With the Dog-Croc Battle Standard dismantled, Vajra returned to what it had always been at its best — a low-profile matte black war machine, built for function over theatre.

Shen Cong was, in many ways, still just a young man with a tendency to chase flashy ideas. Especially as he’d begun to feel something like superhuman stirring in his bones, that inflated sense of self had grown with it. It had taken several near-death experiences to remind him, clearly and repeatedly, that in the grand scale of this mutated world he was still nothing remarkable — a single data point in a wave that dwarfed him.

From a pure individual-strength standpoint, he might be leading the pack in the barren zone’s nesting grounds. But against evolved beasts that moved in colonies and swarms and collective strikes, individual superiority had been chased down and surpassed a dozen times over. Without his weapons, without his equipment, the Furious Sparrow swarm would have buried him.

The Dog-Croc skeleton he tossed to the roadside without ceremony.

It lay there looking like the remains of a prehistoric monster — a testament to past glory that was, in the end, only past glory. Dead was dead. It hadn’t scared off so much as a single Treasure Bee or Furious Sparrow. Impressive bones from a creature that no longer existed.

“Let’s go.”

Shen Cong drained the last of his Bee Treasure, pressed the accelerator down, and Vajra rolled forward.

Yesterday’s amalgamation of the fire truck’s primary metal had delivered more than a Talent increase. He could feel it in his body — a comprehensive upgrade had settled in overnight.

He’d been at seven-bull strength before.

Now he was pushing into eight-bull territory.

The Bee Treasure was helping to cement that, stabilizing the physical enhancement and driving it toward a full, clean consolidation at the new level. Every step up was an across-the-board improvement: raw strength, speed, endurance, agility, explosive output, bone density, all five senses sharpening in parallel. The one area Activity didn’t seem to touch was his mental state — whatever the enhancement did to the body, it didn’t work on the mind the same way.

That part, though, had developed through other means. Years of using willpower to guide Vajra’s Activity, constantly extending his perceptual sense through the bond — it had tempered something in him that was harder to quantify. More resolute. More decisive. A cleaner, steadier sense of purpose.

He’d started this journey frightened of every shadow the apocalypse threw at him. He’d arrived somewhere else entirely — a man with a direction and the conviction to hold it.

Past Xinzhuang the road gave way within a kilometer to the ruins of Xiage Town. Aerial footage confirmed it: no salvage value, damage on par with Wuwei County proper. Nothing worth stopping for.

This stretch of highway was relatively clean. Shen Cong dropped the plow blade to ground level to sweep the smaller debris, opened the throttle, and pushed Vajra up to 80 km/h — dump truck pace.

Juchao District to Hefei: just over seventy kilometers. At this speed, he’d be looking at the city’s outskirts inside an hour.

He managed twenty minutes at that pace before he stopped at Tuogao Town.

Tuogao was an old town — damage comparable to Xiage — but unlike Xiage’s bare, scoured ruins, green was beginning to show here. Patches of it, scattered across the broken structures. Small but undeniable.

When he sent the DJI up, the difference became obvious. Camera pointed east, back the way he’d come: yellow-grey wasteland, the color of gravel and dead earth. Camera pointed west, toward where he was going: yellow-green fields, something alive under all of it.

“If Tuogao Town is the dividing line, then everything west of here should be the abundant zone.”

He could feel it in the ambient Activity concentration. Back in Xiage, the free Activity in the air had been roughly half what it was here in Tuogao. A dozen kilometers had doubled the density. The abundant zone wasn’t a gradual fade-in — it was a step change.

The abundant zone…

Standing on Vajra’s roof with binoculars, Shen Cong swept the surrounding area. More trees — noticeably more, clustering around the ruins and spreading into the fields beyond. No evolved fruit trees that he could identify, but the base ecology here had survived and rebuilt itself into something genuinely healthy.

Then he found the water buffalo.

It was enormous. Crouched at the base of a large poplar tree, apparently sleeping — except for the scale of it, which Shen Cong’s mind took a moment to process. The horns showed pronounced dark-silver metallic gradation, more developed and more impressive-looking than the Bull Demon King Totem mounted on Vajra’s cab. And the animal itself was in a different category entirely from the mutated water buffalo he’d encountered before.

That one had earned the name. This one deserved it.

“At that size — six or seven tons, minimum. Bigger than an Asian elephant. Getting close to African elephant territory…”

He thought it over for approximately three seconds.

Should I kill it?

The Bull Demon King Totem had been running continuously for months. The Activity cores in it were degrading — no core lasted forever under sustained use. If there were a pair of fresher, larger, higher-quality horns to replace them, the resonance field they’d generate would be proportionally stronger, and Vajra’s ambient Activity absorption rate would climb with it. He’d also just taken a significant Activity Value hit from the Furious Sparrow battle.

The answer resolved itself.

Do it.

Survival of the fittest. Natural selection. Shen Cong had learned to take every opportunity that presented itself to grow stronger. His mind shifted into planning mode, working through how to bring this creature down.

He suited up — Half-Activated Armor on, Dog-Croc Warhammer across his back, Rhino Horn Javelin in hand, QBZ-95A assault rifle slung — and moved out quietly toward the buffalo’s position.

At a hundred meters, the Bull Demon King woke up.

It came upright fast, fixing its gaze on Shen Cong with two bowl-sized eyes, locked onto the dark silver figure emerging from the ruins. Beneath the animal, Shen Cong caught a glimpse of what it had been sleeping on — the crushed remains of several unidentified animals. This one had switched to meat.

“MOOOO—!”

A deep, resonant challenge. Its posture shifted immediately into attack stance.

Shen Cong didn’t wait. He yanked the Rhino Horn Javelin free, arm coming back and releasing in one smooth motion. Eight-bull strength behind it — the javelin screamed through the air toward the buffalo’s head.

The Bull Demon King’s reflexes were extraordinary. It caught the javelin on its horn, deflecting it sideways. The javelin bent on impact and clattered to the ground.

Four hooves churned up the earth. It charged.

Shen Cong brought the QBZ-95A up immediately, finger on the trigger.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

Bullets tore into the buffalo’s body in a sustained burst. One round caught it directly above the eye socket; blood sheeted down across its face. Once Shen Cong entered hunting mode, there was no measured response — full force, overwhelming pressure, until the target stopped moving.

The buffalo didn’t stop moving.

“MOO—!”

It bellowed through the pain and accelerated, blood-red eye still fixed on him. The rounds had done surface damage and nothing more. A hundred meters of ground disappeared in under five seconds.

Shen Cong dropped the rifle and sidestepped — a clean pivot, letting several tons of charging muscle blow past him. His hand found the Dog-Croc Warhammer as he turned.

The Bull Demon King’s speed was brutal, but its turning radius was its weakness. Against an opponent faster and more agile than itself, that was a problem it couldn’t solve. And with the Warhammer in hand, Shen Cong’s head-on striking power wasn’t necessarily inferior to the animal’s own.

“Come on then.”

Every muscle in his body wound tight. Confidence steady.

At eight-bull strength he was confident fighting a Dog-Croc one-on-one. The Bull Demon King was formidable — but it wasn’t a Dog-Croc. That said, formidable was still formidable. One moment of carelessness and any fight could turn sideways. Life-and-death combat wasn’t decided simply by who had more Activity, more raw strength, more size.

The instant the buffalo completed its turn, Shen Cong moved.

Feet pushing off the ground, weaving left and right in short explosive bursts, closing distance in a diagonal approach. Then the Warhammer came up — Activity flooding into the triangular head — and he swung hard at the buffalo’s skull.

One strike. Enough to put it down.

(End of Chapter 127)