By the following morning, the floodwater had drained completely. Only scattered puddles remained in low-lying ground. The heavy rain had stopped, but a light drizzle was still falling, keeping the earth wet and the sky uniformly grey. No clearing in sight.

In weather like this, the wired drone version 2.0 wasn’t going anywhere.

Shen Cong stayed inside Vajra, alternating between studying communications research and checking on the larvae.

By midday, both had changed.

The old-mature larva had eaten the last of the Dog-Croc plate dust ground off during last night’s armor fitting — and then stopped eating. It was circling the pupa now, rubbing its body against the casing repeatedly. Already the size of two large cooking oil drums stacked together, it was visibly shedding: the outer skin beginning to loosen and peel away in slow sections.

A third molt.

Shen Cong stared at this. Standard ant larvae molted twice before pupating. He had never seen, read about, or had any reason to expect a third molt. This creature had comprehensively stopped following the rules.

The molting larva’s Activity radiation was spiking erratically, and its emotional state — transmitted through the bond — was agitated. It kept ramming its body against the pupa, and with its current mass, those impacts weren’t gentle. Shen Cong watched it dent the pupa’s casing with one particularly hard collision.

“Settle down.”

He pushed calm through the perceptual link deliberately. The larva received it and transmitted back something that read as submission — the agitation dropped, though it kept rubbing against the walls of the plastic container.

Ten minutes of observation later, the molt completed. The old skin fell away and revealed what was underneath.

The new surface wasn’t the translucent milky-white of before. The larva’s body now caught the light with a silver-white metallic sheen, a texture that looked less like chitin and more like flexible metal.

Metallic gradation. Already.

He pulled up the numbers immediately.

Previous readings: Lv0.231 / Activity Value 0.095H / Talent 0.411H. Current readings: Lv0.251 / Activity Value 0.157H / Talent 0.625H.

The Level had barely moved. But Activity Value had jumped by sixty percent, and the Talent figure had increased by more than fifty percent — from 0.411H to 0.625H, approaching the Bull Demon King’s ceiling.

He turned that over carefully.

Talent was supposed to be fixed. The bottle’s capacity didn’t change — that was the whole premise of the Water Bottle Theory. Vajra’s Talent had sat at 1.584H without moving since he’d first measured it. The framework treated Talent as an individual’s hard evolutionary ceiling, the limit written into the organism at some fundamental level.

And this larva had just rewritten its own ceiling.

“Can Talent actually be increased?”

He stroked the larva’s new surface — it felt like soft metal under his fingers — and thought about what had been different in this larva’s development. The answer was obvious once he looked for it: it had consumed an enormous quantity of Activity cores from the Short-sting ant colony. Cores from its own species. From its own queen.

Which connected directly to something he’d been carrying at the back of his mind since Wang Gen’s compound.

One of Wang Gen’s men, trying to prove his own innocence, had mentioned that Wang Gen’s inner circle referred to evolved people as blood food. Shen Cong had never fully understood the term — in his framework, any Activity-rich meat qualified as blood food, so why specifically target evolved people when evolved beasts were available?

Now he thought he understood.

Consuming Activity cores from the same species — or possibly related species — might have a catalytic effect on Talent. It doesn’t just add Activity Value. It expands the ceiling itself.

And if that was right:

The reason I keep feeling that pull to consume the Hummer’s original activation metal — is Vajra trying to absorb it because it would increase Talent? Is that what Amalgamation of primary-activation metal actually does?

He looked at the chunks of original Hummer framework stowed in the cargo bay.

Vajra couldn’t amalgamate them. The repulsion had been absolute.

Which means… I’d have to eat them myself.

The desire to consume the metal was real and persistent. His ability to actually bite through steel with human teeth was not.

He filed the problem under unresolved and lifted the old-mature larva out of the container. It had outgrown the space — even at rest, it had no room to move properly. The metallic sheen, the sheer size, the familiar warmth of the perceptual bond — he realized he’d stopped finding it repulsive entirely. He turned it over in his hands, examining every surface, looking for anything that might indicate an Activity core forming.

Nothing identifiable yet.

“How many more molts before you pupate?”

No useful answer came through the bond. He put the larva back, dropped a salvaged car door panel in after it for feeding, and turned to the pupa.

He was reaching to move it back into the container when it cracked.

Not from the earlier collision damage — from inside.

The pupa had been reorganizing for days. Now it was done.

The casing split along a seam, and what emerged wasn’t a larva anymore.

It was an ant.

A large pair of mandibles came first, working at the shell. One extension of the body, then another — the creature unfolding from its compressed pupa configuration, straightening, pressing outward until the casing gave way completely.

Shen Cong got his first clear look.

Calling it a worker or soldier felt inadequate — it had grown beyond either category. Compared to the Short-sting workers and soldiers he’d encountered before, this wasn’t just a size increase. The head was proportionally larger, the body coloration deeper black with a high gloss finish. The mandibles were Activity cores, each measuring at least twenty centimeters.

“Come here.”

The newly emerged ant moved to his hand immediately. Complete compliance. Its antennae touched his arm repeatedly — recognition, affection, the bond expressing itself through the only language it had.

He got the tape measure out.

Total body length: 62 cm. Mandibles alone: 21 cm. Head: 11 cm. Thorax: 8 cm. Petiole segments: 6 cm. Abdomen: 10 cm. Leg length: 25 cm. Antennae: 22 cm. Stinger at the tail: 6 cm.

Body weight: 14 kg. The exoskeleton was black, high-gloss, cold to the touch like metal — metallic gradation already clearly visible across the entire surface.

“You need a name. Something appropriately imposing — Ant-Force God has the right energy, but that name should go to the larva when it finishes. It’ll earn it. You’re big and black and your head is enormous, so—”

He considered.

“Blackhead.”

He said it, immediately felt that something was slightly off about it, couldn’t identify what, and decided it didn’t matter.

Blackhead, for its part, responded to the name with what the bond transmitted as something close to delight. Post-metamorphosis, its emotional range was noticeably richer and more distinct than it had been as a larva — cleaner signals, more differentiated states.

Its comprehension had expanded too. When Shen Cong pointed at the wrench on the table and indicated he wanted it brought over, Blackhead needed a few demonstrations before completing the task reliably. But it completed it. Abstract instruction, logical inference, task execution — the brain that had reorganized inside the pupa had come out considerably larger and more capable than the one that went in.

The growth in Blackhead’s intelligence was, frankly, alarming.

(End of Chapter 90)