Woniu Mountain Park was Juchao’s main urban park — the entire district had grown up around the mountain. Using it as a landmark, Shen Cong oriented himself without difficulty.

He was parked at the intersection of Renmin Road and Tuanjie Road, beside what had once been a major shopping mall — the Chaohu branch of Shangzhidu.

He swept the area. No survivors, no half-beasts, no evolved creatures. Once he was satisfied it was clean, he laid out the hunting traps in a perimeter and finally let the tension out of his shoulders. He slept.

When he woke, he was at full sharpness.

Morning drill, perimeter check, everything calibrated back to baseline — then Shen Cong turned his attention to Wang Gen’s Hummer. He needed to complete his research before the vehicle’s Activity bled out entirely.

He laid out a full list of questions to investigate:

How do a vehicle’s vital signs change after losing its core? Can Vajra amalgamate the Hummer? Can forced Activity injection sustain the vehicle’s life? How do the Activity radiation signatures of the Hummer and Vajra compare? Can Activity be transferred wholesale? What happens if the Hummer is dismantled? Where does the Hummer’s Activity originate — what’s the root structure?

No particular logical order. Mostly he was working through ideas as they surfaced.

These were questions he’d wanted to investigate for a long time. But Vajra was his life — literally — and he’d never been willing to run experiments on it. The Plastic Rabbit’s motorcycle would have been an ideal research subject, but the ant colony had consumed it before he’d had the chance.

The Hummer would have to do.

Its Activity was draining faster than a dead animal’s would. Overnight it had already dropped by approximately pseudo-Lv0.02.

The gaseous-liquid-solid framework had been confirmed from multiple angles by now.

He ran the experiments methodically, one step at a time, keeping one eye on the surrounding area throughout. The drought had worsened steadily — daytime temperatures were approaching fifty degrees Celsius. That kind of heat was enough to kill an unprepared survivor. Most people had retreated underground, only emerging around dusk.

Juchao in daylight was a silent city. No voices, no machinery, no cicadas, no animals.

First he guided Vajra through a single Amalgamation attempt on the Hummer. It went smoothly — Vajra absorbed approximately pseudo-Lv0.01 of the Hummer’s Activity, enough to cover the losses from last night’s fight. Then he stopped.

Not because he was worried about killing the Hummer outright.

The siphon phenomenon — that Sword of Damocles still hanging over his head — was the reason. He couldn’t let Vajra’s Activity climb past a certain threshold, or the overflow would trigger: excess Activity forcing itself through Exchange into Shen Cong’s body, whether he was ready for it or not.

He documented the Amalgamation carefully. What he observed was a synchronization of radiation frequencies — Vajra “digesting” the Hummer’s Activity by bringing their frequencies into alignment.

Next, he attempted a full Amalgamation — not just absorption, but genuine merging. His approach: use Vajra’s radiation frequency to interfere with the Hummer’s, nudging the leaderless vehicle’s frequency into sync with Vajra’s. The question was whether that sync would cause the Hummer to become part of Vajra, or remain a separate entity.

The result was disappointing.

Vajra successfully interfered with the Hummer’s frequency — brought them into alignment — but the repulsion between the two was massive. Full amalgamation was impossible.

Why? Is it the Level difference? Are Vajra’s radiation continuity and the Hummer’s radiation continuity fundamentally incompatible?

No, that doesn’t quite fit. Continuity is a variable quantity — once Vajra interferes with the Hummer’s frequency, continuity ought to be adjustable too. There must be another variable I haven’t identified.

He sat with the problem, frowning.

The siphon incident had already planted doubt about using continuity alone as the measure of Level. That doubt had deepened when he’d confirmed that evolved people like Zhang Tianshen showed no clean proportional relationship between continuity and physical enhancement. Something was missing from the model. He’d suspected it for weeks.

What is the missing variable?

He went back to the comparison — Vajra against the Hummer, every aspect of their Activity signatures, examined in fine detail. Hours of careful measurement.

And then he found it.

The clue was buried inside the Activity radiation itself — in the state of how Activity and metal were bonded together.

He’d always treated Activity and the metal it activated as two separate things.

That’s the error.

Activity is drawn from ambient air, yes — but Activity’s “life” is grounded in the physical matter it bonds to. Metal, primarily. The two together produce the living state. They can’t be considered separately. They must be read as a whole. Together, they construct life.

So — this unified state needs a name. The source of life? No, too dramatic. Activity Source. That feels right.

The moment he named it, he was already excited, already running new tests. He needed to confirm: was the Activity Source the variable he’d been missing all along?

He pulled out his stock of Activity cores and worked through them with fresh eyes.

Activity Source was a subtle thing. Not a physical structure you could point to — more like a conceptual aggregate, something that expressed itself through frequency and other observable properties. It was a projection of the whole system. A mathematical entity.

He struggled to describe it precisely.

The closest analogy he could find — the Water Bottle Theory.

Vajra was the bottle. Activity was the water. Activity Source was the bottle’s capacity. Radiation continuity was how much water the bottle currently holds — what mark on the scale it’s reached.

From the bottle’s capacity and the current fill level, you could calculate how much remained before it was full — which was equivalent to knowing its current Level.

Take a hundred-liter bottle. Twenty liters in: Lv0.2. Fifty liters: Lv0.5. Eighty liters: Lv0.8. Full: Lv1.

Applied to the evolution Level system:

You could now measure three distinct values — the Activity Source limit (total bottle capacity), the radiation continuity (current fill level, expressed as an Activity value), and the resulting Level. The Activity quantity, which he’d call Activity Value with unit H, directly represented both the amount of Activity present and the corresponding combat capability.

He ran the numbers.

Vajra’s current Activity Value: 1.025H. Activity Source limit: 1.584H. Level: Lv0.647.

He found the Hummer’s Activity Source next — post-acid, post-drain — and measured it out. Activity Source limit: 1.193H. Current Level: Lv0.175. Activity Value: 0.208H.

Then he went back through his records and recalculated everything he had data on.

The Bull Demon King: Activity Source limit 0.658H, Level Lv0.327, Activity Value 0.215H.

The Tumour-Pig: Activity Source limit 0.596H, Level Lv0.314, Activity Value 0.187H.

The still-eating old-mature larva: Activity Source limit 0.411H, Level Lv0.224, Activity Value 0.092H.

The pupated larva: Activity Source limit 0.350H, Level Lv0.254, Activity Value 0.089H.

(End of Chapter 79)