Thud. Crack.

Early morning. Shen Cong stood on Vajra’s roof, working through his combat drills at speed, fists moving in tight, practiced sequences.

His body had absorbed another round of Activity from Vajra’s Exchange. The gains were real.

Now that he understood Vajra’s ceiling was still far from reached, the anxiety around amalgamation had lifted. He’d guided Vajra to absorb a significant portion of the Hummer’s remaining Activity, amalgamated a substantial haul of stripped components, and then remounted the Bull Demon King Totem — dismantled since the Lv1 overflow crisis — back into position.

The field-force storm spun up. Ambient Activity began flowing in.

His goal was simple: amalgamate everything on Vajra that could be amalgamated. Push the Activity Value up, push the Level up, as a stopgap before the major overhaul. The full redesign was a large undertaking — time, labor, and resources that couldn’t be assembled quickly. In the meantime, he needed to keep climbing, keep his combat capability ahead of whatever the world was going to throw at him next.

As a life-integrated iron person, Shen Cong found that his own Talent matched Vajra’s exactly: 1.584H. His current Activity Value had reached 0.967H, placing him at Lv0.611. His physical capabilities had improved again — he’d stopped trying to calculate it in units of bull-strength.

Bull-strength had always been a rough personal shorthand, not a rigorous unit. He’d never actually wrestled a water buffalo or a wild bison, had no real baseline for what one of those animals could output. And his physical enhancement wasn’t just raw force — it was endurance, speed, agility, and resistance all advancing together. A single animal comparison couldn’t capture the whole picture.

Activity Value was cleaner.

With individual variation from Talent differences and Level gaps, the numbers weren’t perfect — but as a general representation of overall capability, they held up well.

Shen Cong sketched out a rough comparison table while he had a quiet moment.

Starting from a baseline of an ordinary person running 100 meters in 15 seconds:

Above 0.2H — approximately 9 seconds flat. World-class sprinter territory. Above 0.3H — 8 to 9 seconds, past the theoretical human limit. Zhang Tianshen, Tao Daqian, and Zhu Haifeng all sat around here. Above 0.5H — 6 to 7 seconds. Shen Cong had reviewed footage of Wang Gen in combat and estimated him at roughly this level. Above 0.9H — sub-4 seconds. His own level. He’d timed himself that morning: approximately 3.7 seconds.

Reaction time, baseline 0.3 seconds for an ordinary person:

Above 0.3H — approximately 0.1 seconds. Around the level of a world-class table tennis player returning a close shot. Above 0.5H — below 0.1 seconds. Wang Gen’s range. His own current level: approximately 0.05 seconds.

Raw striking force, baseline 50 kg for an ordinary adult male, max loaded burst around 150 kg:

Above 0.3H — approximately 200 kg casual, 800 kg maximum burst. Roughly equivalent to Mike Tyson at his peak. In other words: Zhang Tianshen and the others had been throwing Tyson-level punches as a matter of course. His own current output: 400 kg casual striking force. Maximum burst he hadn’t tested precisely — but he knew from experience that a full punch would cave steel plate inward. It would also probably snap his arm. The strength was there. The structural resistance of flesh and bone hadn’t fully caught up.

Taken together, for evolved people specifically, Activity Value gave a reasonably clear picture.

Mapping it back to the old bull-strength scale he’d used before:

One bull: above 0.2H Two bull: above 0.3H Three bull: above 0.5H Four bull: above 0.7H Five bull: above 0.9H Six bull: approximately 1.0H

He acknowledged, without caring much, that this was a fairly obsessive thing to quantify. The Talent variable made it imprecise across individuals anyway. And the moment you introduced evolved beasts, the whole thing broke down — the Dog-Croc was a known anomaly, a creature whose Activity Value hovered around 0.1H but which Shen Cong, at over five-bull strength, still couldn’t handle bare-handed.

Numbers had limits.

He finished the drill set. His entire body was soaked — the heat was crushing, fifty degrees outside and no sign of breaking. This drought had run for nearly a month straight.

Apocalypse weather could kill you just as dead as anything with teeth.

He worked on the Hummer a while longer before the temperature drove him back inside Vajra.

The cab’s air conditioning had been pushing cool air into the living quarters, keeping it marginally habitable. With nowhere useful to go in the midday heat, he turned to interior upgrades — installing the Hummer’s climate unit, stereo system, and display screen in his sleeping quarters, running the wiring properly.

When he was done, the room had become a compact entertainment space. Plug in a USB drive, and he had music, video, and climate control, all from his bunk.

At some point during the afternoon he suited up fully and swept through the Shangzhidu mall nearby. The scavengers had been thorough — the place had been stripped to bare shelving. But when he shifted a large piece of rubble, he found a jewelry counter underneath it, intact. He collected a reasonable pile of pieces — rings, necklaces, a few diamond engagement rings.

He looked at them for a moment, then put them in a container.

Useless, probably. The apocalypse had different currencies now. But waste nothing.

More usefully, he found a large spool of electrical cable and ethernet cable. He hauled it back to Vajra, set it down — and stopped.

He stared at it.

The drone problem. He’d been stuck at 31 meters vertical range because Wi-Fi signal was the limiting factor. He’d accepted that ceiling because he had no obvious alternative.

What if I cut the wireless entirely? What if the drone runs on a cable?

He started working through it immediately. The DJI Phantom 8 was a small quadcopter — payload capacity around 1.5 kilograms. The cable spool he’d found was approximately 100 meters of ethernet cable, weighing roughly 7.5 kilograms.

More than five times the payload capacity.

Even if I strip the battery and replace it with wired power delivery through the cable, I’m still way over weight.

Fiber optic line would work — remove the steel reinforcement core, keep only the optical fiber itself, and the weight would come down to an acceptable range. But bare fiber is fragile. Without the steel core it snaps easily, and anyway I don’t have fiber optic cable.

He sat with the problem. Under current conditions, a wired drone wasn’t feasible without a fundamental redesign of the aircraft itself — larger rotors, higher output motors, more lift capacity overall.

The DJI Phantom 8 would need to be rebuilt from scratch. Bigger.

(End of Chapter 81)