No moon tonight. The Milky Way was out in full.

Shen Cong stood on top of Vajra in his cleaned armour, watching the stars blink. A night breeze carried the faint smell of earth and damp stone, and breathing it in felt surprisingly pleasant — cool and clean in the lungs. The post-apocalyptic weather ran to extremes, but the air quality was genuinely better than before. Assuming you filtered out the alpha, beta, gamma, and X-ray radiation saturating everything.

Activity was radiation too, of course. Just a fundamentally different kind.

He turned that thought over slowly. A year from now, two years — given the rate at which Activity radiation was reshaping the world, would the species that existed before the apocalypse even still exist? Ordinary humans included?

Blowflies exposed to Activity meat produce mutated offspring in the next generation. The first generation that ate Activity peaches mutated directly. Humans might follow the same pattern. Rebuild a civilisation over a few generations and what comes out the other side might be genuinely strange.

People with mouths full of iron teeth. People with ten blade-fingernails. People with bone spurs through their skin. And a population of iron people wandering the land bonded to armoured fortresses on wheels.

From a physiological standpoint, Shen Cong had always leaned toward thinking of Activity-induced mutation as a radiation sickness. From a personal standpoint, he preferred to think of it as an evolutionary opportunity — the kind that produced people who could grab fate by the throat.

Those two readings weren’t necessarily incompatible.

A pulse of warmth spread through his body — Vajra exchanging a portion of its Activity across their bond, another quiet increment of enhancement. He felt his Activity Value tick upward: 1.184H to 1.187H. A gain of 0.003H.

Evolution.

He closed his fist slowly, feeling the strength in it.

Activity was a strange substance. It had torn through the frameworks of pre-apocalypse physics and replaced them with something that superficially resembled physical law while casually violating it. It had reshaped the living world — at minimum this stretch of Anhui, Hefei and Chaohu and everything between — in ways that still didn’t fully make sense.

Metal had come alive.

Bone was trending toward metal. Tree bark was trending toward metal.

Activity also produced something he still couldn’t fully articulate: a perceptual state. An extension of the senses into the field around him. Abstract and unnatural to describe, but completely natural in experience — like having a set of additional hands he’d always had but only recently noticed.

Through that perception he’d built an emotional connection with the two ants in Compartment 11. Through it he could read the Activity content of any mutant creature he encountered closely enough — not just approximate, but precise to four decimal places if he took his time with it. The H-unit system he used wasn’t instrument-derived; it was perception-derived, calibrated against Vajra as the baseline unit of one.

He understood that no one else in Juchao district had developed this kind of systematic approach. The other evolved people were still at the conceptual surface — Activity as “evolution factor” or “spiritual energy,” no framework for measurement beyond rough power comparisons. His bull-strength scale had been the same thing at first, just more intuitive. The H-system was its successor: more precise, more consistent, more useful.

Though he kept the bull-strength shorthand for his own internal reference. Seven-bull. 7.1, to be exact, if he was being precise about it.

He shook his head and pulled himself out of the spiral of private theorising.

Night breeze. Stars. Comfortable.

The radar display on the laptop at his feet showed several light points converging on his position. He raised his binoculars and found Li Weijun and Zhao Yalan approaching along the mountain path, a small escort of camp guards behind them.

Time to go find meteorite fragments.

He went back inside Vajra for a final equipment check. Close-quarters weapons. Ranged weapons. Firearms. And the special category: Super-2 Ant Acid.

Blackhead had been eating exceptionally well lately. The crop in its venom sac had been building up pressure, and Shen Cong had been collecting the overflow into a glass vial — carefully, incrementally. The small bottle he’d accumulated was enough, if broken over someone’s face, to kill or near-fatally damage almost anyone at his current level. Including him, if he were careless.

Knowing that had recalibrated something in his threat assessment. Insects, venomous serpents — evolved versions of these needed to be treated with extreme caution regardless of how strong he got. Seven-bull strength did not make a person immune to chemistry.

He thought, briefly, about a mutated black widow spider.

He added a new standing reminder to his internal list: even the smallest creatures can evolve weapons capable of killing something much larger.

Li Weijun and Zhao Yalan were at Vajra’s side by the time he finished.

“Boss Huang?”

“Here.”

“Are you certain you want to go tonight? The mountain at night is dangerous.”

“How far?”

“The shaded face of the front peak. Walking, maybe ten minutes.”

Shen Cong nodded, locked down Vajra’s armour plating, gave Blackhead its standing orders through their bond, and stepped down to face Li Weijun. “I’ll provide necessary protection.”

Li Weijun gestured toward Zhao Yalan. “Since you’re committed to the night run — Xiao Zhao has some concerns about my safety. She’d like to come along. Would you…”

“Fine. Let’s go.”

Starlight only, no moon. Li Weijun and Zhao Yalan picked their way along the mountain path with careful deliberate steps — their bodies were enhanced, but only to around three-bull level, and their night vision hadn’t developed significantly beyond baseline human. The darkness was a genuine constraint for them.

Shen Cong walked the same path as if it were mid-afternoon.

At five-bull level, he’d been able to navigate by moonlight as clearly as by daylight. At his current level, he was approaching owl-tier night vision. Owls operated at roughly a hundred times the light sensitivity of ordinary humans — enough that what humans perceived as a black night sky appeared to an owl as brilliant blue-white, every star resolved to individual clarity. Owls hunted field mice in conditions that would leave a human completely blind.

Shen Cong estimated he was currently at around fifty times baseline human light sensitivity. Not owl-level yet, but in the same conversation.

He suspected it would keep improving. Owls weren’t the biological ceiling. The leaf-tailed gecko operated at around three hundred and fifty times human light sensitivity. The mantis shrimp had a different advantage — not raw sensitivity, but spectral range, with twelve distinct types of colour receptors against the human eye’s three, covering everything from ultraviolet to infrared, with polarised light vision layered on top. Three human receptors produced the full visible spectrum of colour experience. Pigeons had five, and could perceive approximately ten billion distinct colours. Mantis shrimp had twelve.

Though Shen Cong wasn’t particularly interested in colour receptors. What he actually wanted was eagle-range vision — eagles could resolve detail at four to eight times the distance of human eyes, a function of their uniquely structured fovea acting as a biological telephoto lens. The hardest adaptation to reach through simple Activity enhancement, given how different the underlying eye architecture would need to become.

True distance vision at the biological extreme belonged to the ostrich: individuals that could detect movement at ten kilometres, track a small ant at forty-two metres. His benchmark was somewhere in that range.

But all of that was the long view. For now: fifty times baseline, improving. Every sense improving together. Strength was only part of what was changing.

Li Weijun wasn’t a talkative person at the best of times. He kept his head down and his pace steady.

Shen Cong wasn’t talkative by nature and had no intention of changing that.

Zhao Yalan, however, was a different case.

“Boss Huang. You’re very strong.”

Stating the obvious. Shen Cong didn’t respond.

“Driving off the crows, saving the vineyard. Thank you for that.”

“A transaction,” Shen Cong said, without particular warmth.

“Still — it helped the camp, whatever your reasons. Old Li always says judge actions not intentions, and by that measure, you helped us, so I’m thanking you.” She said it with her characteristic bluntness, unpolished but genuine. “If circumstances were different, I’d have a commendation banner made for you. Something like: ‘Outstanding Individual in Friendly Cooperation with Citizens.’ Has a nice ring to it.”

Shen Cong offered his assessment: “Juvenile.”

(End of Chapter 109)