity cores to ant larvae crosses a line somewhere.
He didn’t examine where exactly the line was. He noted that it existed, put the cores with the others, and moved on.
Maybe someday, he thought, and let the thought trail off without finishing it.
The Dragon Slayers’ fuel supply was disappointing.
Gasoline: 500 liters. Diesel: 300 liters. Total fuel recovered: 800 liters across both types.
Vajra’s full load capacity was 1,880 liters of diesel across both main tanks and the reserve drum, plus two additional containers when pressed. He’d been running on 180 liters when he arrived in city south. Adding the Dragon Slayers’ 300 liters of diesel brought him to 480 — not quite enough to fill one of the two 540-liter main tanks.
The gasoline was technically usable. His three diesel engines were compression-ignition designs with compression ratios in the 15-to-18 range, which would normally be catastrophic with gasoline’s lower octane tolerance. Under normal conditions, running gasoline through a diesel engine risked cylinder failure from the premature detonation.
Vajra’s engines weren’t operating under normal conditions. The Activity hardening applied to the engine block and cylinder assemblies through six months of Amalgamation had increased their structural tolerance substantially — enough that the occasional use of gasoline, possibly blended with diesel, was an acceptable emergency measure. And if the tolerances still weren’t sufficient, he could use the Extension property to restructure the compression chambers to something closer to a spark-ignition configuration. That was a half-day project at most, given his understanding of both engine types.
He filed the fuel situation as workable but not resolved and directed Li Laotou’s team to load everything.
Li Laotou asked if they could come with him.
“No room.”
Zhang Youhai tried a different angle. “You need support staff, don’t you?”
The two women on the team made the case for domestic utility.
“No.”
Li Laotou accepted this with the equanimity of someone who’d expected it and would have been surprised by any other answer. He gathered his people, exchanged a brief look with Shen Cong that communicated something between thank you and I understand, and led the group toward where Zhu Haifeng was already assembling what he was calling the City South Survivors’ Mutual Aid and Rescue Team.
Shen Cong watched the gathering from the cargo doorway for a few minutes.
It had the organizational quality of a neighborhood association meeting where three competing agendas were being pursued simultaneously and nobody had established parliamentary procedure. Voices overlapping, people talking without listening, occasional sharp disagreements that dissolved before they became anything. The particular energy of a crowd that had been under sustained pressure and had just released it all at once.
He didn’t share Zhu Haifeng’s assessment of where this led. One mutant, a handful of survivors with improvised weapons, no established resource base, and Wang Gen still controlling the river access and the bridges. The rescue team’s immediate problem wasn’t morale. It was that the next challenge was already waiting.
But the energy in the crowd was real, and the thing that had produced it was also real, and those weren’t nothing.
He went inside and started sorting fuel.
The flour bags went into the rear compartment — payment for Li Laotou’s team, set aside to be delivered before he left. Fair exchange was a principle he applied consistently, not because it produced better outcomes in every individual case but because inconsistency produced environments he found harder to navigate than poverty.
He sat with the question of how he felt about the night’s work.
He’d known he would kill people someday. Abstractly, as a prepared statement about the world he’d built Vajra for. Then more concretely, as an assessment of what city south was going to require. Then tonight, when it happened.
It felt like he’d thought it would feel: mildly wrong, not wrong enough to regret, the particular dissonance of acting correctly by a standard he’d chosen and finding that correct and comfortable weren’t the same thing.
The person he’d spoken with yesterday was dead by his hand today. There was a black-humor absurdity to that which he acknowledged without finding funny.
He would do it again.
He retrieved the three mutant Activity cores from the collection pouch and ran readings on each.
Wang Dong: pseudo-Level 0.224. Zhang Tianshen: pseudo-Level 0.356. Wu Wenjun: pseudo-Level 0.397.
He looked at those numbers and frowned.
Zhu Haifeng’s reading: pseudo-Level 0.281.
By the Level system’s logic, Zhu Haifeng should have been the weakest mutant combatant of the four. Zhang Tianshen and Wu Wenjun were both measurably higher. But Zhu Haifeng had been the strongest fighter among them — capable of handling either Dragon Slayer mutant in a solo engagement, and demonstrably superior to Zhang Tianshen in the direct combat he’d observed tonight.
His first hypothesis: Zhu Haifeng had a martial arts background that the others lacked.
He pulled the helmet camera footage, loaded it into the analysis software, and ran punch speed comparisons between Zhu Haifeng and Zhang Tianshen across fifteen usable frames.
Zhu Haifeng was faster. Not by technique — by raw physical capability. The body was simply moving at a higher speed.
Not training. Actually stronger.
Which meant the Level system was missing something.
He sat with this for a while.
The system measured Activity continuity — the rhythm of Active radiation — using Vajra as a calibrated reference point. He’d built the scale around that measurement and it had correctly ordered everything he’d compared so far: Burrowers below Fangwolves, Fangwolves below the Bull Demon King, evolved fish below evolved beasts with full Activity core development. The relative rankings held.
But Zhu Haifeng was stronger than his Level suggested. And the Level system didn’t explain why.
There’s a variable I haven’t found.
He started listing possibilities. The mutation’s specific physical location — cores in the hands versus cores in the spine versus cores in the teeth might produce different distributions of Activity-enhanced physical capability. The duration of development — someone who’d been developing steadily for two months versus someone who’d had a single acute transformation event. The specific Activity-integration pathway for mutants versus iron people versus half-beasts. Something about the relationship between Activity concentration and physical enhancement that wasn’t captured by the continuity measurement alone.
None of these was satisfying. None of them explained the discrepancy clearly enough to build on.
He didn’t have the data to resolve it tonight.
The knock at the door came before he’d decided whether to keep working on it.
“What is it?”
“The rescue team formed tonight,” Zhu Haifeng said. “We want to ask if you’d consider leading it. You’re the strongest person here. You took down the Dragon Slayers. People trust that you’re not someone who preys on survivors. It would mean a lot to have you.”
Shen Cong thought about what that commitment would actually require — the daily presence, the conflict resolution, the resource management, the exposure to every person in city south who wanted something from whoever led the organization.
“And you?” he asked.
“I’d serve as deputy. Support role.”
“Not interested.”
Zhu Haifeng absorbed this. “Is there anything that would change your answer?”
“No.”
(End of Chapter 70)