Whatever Liu Zheng had been — good person or bad, beacon of hope or petty dictator — he was dead.

Shen Cong felt nothing particular about it. A saint with ten lifetimes of good deeds behind him got the same outcome if he came after Shen Cong. In an ordered society, Shen Cong followed the rules of that society. In this world, with no laws and no enforcement, the only guarantee of safety was the other person’s death. Simple arithmetic.

What gave him actual pause was the question of the surviving fire brigade members.

Reading between the lines of their answers, he could tell they’d genuinely respected Liu Zheng — the man had used the Activity grapes strategically, rewarded loyalty, treated his inner circle well. They weren’t just afraid of him; some of them had believed in him.

A handful of ordinary people he could release without concern — they posed no realistic threat. But the fire brigade wasn’t a handful of ordinary people. Nine hundred survivors and several surviving evolved people sat behind them at Fenghuang Mountain. Sending them back unmanaged created complications he didn’t need.

He thought it through and chose the careful option. The fire brigade members were folded into the salvage team — labor in exchange for not being shot. Then he sent Zhou Yajun and Gao Qianshan south to find Zhu Haifeng and bring him up.

Among evolved people in Juchao, Zhu Haifeng was the closest thing to trustworthy Shen Cong had found. Naive, but useful because of it.

Zhu Haifeng had history with the fire brigade. That made him the natural instrument for what Shen Cong had in mind: fracture the Liu Zheng faction’s residual influence, neutralize the remaining dangerous variable — a mutant named Ran Tai, the last member of Liu Zheng’s inner circle — and reconstitute the fire brigade under new leadership. Build something that could actually manage Juchao’s nine hundred survivors without the vineyard politics and the tolerated violence.

Remove Liu Zheng’s shadow from the organization entirely.

The operational path was clear. Zhu Haifeng had no love for Liu Zheng. Deputy commander Li Weijun and logistics officer Zhao Yalan were persuadable — they’d been the opposition faction internally for months. The neutral trio were manageable. Only Ran Tai represented a real obstacle, and Ran Tai could be dealt with when the moment was right.

He mapped it all out methodically, then caught himself and exhaled.

“I don’t want to kill people. I don’t want complications. Why does someone always have to come after me.”

Wang Yingying received an assignment: supervisor. Her job was watching the fire brigade members during salvage work.

The morning’s gunfight had thoroughly frightened the students and teachers. In their mental model, both Shen Cong and the fire brigade probably occupied adjacent categories of dangerous. But Shen Cong had put one man against a squad of armed people and won without apparent effort, and had done it without hesitation or visible emotion. That settled the question of which dangerous entity to align with.

Wang Yingying was operating primarily out of fear, and she knew it, and she did the job carefully as a result.

With supervision handled, Shen Cong turned his attention to the three captured vehicles.

The jeep and van were intact — new tires and they’d be functional. The fire truck was damaged. Two detonators exploding inside the cab had deformed the driver’s compartment significantly, and with Liu Zheng dead the truck’s Activity was bleeding away. Still valuable, though.

It was a Jiangte water tanker, six-wheel double-cab configuration, with twin high-pressure water cannons mounted on the roof. Inside the cab: ammunition, bone-gold weapons, Liu Zheng’s personal effects — lighter, extinguisher, fire axe, crowbar — and a cluster of deep red-purple grapes.

The grapes radiated Activity in dense, visible waves.

So these are the Activity fruit.

He washed them and tried one.

Good flavor. High water content, clean sweetness. The Activity spread through him immediately after — warmer than a Gentle Sand Pear, considerably gentler than an Activity Peach. A middle point between the two in terms of intensity and diffusion rate.

“They’re calling these ‘Evolution Grapes,'” one of the fire brigade members had mentioned — yīn pútao, grapes rich with evolutionary factor.

Shen Cong found the name painfully uncreative. He said so internally at some length.

Then he accepted it anyway. He wasn’t going to impose his naming preferences on terminology that nine hundred people had already adopted.

He ran the numbers: Lv0.365 / Activity Value 0.141H / Talent 0.386H. Weaker than the Gentle Sand Pear Tree on every metric — the pear tree sat at Lv0.492 / 0.203H / 0.413H. But the vineyard apparently covered a large area and produced in quantity. Volume compensated for concentration.

Activity Peach, Gentle Sand Pear, Evolution Grape, Veggie Willow, poplar, Iron Lichen — plant evolution follows different rules. The variety resists easy classification. Activity’s effect on mutation across plant types is genuinely difficult to model.

He ate a few more grapes and turned to the fire truck.

His plan: strip it down to a shell and use it as a cargo hauler behind Vajra. The electric tricycle flat-bed was struggling — less than three tons of load and the axles were already showing stress. The fire truck’s frame could handle considerably more.

He wasn’t going to dismantle the truck entirely — not until he’d found a way to work with the original activation metal question. But the powertrain and specialized firefighting equipment had limited value to him. He stripped everything transferable to Vajra and left the rest.

One genuine find: the roof-mounted emergency strobe and siren unit. He pulled the whole assembly and mounted it on Vajra’s cab roof.

Loud, bright, attention-commanding. Useful for scattering lower-intelligence evolved beasts.

Also useful, in certain situations, for impersonating law enforcement.

Zhu Haifeng arrived at dusk, motorcycle engine audible a minute before he appeared, Zhang Youhai and a couple of others behind him. He rolled to a stop at the Mingshi Jiayuan ruins and climbed off.

His eyes found Liu Zheng’s charred remains at the roadside.

“Commander Liu as well—” He stopped himself before he finished the sentence. Started again. “He was a good person, early on. We all respected him. People change, I suppose. At some point he stopped listening to anyone. Became self-serving. Stopped treating ordinary people like they were really the same as him. I don’t know everything that happened after I left.”

He’d already heard the account from Zhou Yajun. He could reconstruct the rest from what he knew of Shen Cong’s patterns.

Shen Cong didn’t soften the conversation with preamble: “Two things. First — take Zhou Yajun’s group into the rescue team. Second — the fire brigade needs to be reconstituted. The vineyard camp is already built and functional. Nine hundred survivors should be there. I want you back in the fire brigade.”

“Reconstituted?”

“Liu Zheng is dead. The organization needs new leadership. I’m going to support your appointment as captain.”

Zhu Haifeng stared.

The reasoning was clear in Shen Cong’s mind, even if he didn’t say it aloud. Zhu Haifeng was — so far as evidence suggested — genuinely principled. A principled person as captain produced a predictable kind of outcome. Someone else as captain produced unknowns. Zhu Haifeng’s appointment would also generate internal friction among the fire brigade’s remaining evolved people, which would keep their attention on each other rather than on Shen Cong. And practically speaking, Shen Cong knew Zhu Haifeng, which made him easier to work with than a stranger.

Every angle of the analysis pointed the same direction.

“My authority in that organization isn’t—”

“Work through it. I’ve interrogated the fire brigade members. I know the capability of every evolved person remaining. Plan carefully and it’s manageable.”

Zhu Haifeng’s expression moved through several states before settling on resigned determination. “Fine. I’ll try for it. But Boss Huang — please — don’t go in with excessive force. The first time, against Zhang Tianshen’s group, you wiped all the evolved people. Second time, Wang Gen — evolved people wiped. Third time, just now, Liu Zheng’s group — all dead. My friend, I genuinely worry you’re going to wipe the fire brigade’s evolved people too.”

Something shifted in Shen Cong’s posture, barely perceptible under the armor.

Zhu Haifeng has opinions about my killing methods.

The observation arrived and immediately began propagating. A person who objected to violence as a tool was a person with constraints on their behavior. Constraints could be exploited. Constraints could also be cover for something else. Zhu Haifeng had seemed trustworthy, but seeming trustworthy was a skill anyone could develop with sufficient motivation.

He might be playing me. He might have been playing me all along.

Be careful.

He’d reminded himself of this before, would remind himself again. This world had too many angles, too many people with hidden agendas, too many reasons for someone to want him vulnerable or dead. No exceptions. No comfortable assumptions.

Trust was a liability he couldn’t afford.

Not even with the most naive-seeming person in the room.

Especially not with the most naive-seeming person in the room.

(End of Chapter 100)