After the drone survey, Shen Cong suited up in the Super Baogai Armor and went in for a closer look.

He’d been refining the armor since the Dog-Croc harvest. The joint sections — shoulders, elbows, knees — were now covered in crocodile hide, stitched in carefully. The hide outperformed chain links on every relevant metric: better tensile strength, better impact resistance, more flexibility, and considerably lighter. He’d also sewn himself a pair of hide gloves, which had taken several attempts to shape properly before they fit without binding.

The limitation was the hide’s condition. The Dog-Croc carcasses had been heavily consumed before he’d retrieved them, leaving no large intact sections. Everything he’d worked with was pieced together from fragments. A full hide armor — light, flexible, Activity-infused — would have been ideal. What he had instead was a hybrid: hide at the joints and extremities, steel plate at the torso, arms, and legs. Heavy plate where coverage mattered most. He called it close enough.

One tradeoff worth noting: crocodile hide amalgamated more slowly than steel. That affected sustained combat performance at the margins. Not a serious concern — he didn’t prefer close-quarters fighting in the first place. His preferred method was to stay inside Vajra and apply ranged weapons to whatever needed applying them. The armor was for fieldwork, not for prolonged melee.

He glanced at the flat-bed trailer as he passed it.

Four Dog-Croc skeletons back there. I should mount a skull on Vajra’s roof. No words required — anyone who sees it will understand immediately.

He finished a Gentle Sand Pear, tossed the core to the ants, and left the vehicle.

The university ruins came into view quickly. Three hundred meters across the athletic field, a mixed group of survivors was working — several men shifting rubble and stacking stones for wall construction, several women hauling loads with improvised stretchers.

He watched for signs of evolution. Reaction speeds, movement patterns, anything outside ordinary human parameters.

Nothing. All of them read as unaugmented.

He circled to the pond and checked the fishing group. Same result — no evolved individuals visible.

Ordinary survivors. All of them.

He settled in to watch a while longer. The fishing group hauled something out of the water — a basin-sized evolved fish, writhing. Several of them converged on it with poles and beat it for a full minute before it stopped moving.

“Gao Qianshan — take this back. We’ll keep going.” The group’s apparent leader, a young man, directed another young man by name.

Gao Qianshan nodded, hoisted the bloody fish onto his shoulder, and started walking back toward the athletic field. Shen Cong tracked his path, waited until he’d reached a stretch of collapsed building away from sightlines, and moved.

He came up from behind and had the man’s mouth covered before he could react, pulling him into a corner against the wall.

“Mmph—”

Shen Cong swept the area with a glance, voice flat: “Shake your head if you want to die. Nod if you want to live.”

An opening that worked every time.

Gao Qianshan nodded vigorously.

“Good. I ask, you answer. If I’m satisfied with the answers, you go free. If you try to mislead me, I’ll leave you looking like that fish. Understood?”

More nodding.

Shen Cong released his hand. “What group are you with?”

Gao Qianshan didn’t turn around — kept his back to Shen Cong, body held carefully still, voice unsteady: “We’re… students from Chaohu University.”

“Survivors?”

“If you mean from the disaster — yes. There were more of us at the start. Just our group made it.”

“How did you shelter from the storm?”

“Tangshan, the mountain over there. When the heavy rain hit we went up.”

“How many in your group?”

“Twenty-three.”

“All students?”

“Two are teachers.”

“What have you been living on?”

“Scavenging, mostly. The campus convenience store and cafeteria had supplies at first. After that ran out we started hunting. There’s a large lake nearby with evolved fish in it — that’s what we eat now.”

Gao Qianshan was answering everything readily. Shen Cong considered, then: “Have you encountered the fire brigade?”

“Are you… are you with the fire brigade, sir?”

Sir.

Shen Cong was twenty-two years old. He processed this with mild irritation. “Have you encountered them or not. Details.”

“Yes — okay, yes. I’ll explain.”

On the day the apocalypse storm hit, Gao Qianshan and the others had been in the campus cafeteria. The building held. The food stores lasted until the storm broke. After that they’d organized, elected two leaders — a female teacher named Wang Yingying and a student council sports representative named Zhou Yajun — and set out toward the city looking for government rescue teams.

They found a group of survivors instead. One of them had a face described as blue-green and mottled, with one blind eye.

These people claimed to be fire brigade personnel, official government rescue workers.

The students had believed them. That night, teacher Wang Yingying and two female students were assaulted. When the students tried to intervene, two were killed. The blind-eyed man was beyond what they could fight.

Zhou Yajun organized them. He waited until the man left to hunt, then got everyone moving. They fled back to Chaohu University and hadn’t left the area since, hoping eventually for real government rescue.

The first storm had arrived without warning and killed several more. Twenty-three remained.

They’d built a camp, fished the local pond, maintained a perimeter, and waited.

The camp had been destroyed by the second storm. They were rebuilding it now.

“Blue-green face, one blind eye.” Shen Cong ran it against his mental inventory of the district’s evolved people. Zhu Haifeng had given him a fairly thorough accounting — appearance details included — of everyone significant who’d remained in Juchao after the military evacuation. No match.

“Besides that group — any others?”

“Once, when we were scavenging ruins. We saw them from a distance. They had guns. We didn’t approach.”

Five minutes of questioning gave him the full picture. Twenty-one students, two teachers. Wang Yingying and Zhou Yajun leading. They’d spent the entire post-apocalypse period within close range of the university campus — no meaningful intelligence about the wider area, limited understanding of what had actually happened, aware that animals had changed but without the framework of Activity or evolution to make sense of it.

“You can turn around.”

Gao Qianshan’s tension had eased somewhat through the conversation. He turned.

His mouth fell open.

The Super Baogai Armor, seen up close, apparently had an effect.

Joint sections wrapped in the grey-black hide of something unknown, the underlying bone structure showing dark silver metallic sheen at the seams. Steel plate at the torso, arms, and legs, bright grey. Helmet flanked by two large curved fangs. And at the very top of the helmet — two Sharp Eagle tail feathers, fifty centimeters long, dark grey-black, moving in the light breeze.

Shen Cong had liked the feathers immediately upon retrieving them. Something about them felt right — like the pheasant-tail plumes on an ancient general’s helmet, or the two feathers on Sun Wukong’s headband. He didn’t have pheasant tails, so Sharp Eagle feathers it was.

He stood 177 centimeters without the armor. With the full suit and helmet he was closer to 185. Add fifty centimeters of upright feather.

Gao Qianshan looked up at what his brain was processing as a two-meter figure in war armor and stopped producing words.

“Who you’re speaking to isn’t important,” Shen Cong said, keeping his voice neutral. “I’m here to offer a trade. I need people to search this area for scrap metal components. In exchange I can provide food and medicine. Go find Zhou Yajun or Wang Yingying and bring them to the expressway. My vehicle is there.”

“You have medicine—” Something unlocked in Gao Qianshan’s expression. “Yes. Yes, I’ll go get them right now.”

The reaction told Shen Cong what he’d suspected from the drone footage — someone in the group was sick, or injured, or both.

“Expressway. Come find me.”

He turned and walked back without waiting for a response.

(End of Chapter 95)