The two sentries assumed their voices were quiet. They were not, by Shen Cong’s standards — his hearing had been enhanced well past the threshold where a murmured conversation at that distance constituted a private exchange. He caught every word.

He ignored it. Other people’s opinions about him were background noise. The only signal worth paying attention to was the word scheme appearing in any configuration. That was the one thing that could move him.

He pushed the remaining fruit out of the cargo hold and told Li Aiping, who was busy collecting the scattered mangoes off the ground: “Sort those into portions and take them to the People’s Defense Department. I’ll skip the handoff.”

He started to close the cargo door.

“Hu Ge — there’s still more inside.” Li Aiping had looked up at the wrong moment and caught sight of the remaining pile.

Regulations were explicit: task completion required full submission, no private retention.

Shen Cong looked at her.

The temperature of that look arrived before the words did. Li Aiping’s mind produced, unbidden and involuntarily, the thought: he might actually kill me. She shook her head immediately. “No — no, I was mistaken. I didn’t see anything.”

“This pile is eleven portions. Two hundred and ten points. Not one point less.” Shen Cong felt no particular embarrassment about what he was doing. His internal accounting was simple: what he’d collected was his; he was exchanging it for points because points were useful, not out of civic obligation. Without the points incentive he wouldn’t hand over a single mango.

“That’s not eleven portions,” Li Aiping muttered under her breath. “This is price gouging.”

She contacted the People’s Defense Department anyway, had the lot wheeled away on a handcart, and came back with a transaction receipt: 10.5 standard portions of Crimson Mangoes, assessed at 210 points, credited to his account.

Running total: 830 points. Comfortably the highest in the camp.

“I checked the People’s Defense Department’s camp roster,” Li Aiping said, watching him return to the weapons work. “No Wang Yunian. No Tao Cuilan. There are two people named Wang Shun, but neither of them recognizes the name Wang Yingying.”

“Noted.” No visible reaction.

“Who is Wang Yingying, anyway?”

He didn’t answer.

Li Aiping waited, decided the subject was closed, and shifted to the other item on her list. “The People’s Defense Department wanted me to ask — would you take equipment maintenance contracts? Low points, but light work.”

“No time.”

“Understood. I’ll decline for you.”

He finished the Ape King war hammer, set it down, and stood up.

“Task list.”

“You’re taking another task today?”

“Yes.”

He reviewed the available contracts. Many were repeatable daily assignments; given that Vajra and his own Activity reserves were still recovering from the morning’s beetle exposure, he wasn’t looking for anything demanding.

He signed for a one-time job.

Location: Shushan Forest Park. Objective: salvage communication equipment from a collapsed signal tower.

Shushan was the highest point within Hefei’s urban area, its summit holding a China Tower communications base station with city-wide coverage potential. The Research Institute had wanted the equipment for months, but the approach routes were difficult and the evolved beasts on the mountain, while mostly Lightweight-tier and below, were beyond what standard militia squads could safely handle. Sending a larger force was deemed inefficient for the value. The contract had been sitting at 40 points with no takers.

What condition the equipment was in after months of accelerated corrosion was an open question.

“Need my help this time?”

“I have a task for you. Find out which Research Institute staff have automotive engineering background.” He was already walking to Vajra. “Anyone who can design vehicles.”

He drove out alone.

Shushan in Hefei was not the Shushan of television serials — no dramatic peaks, no mystical architecture. He’d visited as a child; the memory was thin, mainly an impression of dense tree cover. What he found now was something different: tree cover on one face, bare rock on another, the mountain wearing the asymmetric damage of the meteor storm. Approaching the summit, the remains of a structure were visible — the ruins of the communications base station.

The road gave out at Shushan Martyrs’ Cemetery at the base. He parked Vajra and sent the DJI up.

In the abundant zone, avoiding evolved beasts entirely was no longer feasible. The realistic goal was identifying the dangerous ones and routing around them. He’d accepted this. The drone survey was threat mapping, not clearance confirmation.

The survey produced a result he hadn’t expected.

He recognized those scales immediately.

Yellow-white, overlapping, lit from above by afternoon sun, visible through the gaps in the tree canopy near the summit. The pattern was unmistakable.

The Golden Jiao.

Here. On Shushan. In Hefei.

“Oh no.”

He pulled the drone back immediately and didn’t wait to think it through. He started the engine and drove away from the mountain at a pace that communicated his intentions clearly.

The thought had surfaced without his permission: nine-bull strength, Ape King-class weapons, near-Heavyweight capability — maybe a Heavyweight solo engagement isn’t entirely out of the question—

He dismissed it. Thoughts were not plans.

He was not interested in fighting the Golden Jiao. Not today, not in these conditions, not when a single miscalculation in a fight at that tier meant a final miscalculation. Individual capability ratings didn’t account for terrain, for surprise, for the hundred variables that determined whether a fight went the way the numbers suggested.

Safety first.

He retreated without shame.

The task went uncompleted. He returned to camp with footage.

The footage was worth 4 points.

He submitted the drone video of the Golden Jiao to the People’s Defense Department. The map update was immediate: Shushan Forest Park and the surrounding area, previously marked in pale yellow — caution, possible significant threats — shifted to solid red.

The camp’s color-coded threat map operated on five levels:

Green — relatively safe, no significant evolved beasts in the immediate area. Pale yellow — caution advised, possible significant evolved beast presence. Orange — dangerous, confirmed significant evolved beast territory. Red — highly dangerous, apex territory of powerful evolved beasts. Deep red — extreme danger. The entire Huoshan area was currently deep red.

Shushan was now red.

The Golden Jiao came from Juchao District, he thought. What moved it here? The abundant zone’s higher Activity concentration? Better prey density?

He’d first encountered the Golden Jiao watching it fight the Dog-Croc pack in the Yuxi River area. That had been over a month ago. Whatever it had been then, a month of feeding and Activity absorption in Hefei’s richer environment would have made it more of everything. And Shushan was six kilometers from the Mingfa Camp — within ten minutes at a Heavyweight evolved beast’s movement speed.

The three-hundred-meter sentry towers picked it up themselves that afternoon, confirming his footage independently. The Golden Jiao had left Shushan, taken a one-hour circuit through Boyangba Reservoir — apparently for bathing — and returned to the mountain. The full body length was visible in the sentry footage.

Heavyweight classification confirmed.

The provincial garrison responded that evening: Second Combat Sequence Reserve Infantry Second Battalion, deployed to hold the Silihe Road corridor and provide early warning against a Golden Jiao approach toward camp.

The garrison had survived one Heavyweight assault from the Violent Ape King’s colony. It was not prepared to absorb a second.

He didn’t take any more tasks that afternoon.

A person’s sustained concentration had limits. One major external task per day was his current standard — enough to maintain the alertness a hostile environment required, not so much that fatigue started creating exposure. He’d operated at high intensity all morning and the mission profile for the rest of the day was internal.

He brought the potted plant outside.

The Mechanical Vine cutting had been sitting in its plastic basin since he’d planted it in the small container he’d prepared near Fucha Mountain. It wasn’t doing well. The root system had nowhere to expand; the vine’s growth was visibly suppressed, the branches sitting flat and listless in a way that suggested the plant’s particular nutritional requirements weren’t being met by the limited metal content of a standard plastic basin.

He needed a larger container. Something with more metal in contact with the roots.

He set it in the sunlight and made a note to find something more appropriate from the camp’s supply system.

(End of Chapter 150)