Zhao Yalan was loud. She kept finding things to say for the entire walk up, like five hundred ducks that had learned to talk.

Li Weijun must have sensed Shen Cong’s patience thinning, because he put a hand on her arm and redirected. “Boss Huang, we’ve got some distance left. Let me tell you about the meteorite fragments.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ll start by admitting something.” Li Weijun’s voice was measured. “I don’t actually know for certain that there are meteorite fragments there.”

Shen Cong’s eyes cut to him. Cold. “Explain.”

“Don’t get angry yet — hear me out. The meteorite fragment claim came from Liu Zheng. About two weeks ago, Xiao Zhao overheard Liu Zheng and a few of his inner circle talking about meteorite fragments — saying they were connected to evolution somehow, without going into specifics. She told me, and I filed it away.”

He continued. “After that, I started noticing that Liu Zheng’s group would slip away from the rest of us regularly, heading deeper into Fenghuang Mountain alone. I followed them once. Found a cave. That was apparently where they’d located whatever this thing is — and Liu Zheng was saying something about needing to ‘feed’ it. When I went back to look by myself, there was one unusual piece of metal inside. Didn’t look like a meteorite to me.”

“I didn’t touch it — didn’t want Liu Zheng to know I’d found it. Just watched. They kept bringing metal scraps and leaving them in the cave. Then you arrived, the fire brigade was restructured, the Provisional Government was established. I didn’t raise it with anyone because I wasn’t sure yet about Zhu Haifeng’s character.”

“Tonight, when I needed to give you a reason to help us, I thought of it. I can’t perceive anything special about that metal object myself. But Liu Zheng could — he’s an iron person. And you’re an iron person too, and you’ve been collecting metal scraps. I thought there was a reasonable chance it would interest you.”

Shen Cong walked in silence for a moment.

It wasn’t enough. He didn’t like being maneuvered.

“I don’t appreciate that kind of transaction.”

“I sincerely apologise. It was a last resort. Any future dealings between us — you have my word it won’t happen again.” Li Weijun said it without deflection or qualification.

Shen Cong didn’t respond to that either. He wasn’t in the mood to make anything of it right now.

Ten minutes, Li Weijun had said. At their pace — his pace, really, since the other two were picking through the dark carefully — it wasn’t far. But Shen Cong felt the discomfort growing with every step he took away from Vajra.

He’d operated away from the truck before. But his eyes had never entirely left it. Vajra had become something structural in his psychology — less a vehicle, more an anchor.

Now they were crossing over the ridge of Fenghuang Mountain into the shaded face, and Vajra had disappeared from view entirely.

The sensation was something like what he imagined withdrawal felt like. Uncomfortable in a way that had nothing to do with his physical circumstances.

He talked himself through it. This is necessary. I can’t spend the rest of my life locked inside that cab. There will be situations — there already are situations — that require operating away from the truck. The overhaul in Hefei will be one of them: when Vajra is being rebuilt, he won’t have the option of sitting inside it.

The dependency had to be managed. An uncontrolled dependency was a vulnerability.

In his own private accounting, Shen Cong had never conceded that anything was wrong with him. The reliance on Vajra was a habit. The wariness of other people was appropriate caution. The solitude was a preference.

I’m perfectly normal. What’s abnormal is the world. Society collapsed. Human nature went rotten. That’s not my problem.

He kept walking.

The cave entrance appeared at the base of a rock face on the mountain’s shaded side, mostly concealed behind a large boulder. Li Weijun put his shoulder into moving it — it took effort — and the darkness inside was revealed.

“The metal object is in there.” Li Weijun took the torch Zhao Yalan handed him and raised it toward the opening.

Shen Cong shoved him sideways.

Before either of them had processed the movement, his fang knife was already out and swinging in a sharp arc toward the cave mouth. A clear metallic ring — knife connecting with something hard.

One strike.

He immediately pulled back three metres from the entrance.

Li Weijun and Zhao Yalan caught up with events a second later. “Boss Huang?”

“Snake.” Shen Cong was watching the cave mouth. His helmet had infrared night vision built in, but he rarely used it anymore — his fifty-times light sensitivity covered most situations without assistance. The darkness around him was essentially daylight.

When Li Weijun had moved the boulder, he’d seen it immediately: a large snake, coiled inside the cave. Normal python dimensions — not remotely in the Golden Python’s category, but large. He’d struck before it could react to the opening.

“Snake?” Zhao Yalan echoed.

Li Weijun directed the torch beam inside. The snake was visible now — pale purple patterning across dark scales, coiled, tongue flicking at the cave entrance.

Once the immediate threat was confirmed and understood, the tension dropped a notch.

“What species? That big — is it a python?” Zhao Yalan asked.

Li Weijun shook his head. “Triangular head. It’s venomous. The body size is probably Activity-induced growth. Those markings — I think it’s a 土公蛇. A Yangtze Short-Tailed Viper.”

The Yangtze Short-Tailed Viper was a pit viper common to the middle and lower Yangtze basin — medium venom potency, necrotic rather than neurotoxic in effect. A bite caused tissue death, sometimes serious enough to require amputation, though in practice a defensive bite from a non-hunting snake usually delivered limited venom and could be managed with basic treatment.

In practice, before the apocalypse.

Now was different. Shen Cong treated it with the full weight of his current threat assessment. A small ant had become Blackhead — producing Super-2 Acid that could dissolve armour plating and kill or maim anything at his level. A venomous pit viper that had evolved in an environment saturated with Activity, possibly near a cave containing whatever the “meteorite fragment” actually was, could be carrying toxins that operated on an entirely different scale. Necrotic venom that could eat through the Super Baogai Armor was not an outcome he was willing to test.

“Stand back,” he said.

He took the rhino horn javelin from his back — his highest-powered ranged bone-gold weapon — and moved five metres from the cave mouth. One clean kill, no opportunity for a counter.

A snake’s primary sensory apparatus was the Jacobson’s organ — detecting airborne chemical traces — and the pit organ, reading infrared heat signatures from living bodies. The Super Baogai Armor’s metal coverage was evidently blocking enough of his heat signature that the snake hadn’t registered the threat. Its tongue kept working the air. Its body shifted in slow, incurious loops.

Shen Cong raised the javelin.

He threw.

The rhino horn caught the snake just off-centre of the skull, punching through both coils of body and pinning it to the cave floor. The snake convulsed, jaw opening wide. Two enormous fangs appeared, and then venom — spraying, not dripping — hit the ground. Where it struck, the earth began to smoke. The soil itself was dissolving.

Shen Cong already had the crossbow up. Two arrows, fast. One through the midsection. One through the head.

The snake stopped moving.

Li Weijun went in first with the torch, grabbed the carcass, and dragged it out. “That’s enormous. Hundred-fifty jin at least.” He paused, doing a retrospective reconstruction of the three strikes. “And Boss Huang’s precision — first throw pinned both coils to the floor. Second arrow hit the seven-inch point. Third arrow took the head.”

He stepped carefully around the patch of earth where the venom had landed, and the soil there was still faintly smoking. He exhaled. “And I need to thank you for the save. If I’d turned that torch on and had the snake lunge at me before you spotted it…” He didn’t finish the thought. “I don’t think I would have survived a bite. Not with venom that does that to dirt.”

Shen Cong was already moving, not interested in ceremony. He retrieved the javelin and arrows from the carcass, then went into the cave and started clearing aside the pile of metal scraps stacked in the corner.

Underneath: a dark silver lump of metal, roughly irregular, dense.

He turned back to Li Weijun. “This is what Liu Zheng called the meteorite fragment?”

Then he noticed Zhao Yalan crouching over the snake carcass with a knife in hand.

“Don’t touch the snake. That’s mine.”

He walked over, took it back, pinned the head firmly, scooped earth from the ground, and packed it carefully over the tips of both fangs. The remaining venom in the gland had to be preserved intact. If the toxin could be studied and its concentration and mechanism understood, it had significant potential as a weapon — coating bone-gold arrowheads with a necrotic agent that operated at Activity-augmented potency would change the calculus of ranged combat considerably.

He set the carcass aside and looked at Zhao Yalan with an expression that communicated exactly what he thought of the interruption.

Privately, he found himself almost hoping she’d push the issue. It would give him a reason.

“Xiao Zhao,” Li Weijun said, reading the room accurately and quickly. “Quiet.” He turned back to Shen Cong. “Boss Huang — yes, that metal object is what Liu Zheng referred to as the meteorite fragment. Though I agree, it doesn’t look much like one.”

It didn’t.

Because it wasn’t.

Shen Cong had known from the first moment his eyes landed on it. The object was radiating the same sensation as the original activation metal from the Hummer’s frame structure — that specific compulsive pull, the urge to consume it, identical in character.

This was primary-activation metal. Not a meteorite. Liu Zheng had called it “feeding” it, and what that meant now made sense: original activation metal absorbed ordinary metal, used it to repair or grow itself. The metal scraps Liu Zheng had been leaving in the cave were food.

But something was slightly different here. The quality of alive that this metal had — distinct from Vajra, distinct from the Hummer, distinct from the fire truck or the motorcycle. Those were all activation metal that had bonded to vehicles and been shaped by that bond. This felt different in character, as though it had developed differently, along a separate path.

He crouched in front of it and extended his perception carefully inward.

(End of Chapter 110)