The Evolved Beast Classification Chart was a living document — updated continuously as survivors reported new encounters. Evolved people who submitted useful data received bonus points, one to ten per submission depending on the information’s assessed value.
Shen Cong worked through the overlap in his head, cross-referencing against his own Apocalypse Journal.
Roughly half of what he had was already in the Chart. No points for duplicates. The other half — new data, his own observations — was worth something. He ran the numbers.
The Golden Python footage: probably Heavyweight tier. Full data would be worth five points; his information was incomplete, just the battle video against the Dog-Croc pack. Estimated three points.
The Mechanical Vine: novel entry in the evolved plant category, unusual enough to be worth two points.
The Treasure Bees: significant as an Activity factor source, probably two points.
Activity fruit sources: the Evolution Grape tree and the Killer Peach tree were likely new to the Chart; the Gentle Sand Pear and Traffic Light persimmon were probably already recorded. One point each for the new entries.
The Short-sting Ant colony: colony-type evolved beast with Activity-factor-dissolving acid, significant threat scaling with numbers. Three points.
The Sharp Eagle, Melancholy Bird, and Venom Duke: probably one point each as individual evolved beast records.
Everything below Bantamweight tier: likely not worth points.
“If I submit what’s in the Apocalypse Journal, I’m looking at maybe fifteen points total. Still a long way from Bronze tier.”
He wasn’t considering withholding the data. Information only had value when it was applied — and if cooperation with the military was inevitable, the calculation needed to start now. The question was how to maximize his position going in.
Which led to the next problem.
“The garrison runs a planned economy,” he said, thinking aloud. “Centralized resource allocation. No private trade.” He looked at Li Aiping. “So everything in this truck — I can’t exchange any of it directly. I’d have to surrender it to the garrison for points?”
“Basically, yes. Though the points system is the currency — once you have points, you can use them to request whatever you need from the allocation pool.”
Centralized distribution was probably the rational choice for a besieged survivor community. Pooled resources, coordinated allocation, no hoarding. From a collective-efficiency standpoint, it made sense.
Shen Cong did not find this comforting.
Everything in Vajra had been earned. Especially the high-value items — those were not being handed over to anyone for a flat points assessment. Some of the lower-priority supplies could reasonably be converted to points; points were the garrison’s hard currency, and he’d need to transact in that currency eventually. But the valuable materiel was staying under his control.
The USB drives and hard drives were a separate consideration entirely. He had over a hundred drives loaded with pre-apocalypse human knowledge — technical references, academic databases, practical skills documentation, cultural archives. If the garrison hadn’t managed to preserve those categories of information, his collection was essentially irreplaceable. The kind of thing that underpinned civilization’s reconstruction. If the garrison valued it, that was potentially unlimited points. If they already had it, the value was lower but still real.
Worth finding out.
“Who’s the strongest evolved person in the garrison?” he asked.
Li Aiping thought about it. “Xu Zhong. He won the open combat tournament last week — earned five points for it. Though the iron people don’t compete. They’re the garrison’s prized assets — fed well, maintained carefully, not thrown into competitions.”
“How strong is Xu Zhong specifically?”
“I’ve never fought him. I don’t know.”
“His raw strength — do you have any sense of it?”
“He hits a lot harder than me. That’s about all I can say.”
Shen Cong picked up a solid steel pipe from the floor — roughly forearm diameter — and handed it to her. “Can you bend this?”
Li Aiping took it, braced, and worked at it for a solid effort. The pipe deformed slightly, a shallow curve, nothing dramatic.
“Could Xu Zhong do better? Bend it cleanly?”
“Probably. It’s thick, but I think he could manage it with some effort.”
“Are his bone-gold features fully metallic yet?”
“I don’t know the details. He looks more metallic than most evolved people, though. More obvious gradation.”
“How do you think he’d compare to me?”
Shen Cong took the pipe back, placed both hands on it, and bent it. Smoothly, in a continuous motion — 180 degrees, then a twist, then the solid steel pipe was a helix, the shape of a wrung-out towel rendered in metal.
Li Aiping’s jaw came loose from its moorings.
“You’re — that’s — you’re superhuman—”
“Xu Zhong. Compare.”
“I think…” she stared at the metal pretzel in his hands, “…you could probably kill him with one hand. I have never — there is no evolved person in the garrison who is physically anywhere near that. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She rallied slightly. “Though combat isn’t usually bare-handed anymore. The Research Institute distributes bone-gold equipment, bone-gold ammunition — that’s the standard issue now.”
Shen Cong produced the odd rounds he’d taken from her during the pat-down. “These?”
“Those, yes. Processed from evolved beast bone-gold. Without those rounds, we couldn’t hold the perimeter. Every time a major evolved beast comes out of the Oasis it empties our ammunition reserves. Between that and the weapons degradation — the iron people’s maintenance capacity is limited, we’ve already lost too much hardware — the conventional firepower is getting thinner every month. It’s getting harder to hold.”
The Hefei Garrison’s situation was genuinely precarious. The abundant zone’s Activity density was an asset for evolved people’s development — but it attracted evolved beasts in proportion, and the Oasis threat was constant and escalating.
What struck Shen Cong as odd, though, was something else.
From everything Li Aiping had told him, no evolved person in the garrison had reached Lv1. Not one. The garrison had been operating in Activity-rich territory for months, with resources and organizational support that a solo operator in the barren zone couldn’t match — and they were still entirely within the Lv0 range.
He’d spent that entire time in the barren zone, working with reduced ambient Activity, frequently losing ground on his level through various disasters. He’d assumed he was behind the curve compared to what Hefei’s evolved people must have achieved.
Apparently not. By the evidence, he was ahead.
Is it the Bull Demon King Totem? Is it something specific to Vajra’s Talent ceiling?
No clear answer. He filed it as an open question.
He spent the next stretch of time memorizing the Classification Chart in full. The sustained willpower practice of Activity guidance hadn’t strengthened his mental faculties in the Activity sense — but it had demonstrably improved his concentration, memory retention, and analytical throughput as raw cognitive skills. The Chart was committed to memory in a single sitting.
The afternoon was still young. He went back outside to continue fortifying the concealment position.
Over the next several hours he cleared the debris around Vajra’s position completely, using the push blade and manual work to open up a roughly basketball-court-sized cleared space centered on the truck. The perimeter of the space he built up with broken stone, assembled into a continuous defensive ring. The western edge ran along Yanhe West Road. The northern edge touched Longquan Road. The eastern edge met Cuozhen Road.
Three clear withdrawal routes. Good positioning.
“You know, watching you do all this—” Li Aiping had been observing from the cleared space, her expression somewhere between baffled and reluctant admiration, “—you won’t even tell me your name. You remind me of a movie.”
“Which one.”
“Waterworld. The main character doesn’t trust anyone. But the garrison isn’t a floating atoll and they’re not the Smokers. You don’t need to be this paranoid.”
Shen Cong knew the film. Post-glacial flood earth, the year 2500 or thereabouts, a solitary sea-drifter trading at a floating market who gets taken captive when his gill mutation is discovered, then hunted by the Smoker pirates, eventually breaks free and leads a group of survivors to actual dry land. Oceanic Mad Max: Fury Road, essentially.
His primary memory of it was that the protagonist’s decision to take a woman and a child aboard his trimaran had struck him at the time as categorical strategic suicide.
Especially given how irritating both of them were.
He didn’t say any of this. He picked up the next section of rubble and got back to work.
(End of Chapter 137)