Strictly speaking, firearms ammunition wasn’t the devastating weapon it used to be — not against Shen Cong, at least.

Activity-infused metal, and most non-metallic materials that had absorbed enough Activity, were already past the threshold where standard rounds could reliably penetrate. When he and Wang Gen had been shooting at each other across a standoff that felt like it lasted forever, both the Hummer and Vajra had come through without meaningful damage — not even a blown tyre. Bullets had gone from decisive to negligible against Activity-hardened targets.

The weapons that mattered now were bone-gold.

He could see the trajectory clearly. In the future, conventional firearms — standard-calibre pistol and rifle rounds, even artillery shells without special warheads — would effectively exit the serious combat category. What would remain relevant was high-explosive, directed energy, nuclear. And Activity. Activity fighting Activity — penetration, disruption, collapse of the opposing field.

Activity was the only thing that reliably destroyed Activity.

That said, the world was still in the Lv0 era. Against general-population evolved beasts, firearms retained enormous killing power. And even Shen Cong, without the Super Baogai Armor, was made of flesh. Flesh had theoretically unlimited evolutionary potential and was also genuinely fragile. He hadn’t forgotten that.

So the ammunition was worth acquiring. On the road to Hefei, pushing through dense evolved-beast territory without military support, reliable firepower would matter. If the QJY-88 had been loaded when the Thieving Crows hit the vineyard, he could have swept the flock clean in a few minutes of sustained fire. Anything below Lv1 couldn’t reliably tank sustained automatic weapons fire. The machine gun with six hundred rounds was a significant card.

With the ammunition deal confirmed, the negotiation phase began — and then Shen Cong’s patience ran out almost immediately.

The position was structurally his. He’d installed Zhu Haifeng. Zhang Youhai and Wang Yingying, both with minor positions in the Provisional Government, were oriented toward him. If he decided to simply take the handguns and grenades, the camp had limited means to stop him. Everyone in the negotiation understood this, which made the whole thing a performance of probing his acceptable threshold.

After several rounds of back-and-forth that all pointed in the same direction, he cut it off.

“One round per rivet. Ten rounds per steel rebar. Special-profile welded plate sections, traded against grenades. That’s the rate. No further negotiation. You’re wasting my time.”

The rate was set.

Zhu Haifeng’s team delivered promptly: two cases of three thousand Type 92 handgun rounds, one case of eleven hundred Type 95A rifle rounds, one case of six hundred Type 87 machine gun rounds, and a hundred wooden-handle stick grenades.

Payment received, Shen Cong started production.

Before acquiring the failed metal life form, manufacturing metal components would have required using Vajra directly. Now Vajra was freed from that role entirely — the failed life form could handle the production work, guided by Shen Cong’s will and fed with Activity.

The Activity source for the operation: the fire truck.

The fire truck was dead — no living bond, no active host — but it still held approximately 0.3H of residual Activity in its metal. Shen Cong had originally planned to have Vajra absorb that Activity and then amalgamate the truck’s entire structure, leaving only the original activation metal components behind. He revised that plan.

New approach: amalgamate the exterior shell only. Leave the interior structure intact. Channel all the surplus Activity into the failed metal life form as manufacturing fuel.

Two reasons. First, the failed life form was easier to direct than Vajra for production work — more compliant, faster to reshape. Second, and more importantly: the optimised Activity flow loop.

Vajra would keep absorbing ambient and truck-sourced Activity continuously, then exchange a portion to Shen Cong’s body at regular intervals — steady enhancement. Meanwhile, the absorbed Activity would be funnelled into production through the failed life form rather than accumulating in Vajra’s own reserves. This prevented Vajra from topping out and triggering the siphon phenomenon while keeping Shen Cong’s enhancement running without interruption.

The math worked out cleanly. Both of them would keep climbing. Shen Cong would catch up to Vajra’s level, they’d cross Lv1 together, and the siphon risk would disappear.

He settled in and started working.

Guide. Amalgamate. Extend.

First rivet: rough, asymmetric, functional. Cut it off, set it aside.

Guide. Amalgamate. Extend.

The failed metal life form was exactly what it appeared to be — a simple lathe that operated on will and Activity rather than motors and tooling. The precision requirements for structural rivets weren’t high, and Shen Cong’s current control over the extension process was adequate for the tolerances involved.

The first hour was slow. About a hundred rivets. The motions unfamiliar, each one individually managed.

By the time the process felt natural, he was guiding two rivets simultaneously. Output doubled.

By evening: five at once. Five hundred per hour.

The full order — twenty-seven hundred rivets and two hundred steel rebar sections, matching the four thousand seven hundred rounds received — took thirteen hours to complete. Total Activity cost: 0.1H drawn from the fire truck.

Simultaneously, Vajra’s regular Activity exchanges had pushed Shen Cong’s Activity Value from 1.184H up to 1.193H.

He rested, then continued the next day with the rebar. Rebar was significantly slower — the length and cross-section were orders of magnitude more material than a rivet, each one taking roughly twenty times as long. The ten-rounds-per-rebar rate was, in retrospect, a mild loss for him. He’d agreed, so he didn’t revisit it. The hundred grenade-equivalent plate sections followed after.

When the fire truck’s Activity finally ran dry, the original activation metal appeared — the engine block and surrounding components. The truck’s Talent ceiling had been 1.084H, weaker than the Hummer and considerably weaker than Vajra, but the original metal still pulled at him with that characteristic compulsive hunger. Three sources of original activation metal now in his possession — the Hummer chunks in Compartment 1, the fire truck’s engine components, and the failed metal life form — all of them pulling at the same instinct, all of them still waiting for a consumption method he hadn’t found.

He pressed the urge down and kept working.

When the production run was complete, the updated readings: Shen Cong at Lv0.765, Activity Value 1.211H, Talent 1.584H. Vajra at Lv0.838, Activity Value 1.328H, Talent 1.584H.

At 1.211H, Shen Cong felt the shift clearly. Eight-bull territory.

Faster. Stronger. Harder.

The gap between them was closing.

Vajra had finished amalgamating the fire truck’s exterior shell. Next phase: continued ambient Activity absorption, steady climb. The fire truck’s interior was Liu Changming’s workspace now — he was installing the monitoring system and sorting through the scrap camera components, pulling usable parts from whatever couldn’t be repaired.

More cameras meant more coverage. No dead angles.

Shen Cong handed over the completed delivery on September 12th.

He did the accounting. From first contact with the fire brigade at the end of August to today: two full weeks. Far longer than he’d planned.

This needs to accelerate. Hefei. The evolved beasts in the abundant zone are advancing every day — faster than anything in the barren zone. Every day I wait here, the gap between my level and whatever’s out there potentially narrows. Being the strongest person in Juchao district means nothing if I fall behind the pace of evolution in the regions I need to cross.

The urgency sharpened his pace.

The Provisional Government immediately requested a second production run — three thousand rifle rounds for another batch of rivets and rebar. Shen Cong agreed and watched the camp’s stone wall take shape over the following days. Three metres high, one and a half metres thick — effectively a medieval city wall by any honest comparison.

“Even a Dog-Croc would struggle to break through this section,” he noted during an inspection.

The Evolution Grape vineyard had received its own solution: the camp had built a steel rebar cage around the entire grove, enclosing all the vines. Shen Cong looked at it and frowned slightly.

“Have you thought about corrosion?” he asked Zhu Haifeng at the next exchange.

“We have. Next step is coating the rebar — evolved beast fat first, then machine oil, then anti-rust spray paint. Full saturation treatment.”

“You have spray paint?”

“Yes.”

“I want some. Add it to the trade.”

The camp’s spray paint supply had been Liu Zheng’s collection — he’d repainted his fire truck himself, apparently taken with its original red-and-white livery and decided to restore it after his modifications had obscured the pattern. Ordinary anti-rust paint, nothing exotic.

There were specialty coatings that would have been worth significantly more — Line-X spray-on truck bed liner, for instance, which in sufficient application thickness could resist a shotgun blast. But specialty coatings required specialty equipment to apply, and neither existed in accessible condition.

Ordinary anti-rust paint would do.

Shen Cong sorted through the colours, selected matte black, and began spraying Vajra.

(End of Chapter 113)