Vajra’s silver-white finish was now matte black.

The fire truck’s red-and-white livery: also matte black.

The effect was immediate and significant. At night, Vajra was nearly invisible — still detectable in daylight, but considerably more subdued than the eye-catching silver it had been. And matte black suited Vajra’s aggressive silhouette in a way the silver never had. The truck already looked like something built to intimidate; the darker finish made it look like something that meant it.

September 13th.

Clear skies, thirty-four degrees. Shen Cong sat on Vajra’s roof and watched the camp work.

The construction effort was genuine. Most of the survivors seemed to understand — at some level, even if they couldn’t articulate it — that they were building the thing that would keep them alive, and they were putting real effort into it. No complaining, no dragging their feet.

Some of them cheated. There were always people who found ways to avoid work without crossing the line into something punishable. The Provisional Government had dealt effectively with actual criminals — the tribunal had produced a noticeable improvement in camp discipline — but genuine idlers were harder to legislate.

Harder still were the ones who’d lost everything and couldn’t find a reason to keep going. The people whose families had died in the disaster, who now found that the more stable and orderly the camp became, the more clearly they could feel the weight of what was gone. Shen Cong had seen, through his binoculars, more than one person at the edge of the camp in what was clearly not a good state. Some of them had followed through. Others were making noise about it without the intention to act — the grief performing itself because there was nowhere else to put it.

A few had simply broken. He’d seen people wandering the camp perimeter screaming that they wanted to go home, that they needed to find their families. The apocalypse had given everyone the same disaster and produced every possible human response to it.

None of this involved him particularly.

He had no family. He had no interest in being anyone’s hero. The world could transform beyond recognition, catastrophe could accelerate past anything imaginable, and his relationship to it would remain the same: he was here, he was surviving, and the only thing that gave the whole enterprise meaning was the goal of becoming someone who genuinely controlled his own fate.

No one he cared about. No one who cared about him.

Just that single, persistent ambition, running underneath everything else.

He stretched, dropped off Vajra’s roof onto the fire truck, and hauled out the Dog-Croc skull from the cargo hold.

Three metres of bone. It was, in a word, striking.

Liu Yangyang was playing nearby and stopped dead when the skull came out — small eyes going wide. The boy had been in the apocalypse for months, sheltered enough by his father’s presence that truly large threats had remained abstract. This skull was not abstract.

The skull was going on Vajra.

This wasn’t a tactically conservative decision and Shen Cong knew it — mounting a three-metre evolved predator skull on your vehicle was the opposite of low-profile. But his theory of safety had never been built around appearing harmless. It was built around being armed, prepared for contingency, and — where relevant — looking like exactly the threat he was.

It was also a matter of aesthetic. He had strong opinions about what Vajra should look like. The Sharp Eagle tail feathers on the helmet were the same instinct — technically eccentric, behaviourally rational. In human terms: showing off. In animal terms: displaying trophies as a deterrent signal. The difference was mainly a matter of framing.

The skull as a deterrent to evolved beasts was the primary calculation. Any human who was seriously planning to harm him wouldn’t be meaningfully dissuaded by a skull, and wouldn’t be meaningfully emboldened by the absence of one.

The question was placement.

Front of the vehicle: blocks the dozer blade’s range of motion. Roof: blocks the radar sweep. Side: covers the firing ports. The ideal position — tucked into the angle between roof and side panel — would widen Vajra’s overall profile and create navigation problems on narrow roads.

“You could use a metal rod to raise it above the roof,” said Wang Yingying, who had walked over from the camp and was watching him frown at the skull. “That way it wouldn’t block anything.”

Shen Cong had been aware of her approach for a while. She registered as non-threatening, which meant she didn’t require active attention.

But she’d given him the answer. A telescoping pole — two metres of extension would put the skull two metres above the roofline when deployed. Deployed, it cleared the radar’s ground-facing sweep entirely. Retracted when the radar needed to work at height, then raised again. And better yet: he didn’t have to mount just the skull. He could assemble and display the entire Dog-Croc skeleton, posed on a pole above Vajra’s roof.

A complete skeleton, mounted at height. That was the image.

“You came to find me for something?” he said, without turning from the skull.

“Nothing important. Just checking in.” Clearly a deflection, but he didn’t push.

He pulled the rest of the skeleton from storage and got out a notebook, intending to sketch a mounting configuration. What came out of the pencil was technically accurate and aesthetically worthless — straight lines, correct proportions, no sense of form.

“I can try,” Wang Yingying said.

“Try what?”

“Drawing. I teach art design at Chaohu University.”

“Draw it.” He tossed the notebook and pencil across. “Ferocious. Imposing. Like it’s about to attack.”

She took the pencil and worked quickly. A few minutes later she handed it back.

A leaping crocodilian, mid-lunge — it had the right instinct. But the legs were wrong. She’d drawn from a standard crocodile, and Dog-Croc legs were significantly longer in proportion.

“Lengthen the legs. S-curve the body. Mouth open. Tail swung to the left.”

Ten minutes later, a revised sketch — more detailed, properly proportioned, and unmistakably predatory.

Shen Cong looked at it and immediately knew it was right. He started building the three-dimensional parameter model in his head, running tolerances and attachment points. The skeleton would be fixed with steel rebar — which Vajra could amalgamate — and the whole assembly mounted on a telescoping pole.

He began working.

After a few minutes, perhaps deciding the sketch counted as a transaction between them, he asked again without looking up: “You came for something. What?”

This time Wang Yingying didn’t deflect. “Boss Huang. Are you leaving soon?”

“How did you know.”

“You only reserved one more day for the rivet and rebar production. So I assumed you were close to departing.”

“Yes.”

She stepped forward slightly. “Then — what would it cost me to go with you to Hefei? My family is there. My parents and my brother.”

Shen Cong kept welding, fixing one of the Dog-Croc’s legs in place. He let the silence sit for a moment before answering.

“I’m sorry. Vajra doesn’t have space for passengers. And going to Hefei isn’t a reasonable choice for you right now. The evolved beasts between here and there would be beyond what you can imagine. The road is genuinely dangerous.”

“But you’re going,” Wang Yingying said, her voice level. “You’re going, and you’re powerful enough that you could stay here and control everything. Why make the crossing at all?”

He set down the welding tool and looked at her directly. “Evolution might not be the right path. It might not be the way out of the apocalypse. It might just be a radiation sickness. I’m going to Hefei to understand what’s actually happening — what Activity is, what it means. And to do that, I have to cross dangerous territory. I can’t take ordinary people who would slow me down.”

“You’re right. I would be a liability.” She said it plainly, without self-pity. A brief expression crossed her face — something close to pain — and then it was gone. “Then I won’t ask you to take me. But if you get to Hefei — if you find those men—”

She meant the group that had hurt her. The scarred face, the one-eyed man. They hadn’t turned up in the Vineyard Camp, which meant they were either dead on the road or had made it to Hefei independently. Some evolved people had chosen not to wait for the military and had set off alone.

Whether they’d arrived was another question.

“If I encounter them and conditions allow, I’ll act,” Shen Cong said.

“Thank you.”

“One more thing.” He stopped her before she turned to leave. “Your evolution — any progress?”

Wang Yingying was another of his experiments. He’d given her a consistent supply of Gentle Sand Pears and Evolution Grapes.

She shook her head. The disappointment was honest. “Nothing. No response at all.”

“Keep eating the Evolution Grapes. Push toward your body’s tolerance limit — eat more at once than you normally would.” He reached into Vajra and produced a cluster. “Here.”

Wang Yingying hesitated. “I can’t afford to pay for this much.”

Shen Cong’s expression flickered with mild irritation. “You’re a teacher,” he said. “When you have time, pass your knowledge on to the people in camp. Consider the Activity fruit payment on their behalf.”

A flash of surprise, quickly contained. She nodded. “Alright.”

She turned to leave. Then stopped, and turned back.

Her hand went to the chain at her throat and unclasped it. A heart-shaped pendant — inside the locket, a small photograph. A family of three.

“Boss Huang. One last request, if you’re willing.” She held it out. “If you make it to Hefei — if you find my father Wang Yunian, my mother Tao Cuilan, my brother Wang Shun — give them this. And tell them…” She paused. “I’m all right. And I’ll come find them.”

(End of Chapter 114)