Shen Cong didn’t follow the logic.

Sun Laiqun kept shouting. He was walking toward Vajra as he shouted, closing the distance without any apparent awareness of the machine gun pointed at him.

“Get back.”

Sun Laiqun didn’t register it.

Three shots, low — into the legs. Sun Laiqun went down immediately, rolling on the ground with both hands pressed to his thigh, still screaming: “Come out — why won’t you come out — where is my son — come out—”

Shen Cong watched this without particular urgency. The behaviour was either genuine derangement or a very committed performance. The practical response was the same in either case.

He asked the question he actually wanted answered. “Sun Laiqun. One of the half-beasts was pregnant. Your doing?”

The screaming stopped.

Sun Laiqun looked up, blood-soaked hand extended toward the female half-beast corpse a few metres away. His voice had changed — something raw underneath the performance now. “Yes. My son. That’s my son.” He began laughing, a sound that had nothing happy in it. “I have a son again — I have a son—”

He started crawling toward the body, dragging the wounded leg.

Shen Cong raised the QJY-88 and tracked him.

Sun Laiqun reached the corpse and put his hand on the distended abdomen. He was losing blood fast — the pallor and the slowing movements showed it. But something rallied in him. He turned his head toward Vajra with what strength he had left and screamed: “Why won’t you come out — I was going to put kudzu flower pollen on you — let the killer bees sting you to death — sting you dead — you devil, you go to hell—”

His hand found something in his robe. A glass vial.

He crushed it.

A cloud of pink powder dispersed into the air, spreading on the breeze toward Vajra. Shen Cong caught the scent immediately — clean and floral, faintly sweet.

Kudzu flower pollen. Killer bees.

He shut off his breathing and fired.

Sun Laiqun — self-styled Great Chieftain of the Beastmen, prophet and guide to the fallen — died in the field beside the half-beast he’d called his son’s mother, beside the child that would never be born, in a landscape of his own making. The grand cosmology of beastmen and Dark Portals and Draenor reduced, at the end, to this: a man bleeding out in the dirt, alone except for the people he’d enslaved.

“Leader’s dead. Time to go.”

Shen Cong closed the window and prepared to leave. The island, the remaining half-beasts, the kudzu pollen and whatever killer bees Sun Laiqun had been referencing — none of it was his concern. He’d barely entered the abundant zone, was still technically within Juchao district’s range, and had already burned two days on Giant Stag beetles and a delusional survivor playing warlord with half-beasts. He wanted highway, not complications.

Five minutes later, back at the bombed road section. Vajra’s dozer blade working through the craters, filling and levelling.

He was halfway done when the sound arrived.

A low, collective drone — the kind that registered in the bones before the ears caught up. Coming from above and to the north. He looked up.

A swarm of oversized bees, each one roughly fist-sized, filling the air in a dense moving mass. The sound of them at two hundred metres was already oppressive.

So that’s the killer bees.

He assessed them the way he assessed everything: quickly, without sentiment. Impressive visually. Probably attracted by the kudzu pollen Sun Laiqun had released — some of it had evidently reached Vajra’s exterior. The bees were responding to the scent signature. The Giant Stag beetles had been larger and more numerous. He’d handled those fine.

The bees landed on Vajra’s armour plating and began probing at the surfaces.

He let his Activity perception read them: average Lv0.48, Activity Value 0.049H, Talent 0.102H. Lower than the Short-sting worker ants from the colony months ago. The stingers were doing essentially nothing against Vajra’s amalgamated exterior — the Activity differential was too large for them to even register as a drain.

Not a threat.

But.

If there are bees, there’s a hive. If there’s a hive, there’s honey. If there’s honey—

Most of his Activity enhancement pathways had hit ceilings or were producing diminishing returns. The Evolution Grapes were effectively exhausted as a source. What he needed was something new — something that could stimulate his Activity and push his physical baseline further. Evolved bee honey was, at minimum, worth investigating. A bee colony at Lv0.48 was producing something with meaningful Activity content.

He kept working on the road. Let the bees feed on whatever pollen residue was on Vajra’s surface. When they were done, they’d return to the hive.

He’d follow them.

The feeding took approximately one minute. Then the swarm organised itself and moved out — orderly, directional, purposeful in the way insects were purposeful.

Shen Cong sealed into the Half-Activated Armor, grabbed a large iron canister he’d designated for honey collection, and fell in behind them.

The route back took him past Sun Laiqun’s body and the half-beast beside it. The bees had apparently visited on their way in — both corpses were considerably more disturbed than he’d left them. He noted this without comment and kept moving.

Enigmatic individual.

The swarm led toward the lake, then abruptly veered around it. The lake island — Sun Laiqun’s home — was apparently avoided. Something there repelled them. Shen Cong followed the detour carefully, watching for anything that might explain the avoidance. Nothing obvious presented itself. He noted it and moved on.

One kilometre past the lake. Then another half.

Two and a half kilometres from Vajra.

The discomfort was building steadily — the familiar pressure of operating outside Vajra’s range, the baseline anxiety that came with not being able to see the truck. He acknowledged it, pushed through it, and kept following the swarm.

The Giant Stag beetles are eliminated. The half-beast colony is eliminated. There’s nothing here.

The hive came into view.

Not suspended from a tree. Growing from the ground — a structure the size of a small room, organic and dense, the outer surface covered in moving bees. The geometric precision of it, scaled up to this size, was genuinely striking.

The swarm registered his presence the moment he came into range. The entire mass lifted and turned toward him — a living cloud of sound and motion, driving straight at the intruder.

He didn’t adjust course.

At his Activity level, these bees represented approximately zero meaningful threat. They stung at his armour and found purchase on nothing. He walked through them to the hive surface and tore a section open with both hands.

The interior was immediately visible: dense honeycomb, the hexagonal cells packed in vertical layers. Upper cells held pupae and developing larvae. Middle cells held compressed flower pollen. The bottom layer — the layer that mattered — was filled with honey.

Not yellow. Orange-red, deep and vivid, and the scent of it hit him before he had time to prepare.

He stopped moving for a moment.

The smell was extraordinary. Richer and more complex than any Activity fruit he’d encountered — the peaches, the pears, the grapes. This was in a different category. His body responded to it before he’d consciously registered what the response meant.

This is better than Activity fruit.

He set the iron canister down and began working. The honey was too viscous to pour and the comb walls blocked any kind of direct decanting. He switched approaches: fang knife, cutting along the bottom layer of each comb section, separating the honey-filled plates intact. He could transport whole sections this way — cut, lift, pack. Faster than trying to decant, and he could take everything worth taking in a single pass.

The killer bees covered him, stinging at every surface they could find, achieving nothing whatsoever.

Shen Cong harvested honey and ignored them entirely.

(End of Chapter 122)