The storm showed no signs of letting up after an hour of observation. Shen Cong stopped watching and went back to bed.
He slept until eight the next morning. The downpour was still going strong outside. He wasn’t the type to spend a whole day horizontal — he got up, moved to the cargo bay, and started organizing his accumulated materiel. The main task: sorting through the bone-gold weapons and Activity cores taken from Wang Gen’s group and the Dragon Slayers.
The tally: Zhang Tianshen’s ten finger-claw cores. Tao Daqian’s ten finger-claw cores. Wu Wenjun’s four canine cores. Dahaizi’s four canine cores. Wang Dong’s two shoulder spine plates.
Zhang Tianshen had also carried a bone-gold hammer — the hammerhead was a substantial Activity core registering at 0.186H, roughly equivalent to a weak evolved beast. What creature it had come from, Shen Cong couldn’t determine. Internal skeleton, probably. He had no reference for it.
Beyond those, everything confiscated from Wang Gen’s operation came in for inspection.
One curved blade made from something resembling a Tumour-Pig tusk. Four daggers fashioned from what looked like Fangwolf fangs. Two cleavers from Gnawrat incisors. And one long spear with a curved tip that appeared to be rhinoceros horn.
Most of it was weak — early-stage evolved beast material, the products of Wang Gen’s group hunting low-Level targets in the district’s first weeks. The exception was the rhino horn spear tip, which registered at 0.236H, not far off the Bull Demon King horns Shen Cong already carried.
The craftsmanship across the board was rough. For someone who’d spent years doing precision metalwork in a warehouse, looking at these weapons was almost painful. He stripped them down to raw Activity cores and set them aside for reprocessing — anything worth keeping would be remade properly, anything substandard went straight to the old-mature larva as feed.
The Short-sting ant colony’s original Activity cores were nearly exhausted by now, consumed steadily through the larva’s appetite. Most of the others had already been fashioned into weapons at this point. He picked through what remained with a critical eye.
What do I do with the bird beaks?
He turned the Sharp Eagle’s beak over in his hands. Two sections — a larger upper mandible, a smaller lower — meeting at a slightly curved point. The shape didn’t lend itself to conventional weapon design. He tried the obvious alternative: run both halves at high frequency and see if they could generate a resonance field the way the Bull Demon King horns did.
They didn’t. The size mismatch between upper and lower mandible created unequal Activity values in each half, and the imbalance prevented the field from closing into a stable loop.
The bird beaks went into storage.
He turned to the rhino horn.
Good curvature, reasonable Activity value — but Wang Gen’s people had handled it crudely, drilling a hole through the middle section to mount a shaft. Structural integrity compromised. And a long spear wasn’t a weapon Shen Cong valued particularly; he’d always prefer a blade.
The front section could become a javelin. The very tip could be trimmed into an arrowhead. That left the perforated base — too damaged for any practical weapon use.
He looked at it for a moment.
A rhino horn cup.
It was an absurd idea, and he liked it immediately. He’d already mounted a crescent blade made from a Tumour-Pig tusk on the cab wall as pure decoration. A drinking vessel carved from an Activity-core rhinoceros horn was exactly the same category of indulgence, and he was going to make one.
Living alone required small pleasures.
He set to work. The tip came off cleanly and was shaped into an arrowhead — notably higher grade than his standard fang arrows. If he’d had this during the Wang Gen fight, that first crossbow bolt would have punched clean through the Hummer’s windshield rather than just cracking it. The javelin head that followed would be equally devastating — well above fang javelin standard, a genuine ace in reserve.
Then the cup. Hollow out the base, sandpaper the interior smooth, buff the exterior. Simple enough. The question was decoration — traditional rhino horn cups always had something carved into the surface. Dragons, phoenixes, qilin, pixiu.
He wanted to carve Vajra onto it.
Thirty minutes later, he understood clearly that he had no talent for carving whatsoever. The attempt was genuinely terrible. He couldn’t even produce a recognizable stick figure.
He sanded the whole surface smooth and accepted the plain cup.
Mineral water drunk from a rhino horn cup tasted exactly like mineral water drunk from anything else.
The feeling, however, was considerably more distinguished. He made a mental note that ivory chopsticks would complete the aesthetic nicely, then filed it under things the apocalypse had made difficult to source.
He leaned back against the bedroom headboard, window cracked beside him, and watched the storm. Daytime and night had become indistinguishable — the rain pressed a uniform darkness against every surface, and the hours moved through it without leaving marks.
His thoughts drifted.
How were the southern district survivors sheltering through this? What was the Hefei military doing — disaster protocols, redeployment? Did the Oasis get weather like this? Had the fire brigade identified Vajra yet? Would the drought return after the rain broke, or would flooding become the next problem? How far had evolution come since the world ended?
He turned on the stereo. A random shuffle landed on an English track.
All around me are familiar faces Worn out places, worn out faces Bright and early for their daily races Going nowhere, going nowhere And their tears are filling up their glasses No expression, no expression Hide my head, I wanna drown my sorrow No tomorrow, no tomorrow …It’s a very, very Mad world.
Outside: the roar and hiss of rain. Inside: the song, slow and quiet. Together they made something — a painting built from sound, with all of Shen Cong’s mood somewhere inside it.
He rolled his neck, pulled himself back from wherever his thoughts had gone, and steadied himself. Picked up the laptop, plugged in the USB drive, pulled up the communications research files he’d been working through. Knowledge needed to be accumulated. For Vajra’s evolution, for his own — he had to keep working.
The rain began easing around one in the afternoon. By then it had dropped to a light drizzle, the sky brightening slowly from black to a grey that at least allowed visibility.
Shen Cong pulled on a rain jacket and climbed to Vajra’s roof.
Through the binoculars: water in every direction. Flag Mountain and Drum Mountain stood like two small islands in a brown inland sea, the floodwaters reaching to every horizon. Debris moved through the current — truck frames, shop signage, tangles of wire fencing — carried somewhere unknown by the flow.
Then he stopped.
In the direction of Juchao’s main urban district, several figures clung to a floating tree trunk, heads barely above the water, mouths open. Even at this distance, it was obvious they were screaming.
Before he could focus the binoculars properly, the water surface around the trunk shifted.
An enormous head rose.
“Dog-Croc.”
He got the words out just as it erupted from the water — jaws spread wide — and swallowed both survivors whole in a single lunge.
(End of Chapter 87)