Night settled over Feidong County.

Li Aiping had retreated to the rearmost partition with a phone Shen Cong had given her — network module disabled, no connection to Vajra’s systems, but loaded with games and films. Enough to occupy an evening.

Shen Cong had been watching her throughout the afternoon. His internal threat assessment had quietly revised downward. He’d stopped thinking about the restraints.

He ran his own system for evaluating people — no external framework, just his read of the situation. If he judged someone a threat, they were a threat. If he judged them manageable, they were manageable. The standard didn’t need to be explained or justified to anyone.

And beyond the threat assessment, there was a practical consideration: dealing with the garrison was inevitable. Which meant how he treated Li Aiping was already, in some sense, an opening move. Vigilance was necessary — it was also compatible with a surface layer of social functioning. Keeping someone cooperative required minimal warmth. That was a skill, not a concession.

He didn’t particularly enjoy the social calculation. But it was real.

If I’m going to embed myself in that organization long enough to get what I need, I have to be able to operate within their framework without losing my independence. Find the angle that gets Vajra’s overhaul done. That’s the objective.

He caught his own reflection in the small mirror — a clear-featured young man looking back at him with the particular calm of someone running a very private internal audit.

He’d always thought his real advantage over others was his capacity for honest self-examination. Zengzi had said it: I daily examine myself on three points. The principle was sound regardless of the source.

He worked through it.

In a pure zombie apocalypse, maximum caution was always correct — anything in the dark only needed one opportunity, and the cost of a single mistake was permanent. But this wasn’t that. The evolutionary framework this world had built itself around changed the calculation. Against Super-heavyweight and Heavyweight tier threats, he was still badly outmatched. Against Lightweight, Featherweight, Bantamweight, Flyweight, and Grassweight — he was near the top of the food chain.

I’m aiming for apex predator. Not prey that survives by hiding carefully. I need to build the mindset to match the position.

Physical strength: keep evolving. Whatever this was — irradiated mutation, Activity enhancement — push it harder than anyone else.

Mental posture: stop defending, start attacking.

The shift had been building for a while. Back when he was genuinely weak, the right posture was conservative — step by step, avoid unnecessary exposure, only engage when forced. Don’t make trouble, don’t attract attention. That was the right call then.

Now it was a cage.

The attacking posture — what he was thinking of, internally, as fishing — meant taking proactive action to identify and neutralize possible threats before they became actual threats. Anything that might come for him, he’d find first and remove the possibility. What was left after that would be genuinely safe.

He’d been doing this unconsciously for a while. Reorganizing the fire brigade into the Juchao Provisional Government had been exactly this impulse — don’t wait for the political situation around the vineyard camp to become a problem, shape it proactively. Same instinct.

He looked at the laptop screen in front of him. A Marxist philosophy text he’d been working through, open to a chapter on the unity of opposites in materialist dialectics — the idea that everything moves and develops constantly, transforming toward its own contrary.

He’d only absorbed the surface of dialectical thinking. But the current application was clear enough: his own psychology was a contradiction in motion. The defensive posture and the offensive posture, held in tension, shifting toward resolution.

The resolution was: leave Vajra. Walk out tonight. Overcome the dependency. Reconnoitre the garrison perimeter in person.

Thirty minutes later, he handed Li Aiping a medium-rare steak through the partition.

“Eat that. Then take me on a circuit around the garrison perimeter.”

She looked up from the phone. “You want to walk in the dark?”

“The moon is good tonight.” He was drinking his Bee Treasure — his preferred nutritional supplement — and frowned slightly at the question. He’d checked her stats during the afternoon: Activity Value around 0.5H, three to four bull strength. Low enhancement bracket. “Your night vision — it’s limited?”

“It improved some after I evolved. But nighttime is still nighttime. Two or three meters of clear visibility is about what I can manage.”

At this point, night and day were largely equivalent to Shen Cong. His light sensitivity had long since passed anything a normal human would recognize.

He made a deliberate effort to soften his delivery. “You have my protection. You don’t need to worry.”

“Deathclaws have good night vision, I’m pretty sure. You’re certain you can protect me?”

“Against Deathclaws specifically, yes.” He said it plainly, without hedging.

From Li Aiping’s perspective, the tone landed somewhere between composed and insufferably self-assured. But she thought about the steel pipe. The way it had become a helix in his hands without visible effort. This iron person from outside wasn’t ordinary by garrison standards — not even close.

And more practically: she didn’t think she had the option to refuse.

One afternoon of trying to follow his conversation had already told her a great deal about Shen Cong. He was someone who had built an entire world inside his own head and was largely indifferent to the existence of any other. Their interactions mostly consisted of her answering a stream of non-sequential questions while he ignored her counter-questions entirely. He had the specific quality of a person who was certain, at all times, that someone was probably planning something against him — and who had organized his behavior entirely around that assumption.

Talking to him was like trying to have a conversation with a chess engine that was also running a parallel background process devoted to suspecting you of cheating.

“I don’t have armor like yours,” she said, getting to her feet with minimal enthusiasm.

“You won’t need it. Anything below Bantamweight tier, I’ll handle. Don’t concern yourself.”

“What about above Bantamweight?”

“Lightweight and Featherweight, manageable. Super-heavyweight or Heavyweight — at that point, personal survival is your own responsibility.”

Li Aiping stared at him. “Is that — can I refuse? Is refusing an option here?”

She’d meant it as venting. Shen Cong considered it as a genuine question, which was somehow worse.

“I saved your life,” he said, after a moment. “You’ve given me garrison intelligence in exchange. The transaction is balanced — we’re even. You do have the right to refuse.” A pause. “But understand that if you refuse, I’ll be declining to allow you within twenty meters of this vehicle. Both parties in a transaction can say no.”

“Are you serious—”

The profanity came out before she could stop it.

(End of Chapter 138)